Rethinking The Reality of the Evangelical Bully: Donald Trump’s 2022 Insights into the Future of the Religious Right
Republicans were hit by voter revulsion toward candidates like MAGA after their red wave in 2022. Mike Evans, a former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, described, in an essay he sent to The Washington Post, leaving a Trump rally “in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, enthused to Alberta about the way Trump had punched “the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around,” by which he presumably meant American liberals. Perkins said that the challenge was that he went a little too far. He had a lot of edge. The shining hope of the post- Trump religious right, Ron DeSantis, was what Perkins was rooting for.
No post-Trump religious right is going to happen in the foreseeable future. Evangelical leaders who started their alliance with Trump on a transactional basis, then grew giddy with their proximity to power, have now seen MAGA devour their movement whole.
Absent the sort of miracle that would make me reconsider my own lifelong atheism, Trump is going to win Iowa’s caucuses on Monday; the only real question is by how much. When it comes to Republican candidates who connect with religious conservatives, Iowa tends to give the mostprimatur to George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, followed by Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012). In his first year leading the Republican Party, Trump leads his nearest rivals by more than 30 points.
If Donald Trump storms through Iowa and easily seizes the G.O.P. nomination, as presumed, and then goes on to win back the presidency, his victory will trigger a wild political and legal melee. The primary motivating purpose of his campaign is vengeance. He told his base that he would destroy the deep state. If he faces protests, he may immediately invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy troops, under his command, to American cities.
We experienced a melee during his first term, but a second would be worse. Instead of offering an internally divided administration, in which a variety of responsible aides and appointees struggled to contain Trump’s worst impulses, a second term would present him in his purest form. The Federalist Society was the first to screen his judicial appointments, but now there are many pure Trump sycophants in the White House.
I fear a second Trump term may cause permanent political damage to the Republic, and I don’t minimize the possibility that he will do that. The problem I am most worried about is the cultural transformation of red America, which a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.