Sources of the Trumpian Ethos

Cultish zeal, warped Christianity, and the emasculation of white America

Having been incited by “President” Donald Trump and his cronies in Congress, potentially as part of a coordinated coup attempt against President-Elect Joe Biden, a herd of rioting Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building on January 6 to interfere with the certification of the electoral votes, leaving five people dead.

Realizing, though, that he lacks the backing of the military (because he insulted them at every turn in his four years in office, acting as a useful idiot for Russia, a rival of the US), Trump backed down and filmed a plea for his supporters to leave Capitol Hill in peace.

His plea was disingenuous and forced, since in it he maintained that he won the 2020 election in a landslide and that the victory was being stolen from him by mass voter fraud. Thus, Trump provided his supporters further incentive for insurrection, sedition, and terrorism.

But what interests me is the content of the “conservative” ethos or cultural character that was on display in this Capitol Hill riot. The rioters may have been the worst of the worst but calling them bad apples that don’t represent the bulk of Trump supporters is untenable, because seventy-four million conservatives, Evangelicals, and libertarians voted for Trump in 2020 after having witnessed a full term of his anti-presidency.

The Cult of Trumpism

To understand this troubling ethos, we should begin with what’s obvious on a surface level. The Trump supporters are members of a cult led by the charismatic con man, provocateur, entertainer, and anti-president Donald Trump. Take everything you know about how cults operate and apply it to Trump’s Republican Party.

A cult is a miniature religion, so the members are united not by critical thinking, pragmatism, or by an appeal to statesmanship, but by a shared zealous faith in the greatness of their leader. The cult leader is typically not a spiritual or an enlightened person but a charlatan who exploits the vulnerabilities of his or her followers for personal gain.

The cult defines itself in opposition to the more dominant culture, in this case to neoliberal American secularism and to the Democratic tribe.

There’s no reasoning with cult members. They’re brain-washed and out of desperation or mental illness they’ve grasped for salvation from a guru or from some other dubious agent of change. Their paranoid conspiracy theories are preposterous, but that’s of no concern to the cultists because intellectualism is part of the reality they’re rejecting in favour of a fantasy world in which their weaknesses make them great.

Far from making America great, as Trump promised he would in his 2016 campaign, Trump divided the country and catered to the trollish whims of his base of supporters. By doing so, he gained their fervent allegiance and turned the Republican Party into a cult of personality, holding the party and the country hostage to his cult’s delusions of grandeur and to his severe, untreated mental disorders (psychopathy and narcissism).

To the centrists who believe we should all play nice and stop calling each other names to get along, I’d point out that according to a YouGov poll, “45 percent of Republican voters backed the attack on the Capitol building.”

Moreover, before you can devise tactics for social interaction, you need to understand what you’re dealing with. Pretending everyone’s on the same page and acting in good faith in the US, because these people are all Americans is about as fanciful as the egregious delusions of the tens of millions who voted for a second term of Trump.

If you’re blinded by fantasies, reality will triumph over you.

The Bedrock of Evangelical Christian Hypocrisy

In any case, the lone figure of Trump shouldn’t be scapegoated in our effort to understand Trumpism. If you watched the rioting on Capitol Hill on the news, you might have seen, mixed in with the QAnon lunacy and with the American, “Trump is president,” and “Don’t tread on me” flags, various conservative Christian banners such as those declaring, “Jesus 2020,” “Pelosi is Satan,” and “Jesus saves.”

Trump wouldn’t have been competent enough to have created his cult without the benefit of fertile ground in the form of Evangelical Christianity, a pseudo-spiritual movement that’s dominated American conservative culture since Ronald Reagan persuaded Evangelicals and Fundamentalists into uniting with free-market libertarians to defeat the evil Soviet empire.

Here, then, is the deeper source of anti-intellectualism among Trump supporters. To understand the kind of conservative who believes Joe Biden’s presidency would be illegitimate and who would attempt a coup in the United States, we need to understand Evangelical Christianity.

These so-called Christians believe the Bible was written by God and is inerrant, and they believe that although you can interpret biblical passage in myriad ways, their particular interpretations are typically inspired by God.

They believe natural wisdom (science or philosophy) is foolishness to God and that spiritual matters are discerned as a gift by the Holy Spirit, not by a hubristic application of reason.

On the contrary, they believe that until Jesus returns to help God judge everyone at the end of history, demonic fallen angels rule the world. Those forces include everything opposes fundamentalist Christianity such as science, philosophy, and liberal culture (but not, for some reason, capitalism or democracy). This is why Evangelicals often resort to personal attacks against their critics, because they believe those critics are literally possessed by or are otherwise in league with demons.

Thus, Evangelical Christianity is a source of Trumpian sanctimony. Of course, the Dunning-Kruger effect explains in general why the dumbest people in the room are often the loudest: their low ability causes them to overestimate their skills.

But Trump’s supporters are so spitefully confident that they’re the patriotic ones who are on the right side of history, because these conservatives have spent decades immersing themselves in a closed infosphere of Evangelical self-righteousness, broadcasted on conservative talk radio and Fox News and repeated back to them by the political representatives in their gerrymandered and voter-suppressed districts. Trump chose the well-known born-again Mike Pence as his vice president specifically to appease that faction.

Evangelical Christianity is a hybrid religion, a cross between Christianity and the American civil religion. The result, of course, namely a warmongering, xenophobic, socially Darwinian, hypermasculine breeding of unspiritual, arrogant, hypocritical, and idolatrous gun nuts is one from which the Jesus of the gospels would have fled screaming.

So that’s where Trumpists learn to be hypocritical, sanctimonious, and anti-intellectual, from the fetid swamp of American Evangelical “Christianity.” The conspiracy theory that there was mass voter fraud in 2020 and that Trump won re-election is as delusional and hapless as this Americanized religion. Just like these so-called Christians, Trumpists mistake the intensity of their subjective convictions for an attachment to objective reality. Truth becomes truthiness, a post-WWII process pioneered by the dulcet tones of Ronald Reagan and advanced by the swaggering George W. Bush.

And this is where Trumpists learn to take their place with the world’s sorest losers. After all, for centuries Christians have had to live with the bankruptcy of their creed, since Jesus didn’t return as expected by his earliest generations of followers. Jesus was supposed to have started a spiritual revolution. Instead, his message got co-opted by the very empire that slaughtered him. As Robert Eisenman argues, Roman Catholic Christianity was a replacement for the rebellious Jewish Christianity that James represented and that was terminated with the fall of Jerusalem in the first century. That church was also a bastardization of the Greco-Roman form of apolitical, feel-good mysticism, represented in the gospels and in Paul’s epistles.

Imagine, then, the cognitive dissonance that would threaten to boil over for a so-called follower of Jesus who must reckon with centuries of Church hypocrisy and delusion that add up to the foolishness of her entire religion and of Christendom. Now channel that rotten mentality into politics, into a Trumpian offshoot of Americanized conservative Christianity.

You’d have both the monstrousness of the Trumpist cult and the equally appalling unwillingness of the followers to admit to their grotesque wrongness — not just their unwillingness, but their crude, hostile shouting down of Trump’s critics.

Frustrated Hypermasculinity

Add to this witch’s brew the frustration of American hypermasculinity.

You see, the two-party political system is divided, in part, along the lines of masculinity and femininity. Republicans represent the toxic masculinity (psychopathy) that’s run rampant since the 1980s in American capitalism, consumerism, and the nascent plutocracy. This is the kind of masculinity celebrated in action-hero movies. Conservatives see themselves as men and women of action, not as eggheads that talk themselves into anxiety and treachery, but as patriotic champions of liberty and the American way.

Alas, not everyone can win in that American lifestyle; on the contrary, because the economy that supports such privatization of wealth is individualistic, unforgiving, and implicitly antisocial, for every American billionaire there are necessarily hundreds of thousands of members of the working poor.

Between Reagan and the coming of Trump, Republican politicians pandered to their rural constituents’ Christian prejudices, while working mostly for the economic entrenchment of the richest one percent, with tax cuts that favor the rich and by deliberately running the government into the ground. So the libertarian myths of capitalism and of the American dream have proven to be half-truths, at best, for most Americans.

The disenchantment continues with the rise of neoliberalism, represented by the more feminine, Democratic Party. The cosmopolitan values of globalization have added to the woes of disenfranchised Americans since over the last several decades, other countries have managed to increase their standard of living only by taking up the manufacturing jobs at which Americans used to excel. American companies offshored their manufacturing to increase their profits, taking advantage of weaker labour laws and lower wages in the developing world.

Moreover, in this postindustrial society, middle-class jobs are increasingly automated, which is to say they’re taken over by machines, not just by foreigners. The internet has been a bounty of cheap content for the consumer and a bane to content producers since the latter are expected to work for a fiver.

All of which has led to the American depression, anxiety, and opioid crises and to the cultish demagoguery of Trump’s presidency, but also to the emasculation of the American psyche.

Think of what typically happens in an action movie. The hero kicks butt and takes names but reaches a point where he’s down on his luck, where he hits rock bottom and must dig deep to defy the odds and defeat the evil boss.

Now suppose the action movie is really an absurdist nightmare or a tragedy: the action hero struggles to regain his former power and glory only to fall on his face. Hope is lost, and the enemies are winning all around the proud defender of liberty. Feminists and African Americans are hogging the spotlight, and white America is under attack and seemingly overwhelmed. The blessed Christian creed is a laughingstock as church attendance drops, thanks to internet-fuelled multiculturalism.

Until the coming of Trump!

Cheering for the Supervillain

Trump is the knight in shining armor for these battered wannabe action heroes who join militias, dress in camouflage, and practice shooting long guns, hoping for their chance to be Rambo. President Trump’s taking their power back and demonstrating that hypermasculinity isn’t a self-destructive farce. As bumbling, pathological, and traitorous as Trump is, he nonetheless humiliates only his enemies, having no capacity for shame himself; with three Supreme Court picks, Trump gave the court over to “conservative” savagery.

Perhaps most importantly, unlike Barack “No Drama” Obama, Trump is a transformational figure, a politician who takes center stage as a consummate entertainer. Trump leads like an actor as though American political life were a movie, and he entertains the masses, giving them the cathartic joy of trolling their enemies. Whereas the multitudes had been duped and disenfranchised for decades by American neoliberal policies that had been designed to benefit mainly the richest minority, now these resentful Americans were given starring roles in a performance of mock greatness, led by Trump.

This is what neither the Clintons nor Obama could do: make Americans believe they’re working for a greater good. This is because they were too educated, professional, and technocratic to grasp the nonrational dimensions of politics and of the human mind. George W. Bush tried to lead in the visionary fashion after the 9/11 attacks, with his neoconservative policy of democratizing the Middle East. But his performance ended in disaster when the curtain was pulled back and it turned out he was reading lines from a pure fiction: Saddam had no WMD, the war wasn’t a cake walk, and Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell were caught in the act of defrauding the world.

Of course, Trump has likewise been caught — not just in one giant lie but in uncountable frauds large and small. However, the miracle of Trump and a source of his fans’ undying defense of him is that the Trump technique — of committing so many misdeeds that you tire out the guardians of law and morality — comes across as a divine anointment. Trump seems untouchable since he failed and cheated his way, over the course of many years of scheming, right to the US presidency.

This is why his supporters are so ready to believe that he didn’t lose that election in 2020 to Joe Biden, that the election was rigged and that it’s not Trump but the Democrats who are cheating and stealing. Saying that Trump deceives has no meaning at all, because Trump is like a black hole that swallows such an accusation: he’s gotten away with so much wrongdoing for so long, and he continues to fill the land with so much flagrant inhumanity, with no trace of shame, that mere accusations against Trump seem petty in comparison to the magnitude of his supervillainy.

This is the comic book logic we’re dealing with in American politics. When you’re met with a real, living supervillain, you expect that that malevolent entity can be dealt with only by a hero of equal gravitas and uncanny power. The elderly, effeminate Democrats have no such heroism on offer. Therefore, the Democrats are spurned for failing to play their role in the unfolding American political theater, in the sordid spectacle that Trump, the explicit entertainer, dominates.

Nevertheless, Trump’s followers might fear that the end of their charade is near, that Trump will soon leave the stage and perhaps even be hounded by state charges and imprisoned or at least neutralized. What fantasy, then, will lighten the days of these bitter, desperate, down-and-out Americans who fear their country is declining rather than still deserving of its global leadership role? Having no further prospects to vent their frustration, the loyalists lash out, grasp at straws, and turn their trolling into insurrectionist terrorism.

Perhaps in this respect Trumpists are harbingers of a larger fate, since automation, overpopulation, consumerism, global warming, and the sixth mass extinction are poised to leave all people in the lurch. These environmental catastrophes aren’t acts of God; we’ve done this to ourselves, but few of us have the humility to shoulder the responsibility and to change our ways. We anti-Trumpists, too, may find ourselves lashing out like neo-Luddites, searching for scapegoats and refusing to concede that history may all along have been a tragedy.