Gearing Up for the Fight Against the Donald Trump Cult

I don’t think there’s any stopping Donald Trump from getting the Republican nomination.

I’ve been wrong before, but I’m beginning to think that’s true. I can’t even count the times I’ve protested that I hate politics, I just happened to gain notoriety back in 2016 as a Patheos Catholic blogger who denounced Trump, thinking it would all be over by the second week of November. I wasn’t wrong to denounce him. I was wrong that he’d disappear. My fellow Christians flocked in droves to elect a thrice-married cad, a rapist, a con artist, a white supremacist, a monster. He proceeded to exceed my expectations in every way. During his administration, we had concentration camps at the Southern border. We had a botched response to a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands. We tear gassed peaceful protesters . Trump left Americans with fewer jobs than when he started, the first president to do so since Hoover. Rather than leave office, he made up conspiracy theories, fomented violence against poll workers, and incited a coup attempt that killed several people. Along the way, although his Supreme Court picks ultimately got Roe overturned, he drove the abortion rate up drastically.

Of course, his cultists don’t care about any of this– or else they have conspiracy theories to explain it away.

I call them “cultists” because that’s what they are. They are not a political party anymore. They’re cultists, and nothing I do will change their minds. The people who voted for Trump in 2016 for saner reasons, or abstained from voting because they disliked Hillary, have all changed their tune. Trump led the Republican party to humiliation and defeat in 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022. The only followers he has left are the one who believe his every word despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, because it makes them feel safe to belong to his cult.

And tonight, we’ve learned that Donald Trump is the winner of the Iowa Caucus by an overwhelming margin: 51% the last time I checked. His rival, the extremely awkward aspiring theocrat governor Ron DeSantis, came in a distant second with with 21%. Nikki Haley, who is far from a moderate but relatively sane, came in third. There is no Republican Party anymore. Authoritarians who do not believe in a representative democracy took 71% of the Iowa caucus vote.

Nothing’s impossible. It could be that by this summer I’ll be eating crow and explaining to you how Asa Hutchinson, currently trailing in sixth place ahead of Chris Christie who isn’t even running anymore, got the GOP nomination. But I’m about ninety percent sure that Donald Trump is going head to head with Joe Biden for the vote in November, just as he did four years ago.

In the meanwhile, Trump will be on civil trial, again, for repeatedly defaming the woman he digitally raped in a department store (for which case his lawyer just quit); and on criminal trial in New York for illegal hush money payments to a porn star who spanked him; and on criminal trial in Georgia for violations of the Georgia RICO act; and on criminal trial in Washington for federal charges for trying to overturn the election. Eventually he’ll also have to stand trial in Florida for storing top secret stolen documents in his tacky bathroom. Somewhere in there, he’ll find out his sentence for the business fraud civil trial that just concluded. But his cultists will continue to vote for him, and they’ll earnestly believe that in doing so, they’re doing the will of Jesus.

This is going to be quite the year.

Whatever happens, I’ll be trying to write about it every step of the way.

I’ll be sounding the alarm for any dangerous disinformation and trying to help us keep our heads above water, which isn’t going to be easy.

And along the way, I’m afraid we’re going to have to try and understand Trump’s cult.

And by this I do NOT mean we’re going to have to employ the tactic the mainstream media, who is desperate for this election to look like a horse race, has been using since 2016. We’re not going to go to rural Midwestern diners and talk to yokels in blue jeans and plaid jackets. I mean, we’re going to have to understand White Christian Nationalism. We’re going to have to learn everything we can about this cult, how it adhered to Donald Trump as its personal Lord and Savior, and what its plans are for the future of our country. My readers who are Christians and I are going to have to understand and repent of every way we’ve unwittingly participated in it and advanced it when we didn’t know what we were doing. And once we understand, we’re going to have to fight back against it.

This isn’t just a matter of differing opinions anymore. Most of the time I would caution you that there’s no one right way of looking at things, politically. Trump’s cult has tried to burn down democracy once. They will again. Trump has already insisted that he’s going to be a dictator, he’s excited to wreak “retribution” and to deport millions. His cult has a plan they’re boasting about to make sure the entire government does their bidding from now on. If we don’t fix this now, we lose our democracy forever.

We’re going to fight it, it’s going to be exhausting, it’s going to be horrifying, it’s going to make us feel unclean just thinking about it, but I think we do stand a good chance of winning. Whether or not we win, we’re going to fight.

As a Christian, one who wants to follow Jesus instead of any earthly idols, I consider this to be a very grave duty.

Are you excited?

Me neither. But this is our mission for the year.

Here we go again.