trump church
By
now most of us have been reminded that the presidential presumptive Republican
nominee, Donald Trump, does not just put his name on tall buildings, hotels,
casinos, and golf courses, but on wine, steaks, water, ties, and even a “university.”
While he falsely claims he is the “king” of several things, he surely is a
prince of branding. Now, if we can believe scholar Peter Manseau’s Los Angeles Times op-ed, Trump can claim
a new religion.*
Manseau convincingly argues that what
Trump is offering many of his supporters is “a belief that will bring about our
national salvation.” Despite knowing very little about the family Bible he
often clutches to his chest, and the fact that he has openly admitted that he
has never asked God for forgiveness—a fact that suggests is has a very loose
relationship with his professed savior—Trump is so popular with his mostly
Christian, working-class supporters because he offers them a new kind of
religion. As Manseau writers:
The religiosity of Trumpism…is
not dependent on his
level of religious literacy.
The Church of Trump draws
from a deeper well—specifically from what
the sociolo-
gist Emile Durkheim called
the “elementary forms of
a religious life.”
A century ago, Durkheim
proposed in a book by that
title that religion might be
defined as a system of beliefs
and practices that unites a community
through the
experience of “collective
effervescence.” The euphoria
of losing oneself in a crowd
is projected onto a sacred
object as if it is its
source, when in reality the collective
feeling and the sense of
sacredness feed off each other,
distancing both from all
that is considered profane.
The author points to Trump’s own
categorizing of the world in terms of “winners” or “losers,” a kind of shorthand
for believers and sinners; and by offering his congregants the sacred “winning”
side, he offers them also a protection from all outsiders, including Muslins, Mexicans,
and “low-energy losers.” Even his argument to build a wall, calls up an attempt
to strengthen the borders between believers and all others, what Durkheim
described of as the “the limit of the collective personality.”
For both Trump and his believers his
message is clearly a messianic one: not only will the members of Trump Church
be “winners,” but, as he has proclaimed time and again, “we’ll have so much
winning, you’ll get bored.” A tweet expressed his message much better: “If I
win all of the bad things happening in the U.S. will be rapidly reversed.” And
his followers are motivated, as Manseau notes, “by a kind of faith: They
believe in the man, and in his promise that all their losing will come to end.”
Perhaps that explains why, when a Trump
supporter in Burlington, Vermont responded to a CNN reporter’s question, “What
do you think of Donald Trump?” he answered: “I don’t need to think; he’s my
man.” Religious zealots and gurus generally absolve their believers from
thinking and encourage them to rely simply on faith.
While nearly all religions have based
much of their scriptures and canons on obvious myths, exaggerations, and outright
falsehoods, however, the Trump Church is an almost entirely based
on a series of lies. That the country is in absolute decline
and laughed at by most the world’s great nations, that he will suddenly be able
to transform a failing economy with the exodus of millions of Mexicans, that he
will be able to protect us from fear and physical harm by refusing entry to the
people of any country who has had supported radical Anti-American viewpoints or
itself seen radical Islamic uprisings, that he might even be able to build a
wall and have the Mexican government pay for it, that his seemingly
isolationist positions will help make America great again, all outright nonsense—as
anyone with even a little bit of knowledge about these issues can tell you.
But, as with most religions, such “truths” matter little to the church-goers.
In fact, Trump’s brand of demagoguery is
grounded, very assuredly, in a previous time, in the horrible period of the
modern American witchcraft trials of Joseph McCarthy through Trump’s own
personal mentor, Roy Cohn. Cohn, as McCarthy’s legal counsel was deeply
involved in the senator’s attacks on gays and American Communist members, and
personally worked to see Julius and Ethel Rosenberg tried and executed for
espionage.
Trump, as The New York Times and other papers have recently revealed, friended
Cohn early in his career, and Cohn remained his advisor and associate until
that man’s death by AIDS in 1986. Trump was one of the few people whom Cohn
confided to that he was gay, and called him to discuss his AIDS diagnosis.
Trump carried a photograph of Cohn in the top drawer of his desk, presumably to
intimidate individuals with whom he was negotiating. And you can hear Cohn and
McCarthy’s highly exaggerated claims and finger-pointing in almost every one of
Trump’s speeches. (The very moment I wrote this sentence, Trump proclaimed on
television: “Hilary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the
presidency of the United States.”; and earlier in the same speech he claimed
that Secretary of State Clinton had been personally responsible for the loss of
thousands of lives: if the first is a ridiculous opinion, the second is a just
a lie.)
The fear of going back to that time of
mad “spiritual” fervor—to a time when anyone who others claimed “is not one of
us” were hounded and his or her life destroyed—daily terrifies me.
*The
account is based, in part, on the op-ed piece, “The Church of Trump” by Peter
Manseau, Los Angeles Times, June 21,
2016.
Los Angeles, June
22, 2016
