Trump Sees Himself as the King of Kings: My Interview at Salon
Plus, a 25% summer discount on paid annual subscriptions.
I’ve now had a years-long ongoing conversation about Donald Trump, white supremacy, and the Christian nationalist threat to democracy with journalist Chauncey DeVega at Salon. This week, Salon published our latest interview. I’ve included key excerpts below, and you can read the full piece here.
Before I jump in, a quick reminder: I will be hold our next LIVE Author Salon on 06/10 at 7pm ET with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present. Details are in post below. I hope you’ll subscribe and join us.
And I also wanted to flag that I’m offering a 25% discount on paid annual newsletter subscriptions throughout the summer, given the economic strain so many are feeling. Becoming a paid subscriber supports my work and gives you access to monthly Author Forums, the archives, and the comments section. Now, on to the interview!
Warmly,
Robby
You and I have been engaging in a years-long conversation about the Age of Trump and America's embattled democracy. Trump is back in power as we warned. It has been more than 120 days and matters are very dire here in the United States. How are you feeling?
Even as someone who lives and breathes politics in the United States, I continue to be in a state of perpetual disbelief. On the one hand, there's not much at this point that President Trump could do that really would surprise me. But at the same time, the speed of the destruction he has commanded and unleashed on so many fronts makes my head spin. I was prepared for Trump's return to the presidency to be ugly and disastrous. But seeing the reality of it--especially up close here in Washington, DC, where so many patriotic public servants’ lives have been decimated by Trump’s attacks on our government institutions--has been very upsetting. I love my country and it is painful to watch it being dismantled and destroyed by Trump and his MAGA forces.
As part of its national whitewashing and Orwellian memory hole "patriotic education" program, the Trump administration is censoring books, targeting universities and colleges and the American educational system more broadly, and even attacking museums and libraries. Your book was banned at the US Naval Academy. How does it feel to have such an "honor" and "distinction?"
The Nazis burned books to destroy knowledge. It was an analog world then. Now we are in a digital world and the Trump administration can destroy and suppress knowledge and the truth with the push of a button. In addition to so much digital destruction, which materially would be the biggest book burning in history, the Trump administration is resorting to old-fashioned book bans. My book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, was one of 381 books, including 7 books on Christianity, banned from the US Naval Academy. Guess what? Quite predictably all those books were about Christianity's complicity with racism and white supremacy. But Hitler's book Mein Kampf was not banned. Apparently, books about Christianity's complicity with racism and white supremacy are too dangerous for midshipmen to read but Mein Kampf is not. But there has been important pushback. The New York Times published two different articles on the books being banned at the Naval Academy per Donald Trump and the Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s directives. The American Academy of Religion organized a webinar featuring me and the other banned religious studies authors to denounce the bans and support academic freedom. A retired Navy commander organized an effort to make the banned books available to midshipmen. As a result, most of the banned books are now being put back on the shelves as the US Naval Academy. Personally, for the Trump administration to ban one of my books makes me feel like I must be doing something right.
Trump has now been president for more than four months, approximately 130 days. What are the polls telling us about his support among the American people, in particular White Christians?
White Christians are still largely supporting Trump. If you look at the voting and polling patterns there is a stunning dichotomy between predominantly White Christian groups and everyone else. A recent PRRI poll shows that Trump's favorability among white evangelical Protestants is 73%. Trump also has majority support among other white Christians too. White Catholics 53% favor Trump. White non-evangelical Protestants: 52% favor. The LDS church, sometimes called the Mormons: 51% favor. Non-white Christian groups, non-Christian religious groups, atheists, agnostics, and unaffiliated all hold unfavorable views Trump….
At this point, a decade into his rise to power, it’s clear that Trump's relationship to white Christians is transactional. Now it is more common to hear white Christians instead claiming that he is a tool of God and prophecy. Ultimately, white conservative Christians are trying to find a theological justification for what is really a political transaction that gives them the power they want in American society -- and Trump is making it increasingly clear that much of that power is oriented around the preservation of white supremacy.
What does it mean to be a "values voter" in the Age of Trump and his return to power?
Very few people use that language anymore. We heard those types of appeals during the George W. Bush presidency and even in the beginning of Trump's first term. For obvious reasons, most white evangelicals have dropped that terminology. A major hub for white evangelical organizing in 2004, ivotevalues.com, for example, is now defunct. Now their appeals are about how "Trump is going to protect our way of life" and "Trump is going to protect our religion." Only the thinnest veil of Christian morality is pulled over the MAGA movement today -- it is transactional and about power. Even the cruelest policies, such as Trump’s illegal renditions of immigrants to hellhole prisons in other countries without due process guaranteed to all by the Constitutions, evoke little protest. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that, if we take this support seriously, such cruelty is in fact a reflection of the values of these voters.
Why believe that given Donald Trump and his forces’ autocratic and increasingly fascist and authoritarian assaults on democracy and the rule of law that there will even be “free and fair” elections in 2026 and beyond? That is a huge assumption that hangs over all these conversations about the future and resistance to Trump and the MAGA revolutionary project’s drive for unlimited power.
When I talk about the midterms, I preface that with the qualifier, "if we have free and fair elections." It is very conditional. In theory if the Democrats take back control of Congress, they could reverse some of Trump's most onerous policies. But, like you, I am quite worried that the midterms and beyond will not be "free and fair" and that Trump and the Republicans will basically have sham elections in key states to "legitimate" their rule. I am from Mississippi. Elections during Jim Crow segregation were supposedly "free and fair" and they were anything but. This is part of America's living history and present -- the Republicans in the South are rolling back civil rights and voting rights laws to bring back a 21st century version of Jim Crow at the ballot box. This is not something in the distant past or in a distant country. American democracy and its principle of "free and fair" elections are not something to be taken for granted. In fact, truly free and fair elections have only been with us for about one-quarter of America’s nearly 250-year history. And that achievement will not be preserved without an active effort to protect it next fall.
