A Retrospective Look at the Religious and
Apocalyptical Beliefs Behind the Trump Phenomenon
Byron Belitsos
March 14, 2020
My aim in this essay is to get beyond “demonizing the other”—that toxic practice of projection and polarization that is becoming an all-American pastime. I began to write this piece on Martin Luther King Day, hoping to go on record for national unity, dialogue, and better insight into the beliefs of the misunderstood other.
These ruminations got started because I was a journalistic eyewitness to the events on January 6 at the Capitol building—or rather, I was a member of the vast crowd standing outside the building that, as far as I could tell, was largely unaware of what was happening inside. My report to you comes in two parts, and Part I will serve as an indicator of my ongoing “transpartisan” commitment to our politics.
In order to better understand Trumpism, it can help to focus on its religious and apocalyptical dimensions, especially since the Christian impulse behind the phenomenon is now among the fastest growing religious tendencies in the country. We also need to get at how the Christian religious commitment of Trump’s followers was related to the Q phenomenon (see Part II below) as well as how it functioned in the storming of the Capitol—while we keep an eye on what may be playing out in the coming months and beyond. In my research, I am discovering surprising features that should be of interest to students of religion or anyone who is able to engage in a relatively disinterested or transpartisan study of the general Trump phenomenon.
PART I: Christian Apocalypticism and the Trump Cult
To begin with, I use the term “apocalyptic” because, around January 10, the Trump faithful began stating (on varied podcasts and videocasts) that Donald Trump would pull off an emergency nationwide broadcast on Wednesday morning January 20 (the day of Biden’s inauguration), beginning at 8am EST. It was believed that he would take over the airwaves just before and as the inauguration transpired. You read that right: They thought Trump would invoke the emergency powers of the presidency, powers he would lose after the swearing-in of Biden around noon that day.
The true believers thought Trump would, as early at Tuesday the 19th, do two things: (1) broadcast messages to all forms of media via the EAS (Emergency Alert System), the official national warning system; and (2) seize control of all radio and TV programming for up to 72 hours. He would gain the upper hand on all of his enemies literally in the final few hours of his four-year tenure in the White House.
The religious or theological point we need to get here is that the faithful saw this last-minute move by Trump as his apocalyptical endgame.
If I may paraphrase one commentator at the time, the Trumpists believed “that he has pursued a clever waiting game. By appearing to have surrendered to Biden in the last week or so, he has lured his enemies into a trap. His opponents, the nefarious Deep State actors, now feel safe and victorious; after all, the national guard is protecting the dignitaries from violent attacks by Trump’s ‘domestic terrorists.’ But, in fact, Trump’s opponents are just where he wants them to be. His enemies, those that his true believers think have stolen the election, engage in satanic practices, and have betrayed the country with other political crimes, are sitting ducks. They are surrounded by the national guard and unable to get out!”
It was widely believed that the broadcasts that were to begin on Wednesday morning would be accompanied by various dumps of incriminating data, evidentiary documents, and even televised confessions. This information, broadcast in real time, would provide the legal rationale for “mass arrests” of Deep State actors who the Trumpists thought would be unable to escape the military forces circling the Capitol. Concurrently, Deep State miscreants in other locations would also be arrested by secret military teams. The criminals were to be served with indictments that had been prepared long ago and then taken to prosecutors working for the military tribunals. And it would all happen in one fell swoop. The upshot is that this was to be the beginning of the end for the great evil that has gripped our nation for decades.
Now this, friends, is classic Christian apocalpticism, the idea that the final redemption of humanity happens in a dramatic moment at the “End of Days.” Light from above appears at the darkest hour, just when it seems that all is lost. Our God has held back as long as he could in order to give human free-will the greatest possible scope. He knows that people will show their true colors if they have been given free reign to “hang themselves.” With their real motives now manifest, their fate will be inexorable. Divine judgment will seize the hour and strike down the iniquitous ones, just when it seems that the Devil has won. It’s biblical, folks—salvation in the End Time!
The widely seen images of the intruders standing on the Senate dais also fits this mold—that is, my attempt to frame these events in terms of the archetypal features of traditional Christian belief, but only now in a strange postmodern incarnation that we sometimes characterize as Christian evangelical nationalism. And please note that this characterization does not exclude the possibility that other actors from unrelated groups may have fomented or even led the Capitol invasion, spurred on by very different motives.
The best images I have found appear in a very remarkable piece of footage linked to a recent article in the New Yorker. Don’t miss this stellar piece of film by a New Yorker photojournalist. It shows the highlights of the incursion into the Senate room in living color. Suddenly, at 7:55, one of the men on the dais shouts, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” Inspired by this, the notorious horned “Qanon Shaman,” now identified as Jacob Chansley aka Jake Angeli (now in police custody), grabs his megaphone and begins to shout out a prayer. Then the shaman removes his horned helmit and even his wig underneath it, revealing that he is bald! Everyone gets hatless, and Chansley now excitedly yells out a Pentecostal-style prayer. Here is a memorable line: “Thank you divine omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love … Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots who love you and love Christ!” The prayer session goes on for another minute, with many of the men holding up their arms in worship poses. People in the room seem moved.
A sociologist of religion, Brad Christersen of Biola University, sheds some light on how this astonishing scene could have happened (posted at TheConversation.com in a January 12 article). He states that, “as a scholar of religion, I argue that a particular segment of white evangelicalism that my colleague Richard Flory and I call Independent Network Charismatic, or INC, has played a unique role in providing a spiritual justification for the movement to overturn the election which resulted in the storming of the Capitol.” INC churches, he writes, are entrepreneurial religious organizations that use a “network model” of interacting with one another. They eschew affiliation with the radical charismatic or Pentecostal denominations they have evolved out of. And according to Christersen, “their leaders are providing the religious motivation for the fight to overturn the election. . . [And this movement] is the fastest-growing Christian group in America.”
Folks, hold on to your hats—horns or no horns. There’s a sincere and powerful religious enthusiasm that pervades the belief system of the Trump activists. Are these merely delusions or Christian fantasies? Let’s look a bit deeper below.
PART II:
“Q” and the Core Beliefs of the Trumpists
I have long felt that in politics, it is what people believe and not the hard facts that matters most. The actual facts are only known in hindsight—and are always contested. Immediate journalistic coverage is always necessarily partial, and of course these days it is very skewed and profit-driven. That’s why I take a vantage point more like that of a anthropologist of religion as I share with you a distillation of what I believe have been the general core beliefs and tenets of the Trump movement—in light of recent events. My findings are also influenced (as stated) by my eyewitness experience of the historic January 6 events at the Capitol.
I believe in taking on a “transpartisan” approach to politics as one assumption, but in addition I hold to the assumption that the so-called “progressive left” (led by people like Noam Chomsky or Amy Goodman) long ago abandoned involvement with “deep politics” and “conspiracy theories” (some of which in my view are supported by compelling evidence). This left behind a major political vacuum that was later filled by the alt-right.
Back when we had a Marxist left in the 60s and 70s, the New Leftists were conversant with what is now called deep politics. (I was there as a minor part of the Marxist tendency on the left from 1969 to about 1976.) We had little problem believing that JFK was taken out by the deep state, for example, or that the Vietnam War was a cover for narco-trafficking or for war profiteering by the military-industrial complex. But as is well-known today, the radical wing of the left (including the Black Panthers) was in part decimated by infiltration and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and other covert or overt efforts.
This gives some context for the understanding how and why the “left” tragically abandoned the domain of deep politics to what later became the general Trump movement—and for this and other reasons I believe it is my transpartisan duty to understand the Trump political tendency as it has manifested for these many years.
This development is especially disconcerting because it has been well-established that white supremacist, xenophobic, and Christian fundamentalist elements are key parts of the Trump movement. And, sadly, far too many of the Trumpists were scientifically illiterate or ill-informed.
Ultimately, I believe that nationalists (“patriots”), “conspiracists,” evangelistic Christians, and libertarians were at its core and are its most defining feature; in terms of social class, this was truly a working class/small business movement that feels the Democrats have turned their backs against their interests and against bedrock American values—and has gone rogue. Most Trumpists are politically inexperienced, economically desperate, and well-meaning patriots who have lost trust in our institutions because they have heard distorted versions of what we know of as deep politics/Deep State corruption, which is generally a truism.
Below is a list of Trump movement beliefs especially as these grew out of Q. A few of them I agree with, many I do not, and for most I have not seen sufficient evidence either way. I tend to think that much of this is nothing other than disinformation introduced by parties who have much to gain by sowing confusion and polarization.
BELIEFS AND TENETS OF THE TRUMP MOVEMENT
- A global criminal cabal exists that has infiltrated all major institutions worldwide
- The cabal’s ancestors and bloodlines can be traced back centuries and even millennia
- A reliable list of crimes of the cabal (wars, 9/11, pedophilia, drugs) has been compiled
- JFK, the first U.S. president to face down the cabal, was assassinated by the cabal
- After the JFK assassination, military generals and others formed a ‘White Hat’ faction
- White Hats now have deep roots in the military, most notably the Special Forces
- The “Black Hats” are associated with the CIA; the White Hats with military intelligence
- The cabal gained its greatest power through their agents: Clinton, Bush, and Obama
- The cabal now controls the levers of all mainstream media and Big Tech—this is crucial
- In 2015, White Hats got control of the NSA (via appointment of Admiral Mike Rogers)
- Also in that year, the White Hats approached Trump and asked him to run
- While the NSA spies on all of us, they also gather evidence on cabal communications
- This data and much other hard evidence now sits in thousands of sealed indictments
- The cabal knows they are now cornered; their response reached its endgame in 2020
- A key subset of the White Hats is “Q”, a crucial group of about 10 key insiders
- The White Hats possess very hard evidence of election theft, including the funding of the theft
- Much of the ‘fumbling’ of Trump and his circle was a ruse to draw out their enemies
- Trump was supposed to order the mass arrest of the cabal criminals—this may still happen even with him out of office—and a Plan B will be implemented by the White Hats
- Tribunals exist that will prosecute the arrested criminals, starting with the Clintons
- The alleged ‘insurrection’ was a planned set-up that entrapped the antifa activists and Deep State infiltrators who led it
- Special forces agents also entered the Capitol with the crowd, seizing evidence
- The rest of the demonstration outside the Capitol was peaceful (I was an eye-witness)