Katherine Stewart on DJT

Katherine Stewart is a one of the writers who got me to understand the depth and scope of the profound threat that American Christian nationalism poses to democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law and honest governance. Her 2019 book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, was an eye opener for me. I wrote several reviews, e.g., here (book review), here (chapter review), here (chapter review) and here (chapter review). A Salon article reports about a recent discussion with Stewart:

“Better than Jesus”: How far will the cult of Trump go?

MAGA has “been persuaded,” Katherine Stewart tells Salon, “that Trump is the savior who will face down the demons”

Salon commentary: Donald Trump is a human chaos engine. It is a function of both his personality and his politics. He has shown himself to be what mental health professionals describe as “hypomanic”: He has what appears to be an endless amount of energy.

Trump is an instinctive authoritarian and a demagogue. Although he has no real ideology beyond amassing raw corrupt power for his own purposes, Trump’s political project is fascist. He hates democracy, the rule of law, and any other restraints on his behavior and goal of being America’s first dictator. Such political strongmen and their movements use chaos, confusion, and destruction as one of their primary weapons to exhaust any resistance to them. As he has shown throughout the last eight years (at least), Donald Trump is a master of this strategy.

In all, it has been very difficult for the American people, the news media, and the country’s responsible political elites to stop Donald Trump and the larger neofascist movement precisely because he and they are launching so many attacks simultaneously on the country’s democracy, institutions, political culture and collective sense of reason – and reality itself.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday to hear Trump’s absurd case about Jan. 6, where he is arguing that while president, he had some type of immunity from the law like a king or emperor who can order his political rivals killed by the military or accept money for political favors, being the most recent example.

Trump’s delusions of grandeur have been escalating as he continues to proclaim that he is some type of messiah-prophet, chosen by “god” and “Jesus Christ” to lead the MAGA movement in an epic End Times battle of good and evil against President Biden and the Democrats and “the left” to “save America” by winning the 2024 election. Trump is now also claiming that he is a “proud” Christian who is being persecuted – basically like Jesus Christ – by the courts and others who are daring to hold him accountable for his decades-long public crime spree.

None of this is normal despite how the mainstream news media as an institution, the other “guardians of democracy”, and too many everyday Americans have come to accept that it somehow is.

Katherine Stewart: There’s a disconnect between the reality and the narrative framing that sticks to everything. For example, we continue to get horse race coverage that tells us about Trump’s “big win” in South Carolina as if this were just another normal election cycle. On the other hand, the combination of Trump’s legal jeopardy and his increasingly unhinged, overtly fascist rhetoric is indisputable evidence that what we are facing is anything but normal.

As for Trump’s claims about being a prophet or some type of messiah, I think we have here a convergence between what appears to be Trump’s mental disorder and the needs of a base that has been primed for fascism. The only surprising thing about Trump’s claims is he has not yet said he is better than Jesus. That is sure to come!

It is what it is, and anybody who has been watching this unfortunate man for the past decades knows exactly what I’m talking about. It’s just sad. The more pressing problem is that fascism so often works through the cult of the leader. The leader is always one who suffers on behalf of the victim majority, but who nonetheless triumphs against the evil cosmopolitan elite. And Trump seems to understand this instinctively, which is why he insists that, in his legal struggles against a supposedly corrupt system of justice, he is standing up for the little guy.

We can’t know the extent to which Trump believes his own lies. The more important point is that majorities of Republican voters believe him when he speaks. In last summer’s CBS News-YouGov survey, Trump supporters – astonishingly –tend to trust him more than they trust their family and friends, conservative media, or even their own religious leaders. We cannot overstate the role of conspiracism and disinformation in bringing us to the point we are in right now. Many MAGA voters have been drawn into a fear-filled, fact-free world.  

They continue to believe the Big Lie that the 2020 was stolen; they think Trump was the greatest president ever; they say that his indictments are just political persecution from a “weaponized” system of justice; and they have been persuaded that a global cabal is trying to strip away from them everything they hold dear – and that Trump is the savior who will face down the demons and set the world aright.

Unfortunately, a cynical faction of affluent supporters don’t believe a word Trump says, but they support him anyway because they are under the impression that he will deliver economic policies that benefit them. I think of this as the tragedy of unenlightened self-interest – or the stupidity of greed.

That speaks for itself. 

DJT & corrupt dictatorship vs. the elites & corrupt theocracy and plutocracy

That last paragraph I highlighted gets at how I analyze the situation. In my opinion, the USSC will quite likely decide that DJT can be tried for his crimes because he is not immune. There is about an 85% chance of that in my opinion. Those elites that Stewart refer to are not stupid. They are very intelligent, brutal, and devoid of empathy and morals. By now, they see the threat that the deranged, unpredictable, equally immoral and brutal DJT will be if he gets back in power. 

Most American radical right authoritarian elites, including those instrumental in selecting USSC judges, are inherently Christian nationalist (usually wealthy), plutocratic capitalist (usually wealthy), or both. The sympathies of the wealthy judges aligns a lot more with the corrupt Christian theocrats and corrupt plutocrats than with the unpredictable, corrupt dictator that DJT is. 

If the USSC decides that DJT is immune from prosecution, that will be the last line of defense they have against DJT coming after them and their power one day. From that point of view, the theocratic, plutocratic USSC has no choice but to throw DJT under the bus and allow him to eventually be prosecuted. 

Of course a serious criticism of that analysis is that the USSC took the case at all. If the USSC had simply declined to hear the case, that would very likely have been the end of the DJT threat. What they did protects the dictator. That is baffling to me. Why did they do this? It make no sense to me. So, there is about a 15% chance the USSC will decide DJT is immune from prosecution. That would help shift the balance of power toward dictatorship, seemingly leaving theocracy and plutocracy less advantaged than they are now.