Fri Jun 19, 2020 02:05 PM
Copied from Mi Robin: “Trump’s rallies — a bizarre mishmash of numerology, tweetology, and white supremacy — are the rituals by which he stamps his name on the American dream. As he prepares to resume them for the first time in months, his followers are ready to receive.”
“He wants to discipline us,” Dave says. He, in this instance, means not Trump but his father: God. Like Trump, COVID-19 is an instrument of his will, and he has allowed the virus as a punishment for our “corporate” sin, our failure as a nation to fully embrace him and his messenger, Trump, a view not so distant from that of many Christian right leaders, including Franklin Graham, Fox News preacher Robert Jeffress, and Ralph Drollinger, who leads a White House Bible study. Inside the Cult of Trump, his rallies are church and he is the Gospel. And there’s “good news”, says Dave. God has given us a chance to redeem ourselves: “We could use this as an opportunity to purge. To get rid of the dross and hold on to the pure.”
A purge. A promise. “Take it as a whole,” Dave repeats, advising me to watch the briefings for every detail — the way those on the stage next to Trump tap their legs, perhaps a spiritual Morse code, the way they blink. Open your eyes. The awakening will be great, the greatest, and the rallies will return. (Indeed, as this story goes to press, the death toll of one pandemic, COVID-19, rising, and that of another, anti-Blackness, coming into national focus as never before, Trump has announced his plans to gather again his masses before him.)
Only the truly initiated — Dave, Diane, QAnon — know the name of “The Storm” that’s coming, but nearly all of Trump’s devotees can read the signs, red flares over blue seas: A CNN crew arrested on camera, live, in Minneapolis; in New York, a viral video of a riot cop flashing the O.K. symbol; and in Washington, following a gas processional, the president of the United States marching through the sterile aftermath to hold aloft a Bible, upside down — a sign? A signal? — its red ribbon dangling along his wrist like a snake’s tongue.
More of a very long excerpt from yesterday’s very, VERY long analysis (linked via Jera with my appreciation): For Trump supporters like Jones, the O.K. sign — thumb meeting index finger, three fingers splayed — is a kind of secret handshake. It began as a joke — a “hoax” meant to trick liberals into believing that the raised fingers actually represent the letters WP: white power. The joke worked so well that it became real. Now, in certain circles, the “OK” sign does mean white power — unless you say it doesn’t. Jones, a big, vein-popping, occasionally church-going white man burdened with what he calls an “Islamic” name by his hippie mother, revels in this kind of coded message, a sense of possessing knowledge shared only by a select few. It’s Möbius strip politics, Trumpism’s defining oxymoron: a populist elite, a mass movement of “free thinkers” all thinking the same thing. They love Trump because he makes them feel like insiders even as they imagine him their outsider champion. That’s what’s drawn Jones here, to the CenturyLink Center in Bossier City, Louisiana, two weeks before Thanksgiving. Like many of the president’s 14,000 followers waiting for the rally to begin, Jones believes that Trump is on a mission from God to expose (and destroy) the hidden demons of the deep state.
To attend a Trump rally is to engage directly in the ecstasy of knowing what the great man knows, divinity disguised as earthly provocation. Jones tells me about Jesse Lee Peterson, a right-wing pastor and talk show host who calls Trump “the Great White Hope.” He doubles over and slaps his knee, signaling to me that it’s another joke. “He’s black!” says Jones, meaning Jesse Lee Peterson. “I love that dude,” he says. He considers Peterson, like the White Hope himself, awesomely witty. Jones straightens up. “But it’s true!” he adds. Which is how racism works at a Trump rally, just like the president’s own trolling — signal, disavowal, repeat; the ugly words followed by the claim that it was just a joke followed by a repetition of the ugly words. Joking! Not joking. Play it again, until the ironic becomes the real.
Later, I listen to Peterson’s show. He calls Trump the Great White Hope because, he says, “Number one, he is white. Number two, he is of God.” Peterson does not mean this metaphorically. Trump is the chosen one, his words gospel.
Peterson is hardly fringe in this belief. Many followers deploy a familiar Christian-right formula for justifying abuses of power, declaring Trump a modern King David, a sinner nonetheless anointed, while others compare him to Queen Esther, destined to save Israel — or at least the evangelical imagination of it—from Iran. Still others draw parallels to Cyrus, the Old Testament Persian [Iranian] king who became a tool for God’s will. “A vessel for God,” says former congressman Zach Wamp, now a member of The Family, the evangelical organization that hosts Trump every year at the National Prayer Breakfast. Lance Wallnau, a founding member of Trump’s evangelical coalition, dubs him “God’s chaos candidate”: “the self-made man who can ‘get it done,’ enters the arena, and through the pressure of circumstance becomes the God-shaped man whom God enables to do what he could never do in his own strength.”
I spoke with dozens of Trump supporters who believe that the Democratic establishment primarily serves as a cover for child sex trafficking. Some were familiar with “QAnon” — the name claimed by believers in a host of conspiracy theories centered around an alleged “deep state” coup against Trump and his supposedly ingenious countermeasures, referred to as the coming “Storm,” or “Great Awakening” — but most were not. It was, they told me, simply known. “Perverts and murderers,” said a woman in Bossier City. One man, a Venezuelan immigrant, explained that many socialists are literal cannibals. There were the Clintons, of course, but a youth pastor promised me that Trump knew the names of all the guilty parties and was preparing their just deserts. The president himself, in speech after speech, intimates that Judgment Day is coming. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, he spoke of “illegals,” hacking and raping and bludgeoning, “relentlessly beating a wonderful, beautiful high school teenager to death with a baseball bat and chopping the body apart with a machete.” And that, he added, was only what he could reveal. There was more, he said, much, much more. Believe me.
Such is the intimacy of Trumpism: innuendo and intimation, the wink and the revelation. Jones gets it. To demonstrate, he pops up his Trump mask, bends over, and begins sniffing the wet blacktop like a hound. “Creepy Joe!” cries another supporter. Jones bounces up and beams. It’s his imitation of Joe Biden, on the trail of young boys to molest. Biden as child sniffer is a popular right-wing meme, but it’s not really Biden himself who matters. They know Joe is one among many. “Demons,” says Jones, speaking of the Democratic Party leadership in general. “Not even human.” Which is why it will take the Great White Hope, chosen by God, to confront them. “It’s real!” says Jones, eyes wide.
The real of which he speaks is that of the reality TV from which his leader sprang, The Apprentice, Celebrity Apprentice. A reality set free from context or history, shimmering with feeling, millions of individual truths — Jones’s, Jesse Lee Peterson’s, the Ping Pong shooter’s — all streaming toward one great fact: Trump. As Trump knows, the best kind of deal—the kind that pays—is not only transactional, it’s transformative. With some minor exceptions, the establishment Christian right has embraced the gospel of Trump, and it has prospered: Trump’s administration stocked top to bottom with its apostles, the movement mightier now than it was under George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. Trump, meanwhile, has fused his penchant for self-pity with the paranoia that runs like a third rail through Christian conservatism, the thrilling promise of “spiritual war” with dark and hidden powers.
Trump doesn’t read the Bible. He doesn’t need to. Rule books are for losers. Reading is for losers. The gospel of Trump — noncanonical, antiestablishment — is gnostic, a form of secret knowledge reserved for the faithful, a “truth” you must have the [believer’s] eyes to see, in order to believe.
Trumps ralliesa bizarre mishmash of numerology, tweetology, and white supremacyare the rituals by which he stamps his name on the American dream. As he prepares to resume them for the first time in months, his followers are ready to receive.
ADVERTISEMENT: Using the FB2WP Importer Plugin