Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
Donald Trump has in recent months been ramping up the “spiritual” language he uses on the campaign trail, casting himself as the man appointed by God to wage war on the perceived enemies of Christianity.
And after his blowout win in the Iowa caucuses this week, it’s safe to say that outreach is working, according to the author Sarah Posner, whose book, Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind, tracks the history of what has become arguably the former president’s most important base of support.
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“His audience really does believe that they are waging spiritual warfare against demons and demonic enemies of Christianity and America,” Posner said on this week’s edition of The New Abnormal. “Then this narrative arose where [many said], ‘There’s something in the Bible that claims that sometimes God chooses an unlikely leader to lead a nation at a very pivotal juncture in its history.’”
“So then it became this whole storyline that he was like King Cyrus in the Bible, and you know, he was God’s anointed,” she added.
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Plus! A talk with professor and author Jason Stanley about his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them and the ways in which Trump’s MAGA movement is both new and dangerous—yet unsurprising and rooted in an American history that many aren’t taught in school growing up.
“Much of the country was under a racial fascist regime until the mid-1960s,” Stanley argues. “But the United States is the one country that has fought and at least temporarily beat back the tide of fascism without a war—we called it the civil rights movement.”
Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.
