A Faulty Messiah: How Donald Trump Became The Evangelical Right's "Chosen One"
When President Donald Trump looked to the heavens in August 2019 and proclaimed, “I am the chosen one,” it riled critics who worried Trump had developed a messiah complex. Later, Trump would claim the comment was “sarcasm,” saying, “It was joking. We were all smiling,” but the outrage stemmed from a tweet posted earlier in the morning where Trump had quoted Newsmax personality Wayne Allen Root declaring the president was seen by Israelis as “the second coming of God.”[1] [2]
A fringe figure, Root has played a role in promoting many of the conspiracy theories that populate the alternate reality some Trump supporters believe in wholeheartedly, including aspects of the unintelligible QAnon narrative, the portrayal of liberals as conspiring for world domination, and the claim that former president Barack Obama was actually born outside the United States.
As strange and inexplicable as these ideas may seem, including the concept that Donald Trump, a thrice-married billionaire reality TV star might be considered a potential savior, the stories Root is selling and Trump is, at the very least, acknowledging, have origins that are much more traditionally accepted than some might expect, but are no less bizarre.
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In the summer of 2017 I was traveling the country and interviewing people who had become estranged from their families following the previous year’s election when I met a young woman who had cut off contact with her father after a series of ugly fights. To illustrate what she had put up with she showed me images from her dad’s Facebook, the first of which was a photoshopped portrait of Hillary Clinton with horrific eyes and brandishing jagged, demonic teeth. The next was Donald Trump seated in the Oval Office, the spectral image of Jesus Christ behind him and guiding his hand.
It was a jarring sight, but immediately I remembered my grandmother bowing her head in 1987, clasping her hands, and praying that God would use Ronald Reagan to lead the United States of America to victory over Russia.
On the television was a documentary called The Late, Great Planet Earth, a film adaptation of Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book by the same name. In that film an aging Orson Welles details a series of predictions by Lindsey that the Cold War constituted a fulfillment of the Christian Bible’s Book of Revelation and that the End Times were nigh. Appearing in denim on denim, the author warned, “I believe we are racing, on a countdown, to the end of history as we know it.”
That same message was being preached to my Baptist congregation each Sunday. According to my pastor, the battle between good and evil was more than a metaphor as each day God and His people were fighting the literal Devil and his enablers, many of whom prowled our communities and served in the highest ranks of political power.
Another believer in Lindsay’s apocalyptic story was Ronald Reagan, who was reportedly obsessed with The Late, Great Planet Earth who made regular mentions of the prophets Lindsay spotlighted, including when he answered a question about whether Armageddon was imminent in a 1984 presidential debate by saying, “a number of theologians for the last decade or more have believed that this was true, that the prophecies are coming together that portend that.”[3]
As a product of California, a state swimming in New Age ideas, Reagan was well known to harbor philosophies outside the mainstream. His wife Nancy relied so heavily on her astrological advisors that Reagan’s chief of staff Donald Regan would say she “had a dependence on the occult” and revealed that the president’s scheduling and decision-making were first checked against the stars.
But one of the more consequential of Reagan’s beliefs was his vision of America as a “shining city on a hill,” a piece of rhetoric borrowed from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. The link between the concept and Christianity was obvious, but what lurked just under the surface was the influence of a popular occultist.
In one of his initial utterances of the phrase, Reagan was speaking at the initial Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 1974 when he framed his political vision of America as a saintly beacon. At the heart was a legend that Reagan liked to repeat time and again, one in which the signing of the Declaration of Independence had been fraught with rancor until a stranger in Independence Hall stood and gave a rousing speech before disappearing like a phantom.[4] It was insinuated that the voice had been a supernatural messenger, perhaps an angel, sent to make sure the United States of America, God’s chosen country, would come to pass.
Though Reagan admitted he had never researched the legend to make sure it was accurate, he acknowledged the man who passed it onto him had been “an avid student of history.” This was a nod to Manley P. Hall, a bestselling author and hot commodity in New Age circles in California, who had coopted a story fashioned by George Lippard, a writer in the 19th century and one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best friends.[5] Lippard made his living writing popular legends regarding the American Revolution that were well known to be fictitious in nature, but Hall latched onto the Declaration of Independence myth and used it for his own purposes.
A self-professed mystic, Hall studied symbols and stories from past cultures and maintained that the United States had been the secret plan of ancient philosophers, a goal for centuries worth of learned people who sought to make it the ideal nation of freedom and inspiration. In his writings, he argued that the landmass that would come to be America had been known and targeted for usage well before Christopher Columbus’s voyage, and that the country held a secret destiny to become the cultural, philosophical, and religious heir to the legacies of Ancient Greece, Rome, and allegedly Atlantis.
Reagan’s belief in this destiny would result in a strange new political outlook equal parts Christian and occult in nature and held that America would stand as the champion of God against “the Evil Empire” in the Soviet Union, a nemesis Hal Lindsay had deemed “the Beast” of Revelation. Republicans, and even some Democrats inspired by Reagan’s rhetoric, would begin referring to the shining city on the hill, many, if not all, ignorant as to how Reagan had come to hold that vision. Meanwhile, American churches would frame the political battles of the time as conflicts on the path to the end of history portended by The Late, Great Planet Earth.
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In 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attempted to serve a search warrant to the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, setting off a deadly chain of events that would lead to 86 deaths and the total destruction of a religious sect aired live on television.
The leader of the Branch Davidians was a man named Vernon Howell who had taken to calling himself David Koresh as he claimed to be the heir to King David and Cyrus and a messiah charged by God to lead his people through the apocalypse. The siege lasted nearly three months as Koresh stalled for time so he could prepare a draft of his readings of the seven seals of Revelation.
The tragedy at Waco sounded an alarm sounded among Christian apocalyptics that perhaps doomsday prophecies were coming to pass. Ronald Reagan and the Republicans who had pushed America as God’s chosen nation had warned that the government was to blame in nearly every matter, and now it seemed as if the government might actually turn on its own people. The emerging conspiracy revolved around the New World Order, a phrase made popular by President George H.W. Bush as a doctrine but passed onto President Bill Clinton, along with ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and rumors of its evil were appearing in Christian sermons, televangelism broadasts, and paranoid circles. The theory held that globalism and the changing economy were fronts for what would come to be a one-world government that destroy religion and outlaw firearms in order to dominate Americans.
Clinton and his wife Hillary would be at the center of these conspiracy theories as prominent Republican voices like Rush Limbaugh played upon fears by linking them to a growing number of what they deemed suspicious deaths, a ploy to further the idea they were the heads of a vast criminal conspiracy.[6] Even though the New World Order had not succeeded in erasing the 2nd Amendment and enslaving the American populace, the story still survived and grew in scope and imagination.
During the presidency of Barack Obama that conspiracy theory would reemerge as rumors about his origin of birth were used to delegitimize his election. Most prominent among these “birthers” was Donald Trump, who appeared regularly on Fox News to question Obama’s nationality and give updates on the “investigations” he claimed to be funding. Birtherism was a racist attack on Obama, but at its heart was an appeal to Christians and those inclined to believe conspiracy theories like the New World Order narrative.
If Obama wasn’t actually born in America, if his origin was actually being obfuscated, it reasoned to ask why it was being done in the first place and who was pulling the strings?
In this scenario, it was too easy for many Christians raised on conspiracies to connect the dots. Obama was, in essence, a Manchurian candidate sent to destroy the United States from the inside, an agent of foreign influence empowered by shadowy forces. Before his election in 2008 email forwards were already bastardizing the Book of Revelation in order to link Obama to the fabled antichrist predicted in Late, Great Planet Earth and the flood of apocalyptic books that sought to swim and profit in its wake.[7]
On Fox News, Glenn Beck stood in front of his chalkboard adorned with pictures of Obama and compared him to the most murderous dictators in history. Obama to Stalin. Obama to Pol Pot. Obama to Hitler. Each afternoon the case was made that he had the potential to be just as dangerous, and behind him was a giant machine of unknown origin and terrific strength.
On social media there were endless memes of Obama being revealed as the antichrist, videos of flies swarming his face.
On Info Wars, conspiracy mogul Alex Jones claimed Obama smelled like sulfur, the telltale aroma of Satan.[8] He and other liberals were determined stewards of the New World Order, satanic pedophiles who would kill millions if given the slightest chance.
The math was simple. If Obama was the antichrist, then, according to the Book of Revelation and the accompanying popular culture surrounding it, then surely Christ, who Hal Lindsay predicted, would join the battle between good and evil and swoop in at the moment of crisis to deliver the god-fearing faithful from certain doom.
Very few, I imagine, would have predicted that messiah to take the form of a self-obsessed reality television star.
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Not all Christians believe Donald Trump to be the second coming. Many see him as a necessary evil, a fighter they’d rather have on their side than across the battlefield. Many feel so disempowered and endangered they would have accepted anyone, regardless of their past or proclivities.
But there are certainly some who do believe Trump is chosen by God. They have been taught for decades now that the fight between good and evil is escalating by the day and at any moment they might be whisked away in the Rapture or find themselves combating the prophesied Battle of Armageddon. They have been taught to look for signs from God and to connect dots to recognize patterns.
This emphasis on symbols, much in the tradition of Manley P. Hall’s work, can be applied almost anywhere or with any text. Christian apocalyptics have learned from men like Hal Lindsay to search beyond the Bible and incorporate new sources. Along with The Late, Great Planet Earth, in the 1980’s there was a newfound renaissance of a 16th century French doctor named Michel de Nostredame, or, as he has come to be known, Nostradamus. Supposedly a seer, Nostradamus authored quatrains of poetry that have been alleged to contain predictions of future events.
Most of Nostradamus’s quatrains are indecipherable. They are vague and full of symbols easily interpreted to reveal whatever a reader requires of them and readers searching for proof of supernatural order have been constructing meaning from these words for years. I can still remember members of my family sitting with a dogeared copy of the Bible and a worn paperback of these quatrains and working to decipher God’s intentions, including the afternoon the Branch Dividian compound burnt to the ground.
There are echoes of this construction in QAnon, the bizarre conspiracy theory birthed on the website 4chan in 2017 that has infected large swathes of Trump World. Beginning with humble origins, QAnon has grown to be a large and everpresent narrative, so much so that its followers regularly pack Trump’s rallies wearing attire adorned with QAnon messages and holding aloft cardboard “Q’s.”[9] On the Internet hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of believers sort through vague messages from an anonymous poster with seemingly nonsensical tidbits of numbers and phrases, all of it supposedly clues as to how Trump and those loyal to him are actively dismantling a globalist and murderous conspiracy that is the continuation of the New World Order narrative.
The QAnon phenomenon resembles, in many ways, its own doctrine of faith. The writings are most assuredly vague but those who believe in them are unshakeable in their devotion. It is a choose-your-own adventure dogma, a veritable magnetic poetry creed that shifts and changes depending on who is reading and interpreting. The narratives that have birthed from these interpretations are paradoxical and nonsensical, often contradicting themselves as one Trump misstep after another necessitates more explanations of just what the master plan actually entails, but because they are subjective, and because they are at the mercy of the faithful, Trump enjoys unrelenting devotion from a flock who will alter their beliefs at a moment’s notice should he require it.
Now, whether he likes it or not, Trump stands as the leader of a patchwork faith that is both chaotic and, some would argue, dangerous. Multiple times now he has amplified QAnon participants and messages.[10] He is surrounded by a flock of believers who are, in measures, either unrelenting in their piety or else reliant, after years of conditioning, on his leadership in what they believe to be a cosmic battle between good and evil. When he gazed heavenward and called himself “the chosen one” he might have been joking, but there were people looking on who heard him loud and clear and are waiting patiently for him to author his own seven seals.
Jared Yates Sexton is an author and political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Politico, The Daily Beast, and elsewhere. Most recently he’s the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, forthcoming from Dutton/Penguin-Random House in Fall 2020. He can be found on Twitter @jysexton.
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/24/trump-g7-gaggle-1474380
[2] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28772482/donald-trump-twitter-king-of-israel-wayne-allyn-root/
[3] Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Ronald Reagan, 1984, Page 1601.
[4] https://www.ff.org/reagan-at-the-first-cpac-we-will-be-a-city-upon-a-hill/
[5] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/political-bookworm/2010/04/reagan_and_the_occult.html
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/24/yes-there-actually-are-people-who-believe-the-clintons-killed-vince-foster/
[7] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/apr/02/chain-email/complete-distortion-of-the-bible/
[8] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/10/13233338/alex-jones-trump-clinton-demon
[9] https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/qanon-conspiracy-theorists-increase-their-presence-at-trump-rallies-1468233283703
[10] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-shares-twitter-accounts-linked-to-conspiracy-theorist-qanon/2019/07/30/175e59ee-b2ef-11e9-8f6c-7828e68cb15f_story.html