Trump’s true believers will test democracy

By Timothy L. O'Brien

Donald Trump, as widely expected, romped to a presidential caucus victory in Iowa on Monday evening. His most devoted acolytes gave him a thunderous 30-point victory over the second-place Republican contender, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

It’s true that Iowa is a sparsely populated state featuring an antiquated voting system and extremely low turnout. It’s also true that the Iowa results revealed a divided Republican Party, with half of the state’s GOP voters choosing someone other than Trump. Still, Trump spent little time actively campaigning in the state, and he swept the field. His hold over his voters and party is profound, and the theatrics surrounding his Iowa win are as revealing as the vote itself.

At one point during his victory speech on Monday night, Trump looked up toward the heavens and invoked his late mother-in-law, Amalija Knavs. “She’s up there — way up there looking down on us,” he proclaimed. “She’s so proud of us.” He’s done versions of this before when invoking his parents and other family members who have also passed through the pearly gates. They’re all so happy that he’s winning.

Yet Trump, who is invariably cold-blooded about the utility of human relationships, rarely voiced sentimentality about his parents and siblings in his pre-presidential years. He is also decidedly nonreligious, rarely goes to church and is only opportunistically spiritual. Self-help gurus have been his motivational advisers of choice. But, like Elmer Gantry, Trump understands the political sway that comes with feigning spiritual devotion.

Successful presidential politics is often more about forging emotional bonds with the electorate than articulating policy positions, especially when voters feel as if their world is in flux. Chaos or unpredictability breeds neediness, and change often breeds fear. Workers fear inflation and shifting economic realities. White voters fear migrants of color. Average folks fear perceived elites and global entanglements. And so on.

Some voters’ fears are entirely legitimate, of course. Some much less so. Trump’s superpower is his ability to prey upon those fears while appealing to voters’ sense of a higher calling and pretending that he, like them, has been overlooked and victimized. It’s quite an act, and you have to be particularly narcissistic and craven to your core to stick to your script year after year.

“I am the chosen one,” Trump allowed in 2019 while standing on the White House lawn. Wayne Allyn Root, a conservative extremist, conspiracy theorist and self-described “capitalist evangelist” who believes Jesus was the “CEO of the Christian religion,” once described Trump as the “second coming of God” — and Trump enthusiastically tweeted that blessing. Trump’s maneuvers like this show how willing he is to harvest shifts in evangelical Christianity, which now emphasizes cultural, racial and political identity as much, if not more so, than worship and spirituality.

Leading up to the Iowa caucuses, Trump posted a video on his social media account designating himself as an agent of the Heavenly Father. “God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump,” the video noted. Iowa pastors voiced concerns about the video, but Iowa’s GOP voters didn’t seem to care.

One poll last fall indicated that more than half of Republican voters regard Trump as a “person of faith” — ahead of lifelong churchgoers such as President Joe Biden and Senators Mitt Romney and Tim Scott. Trump was statistically tied in the poll with former Vice President Mike Pence, who places his faith at the center of his life.

The political rewards for a relentless and calculating grift — as every authoritarian ruler and propagandist knows — can be vast. In Trump’s case, he has created a cult-like following among a broad swath of the Republican electorate. Others in the party who know better but can’t bring themselves to stem the tide or vote for a Democrat are likely to get on board as the election year progresses.

True belief among Trump’s base transcends religion. Entrance polls from the Iowa caucuses that the Washington Post collected made that case. When asked whether Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, two-thirds of caucusgoers said no. About the same number said Trump would be fit to be president even if he were convicted of a crime. The two qualities in Trump that appealed most to caucusgoers? He “fights for people like me” and “shares my values.”

Trump’s relentless lying about the outcome of the 2020 election, the legitimacy of the court system and the rule of law, and his own carny act as a feel-your-pain empath, have acquired traction. It will all gather momentum, and it may not end well — for the American experiment and for democracy.