Evangelicals Rejoice ... as Two Non-Protestants Take the Oath

America marks MLK Day by lengthening arc of moral universe

Jan. 20: Trump to become president despite Constitution … Trump to declare made-up crises and declare ends to other made-up crises … Army of lawyers armed and ready to divert Trump’s orders into courtrooms … GOP lacks coalitions to address looming budget crises …

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Good morning, Newsfuckers! We’re doing a live chat to unum our pluribus for RePresident Donald Trump’s second attempt at an inauguration speech today. Not just for paid subscribers, but for everyone, because with Trump in the White House for four years, we’re gonna have to socialist the shit out of this, so join us, starting shortly before the noon inauguration.

Also, tomorrow is the official, one-year anniversary of the relaunch of The Fucking News, so I’ll be sharing some thoughts on that soon. But now, presidents may go and come, but newsfucking never stops, so let’s do this…

Pre-RePresident Trump speaks at a boring rally Sunday in Washington. (Screengrab / NBC video.)

Tens of millions of evangelical Christians today will celebrate their capture of the White House, in blissful ignorance of science, history, logic, math, female anatomy, and the fact that the two men taking the oath are not Protestants.

It is, as far as your googling TFN can tell, the first time in U.S. history that neither the president nor the vice president of the United States will be a Protestant Christian.

Not in the sense of, “Oh, they do bad things so they’re not real Christians,” which — friendly reminder — is a slur against non-Christians and theologically fakakta in the sense that no sect is defined by the morality of its believers.

No, RePresident Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have both literally, explicitly, publicly sworn off Protestantism, the religious movement that powered them to victory and mistakenly believes that Protestantism won. Vance, of course, converted publicly and unconvincingly to Catholicism.

But Trump dropped Protestantism without even picking any alternative destination, rejecting both Catholicism and the branch of Christianity that’s literally defined as anything-but-Catholicism. That’s right, RePresident Donald Trump is a Protestant Protestant. A Protestprotestant, if you will. Here he is, in October 2020, smacking down the Religion News Service when it asked him whether he’s evangelical (spoiler: no):

Q: …do you consider yourself to be an evangelical Christian and, why or why not?

A: I grew up going to church with my family in New York City. My parents taught me the importance of faith and prayer from a young age. Though I was confirmed at a Presbyterian church as a child, I now consider myself to be a non-denominational Christian.

The New York Times did a fantastic piece on Trump’s religiosity, which TFN gives to you free because loaves and fishes. When Trump first ran for president, he mentioned attending New York’s Marble Collegiate Church. The church released a statement saying that Trump was not “an active member.”

Marble’s most famous minister was the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, far better known for talking about how people can get rich than about how they can get to heaven. When the Times asked about Peale, Trump “described Dr. Peale as ‘a great preacher and a great public speaker’ but said nothing about any religious beliefs he had imparted.”

The entire thing is worth a read just to see Trump consistently totally uninterested in any specifics about God or Christianity or even spirituality. “What did you learn spiritually?” “This country is full of wonderful people with strong faith in God.” “What have you learned from evangelical leaders?” “They want our churches to be open and I appreciate their prayers.”

That’s the level of bullshit we’re talking about; Trump can’t even be bothered to toss out evangelical keywords as a sop to the saps.

Even before Trump converted (deverted? reverted?) from Protestantism, it was clear he had zero interest in religion or the sectarian differences that strike non-believers such as myself as similar to arguing over the rules of Dungeons and Dragons.

At a Presbyterian church in 2017, Trump had to have explained to him that the pastors weren’t evangelical:

"Well, what are you then?" Trump asked.

They explained they were mainline Protestants, the same Christian tradition in which Trump, a self-described Presbyterian, was raised and claims membership. Like many mainline pastors, they told the President-elect, they lead diverse congregations.

Trump nodded along, then posed another question to the two men: "But you're all Christians?"

Dude.

Vance got to the same place from the opposite direction. He rejected Protestantism because he understands the differences. As your newsfucking TFN newsfucked last summer, Vance has a history of publicly shitting on evangelical Protestants, at least the fundamentalist kind. Catholics and Mormons, Vance said, are “much better … at figuring out how to practice their faith in a multicultural world.”

He described evangelical Protestantism with words like “paranoia” and dismissed the faith of tens of millions of Americans as a “cultural tchotchke.” Like fishing or country music.

But perhaps the most salient part of Vance’s conversion to Catholicism is that it had nothing to do with suddenly believing Catholic theology in his heart. It was the money. Vance himself describes considering Catholicism as a religion he could adopt but still make money:

“There was a moment when I was like, ‘Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.’ You can be a member of your faith and still be a reasonably successful person.”

None of this is to denigrate Trump or Vance for not really truly believing. As an atheist, I’m hunky-dory with folks not believing in magic people and their magic powers.

And this isn’t even about hypocrisy or whatever. Tons of Democrats fake a religiosity they don’t have. Then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) wrote about coming to his faith because he saw the social utility of churches active in their communities. That’s great, and all, my allegedly Jesus-worshiping president dude, but that’s not a reason that ever led anyone to believe that a dead itinerant carpenter-slash-rabbi has super powers.

No, the single most important point here is that yet again the evangelicals are getting took. Weird how people who believe wild shit will also believe wild shit!

And the other single most important point here is that Trump got evangelicals despite not being one because he got every component of his coalition without being part of it. His is a coalition built on a foundation of lies.

It was erected without regulations or inspections or permits, so when the winds blow, it often cannot stand. And that’s the the single most important point here. Because his coalition of the lie-accepting faces many a storm a’brewing.

Trump is heading into a Category 6 economic crisis. The U.S. government will technically hit its statutory limit on borrowing — the debt ceiling — tomorrow. The government won’t shut down, but the Treasury Department is already juggling the books to keep writing checks without having to borrow more to pay off its old debts.

All kinds of spending authorizations start running out in March.

And Trump doesn’t have a coalition united on what to do about any of it. Some congressional Republicans want to raise the debt ceiling, which others see as treason. Some want to borrow trillions more from our future to give it to billionaires. Others do not.

Some want to decimate government spending. Others do not.

The point is not that we’re on the brink of disaster, but that no Republican faction has the numbers to do what it wants. Which means at some point, some Republican, somewhere, is going to do the Republicunthinkable and get out the chalk, draw the circle, light the candles, and utter the forbidden incantation of the ancient scrolls to summon the aid of the demons from the nether regions:

“...Ha-Keem … Jeh-Frees … Ha-Keem … Jeh-Frees …”

So when you see all those headlines about a hundred executive orders coming, remember, most corporate media want to grab your attention — and do so by inflaming whatever’s most inflammatory. That’s the news The Fucking News fucks.

Because on the other side of those orders are lawyers. More and better lawyers¹. Standing back and standing by and standing up.

Think of those executive orders less as things happening than as evites for liberal, America-hating lawyers to join the Trump administration in courtrooms across the land.

The ACLU has tons of said lawyers. Newsfuckers, they’ve already drafted the lawsuits and lined up plaintiffs. The ACLU also has Firewall for Freedom, prepping states to resist unlawful and/or bad Trump initiatives, and empower their people to cope and/or deal.

And the ACLU isn’t alone. There are dozens of organizations on a constellation of causes that have already done their homework because unlike Trump and his ilk that’s how they got where they are.

The lawyers will fight on immigration, they shall fight on reproductive rights, they shall fight in the courtrooms and the court of public opinion, they shall fight in The Hill, they shall never surrender without an appeal.

And even where Trump steamrolls the lawyers, or acts before the injunctions can get served, here there be physics. The things Trump wants to do will have consequences. Which people will see.

Boys’ sports teams will suddenly have people who “look” like girls on them, getting knocked around on the field because Trump sacrificed them to win over evangelicals.

And how do you think communities are going to react when the warning of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) comes to pass and dirty sex perverts² on MAGA school boards implement genitalia checks, putting untrained, uncertified, self-appointed “chaplains” at the doors of school restrooms to feel around for peni and labii?³

Immigrants will stop showing up at jobs where they might get raidified. Which will mean local business owners weeping on the local news. And prices going up as the supply chains get unlubed.

The Republican (but also some Democrat) Laken Riley Act is expected to pass the Senate today. It’ll screw over some immigrants, but guess what? It also screws over the Department of Homeland [sic] Security, because now they have to detain any immigrant accused of anything, which gives them fewer resources to go after the minuscule number of serious, hard criminals, which means more of those will slip through the cracks, leading to more Laken Rileys.

And the new law will also give MAGA state attorneys general the power to block all legal immigrants from designated countries. Which will mean yet another hiring crisis — because Steve Bannon just told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent that he’s gonna use that law to deny Elon Musk all those Asian and Indian engineers who’ll do whatever Musk says to keep their visas.

Local residents and environmentalists will start showing how destructive Trump’s desired new drilling will be.

The list goes on and on, because physics!

And besides, all of these Draconian Trumponian measures are only necessary because of the crises they’re going to fix. But by definition, when Trump is president there are no crises!

Crime disappears today, at a quarter after Trump’s oath. TikTok will be back after Trump rescues it from the ban pushed for by himself. Even as we speak, Palestinians and Israelis are making fierce, passionate love to each other throughout the Middle East. Ukraine has liberated Ukraine and Russia has liberated the part of Ukraine that Russia wanted to liberate.

Here’s what Trump actually said last night: “By the time the sun sets tomorrow evening, the invasion of our borders will have come to a halt, and all the illegal border trespassers will, in some form or another, be on their way back home.” (Which is weird, because today he’s reportedly declaring an emergency at the border, which is really just so he can have some more powers to take money from the U.S. military and play Army against immigrants.)

But overall, things are already so better that we are on the cusp, Trump said last night, of “the four greatest years in American history.” Hear that, past America? Suck it, 1940s Americans who liberated Buchenwald: Trump’s Americans are liberating Bitcoin!

More Physics

One of RePresident Donald Trump’s priorities is to get woke shit the hell out of the U.S. military. The only problem: More political physics. (That and morality and logic.)

Here’s Trump’s problem. Last year, for the first time in years, the U.S. Army finally achieved its recruiting goals. How’d they do it?

With ladies. And other women. (h/t)

Almost 10,000 women enlisted for active duty last year, an 18% increase. The increase in male recruits was only eight percent. From Military.com: “Since 2013, male enlistments have dropped about 22%, from 58,000 men recruited that year to 45,000 last year.”

That’s right, America’s dude crisis is now a national security crisis.

How come? Newsfuckers, today’s dudes are all about the peace and love, doncha know.

What’s the real reason? Women people have more college degrees now. Dudes have more arrest records, which bars them from military service unless they’re the commander in chief.

And why are more women people choosing military careers than used to? Because today’s military has “a professional environment,” according to the Center for a New American Security’s Katherine Kuzminski. In other words, the Army is able to fill its ranks because it’s woke! It’s not the kind of fucking dysfunctional locker room that gives us My Lais⁴.

Women feel like today’s military is a place where they can achieve and thrive.

So just as immigrants stepped up to head off our labor shortage, women people have stepped up to head off our recruitment shortage.

Undermining both, as Trump is planning, means reigniting both crises.

Physics!

More Christian Shit

The part about saying “...so help me God” in the inaugural oath was made up. Like, more than the oath itself originally was.

It’s an add-on courtesy of Christian nationalism. Pres. George Washington didn’t say it, no matter how Christian the liar who says he did is. The lie was made up in 1854, so help me God, and it stuck.

And the reason Christian nationalism lies stick is that other Christians and non-Christians don’t call lying Christian nationalists liars. In fact, a handful of Democrats even today are helping to perpetuate this shit.

As I reported last night, departing NASA Administrator Bill Nelson — the former Democratic senator from Florida — spent much of his last year on the job helping out the Fellowship Foundation, the Christian folks who helped make Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” law possible.

I exposed what Nelson did here.
I revealed how NASA tried to cover it up here.
And I revealed Nelson’s history with The Fellowship — including the police bodycam footage I obtained of his drunk son getting arrested, for a third time, despite being the beneficiary of Fellowship Jesus for decades — here.

The animating lie of The Fellowship’s work is that prayer is a unifying force. It’s a line repeated ad bullshitam by apologists such as Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), the guy who pushed Pres. Joe Biden to keep helping The Fellowship by speaking at its prayer breakfasts. For years, The Fellowship could point to the fact that Republicans could pray together with Biden and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi at The Fellowship’s National Prayer Breakfast.

Yeah, well, as Politico revealed yesterday, even Jesus couldn’t keep Pelosi and Biden united in the face of Donald Trump’s re-election. The Bidens won’t even talk to their former prayer partner. Jesus!

So the real test for Democratic elected officials over the next year won’t be their willingness to stand up to Trump, it’ll be their willingness to stand up for the secularism that is our right under the First Amendment.

Four Quickies

• Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton are attending today’s inauguration to serve as witness for the historic violation of the 14th Amendment’s prohibition against insurrectionists serving in public office. Democrats spent much of last year warning that Trump represented an existential threat to democracy. Which doesn’t mean they can’t be polite!

• Donald Trump on Saturday announced his new deputy secretary for education. And spelled her name wrong.

• Looks like billionaires bet on bought the wrong horse! Oxfam International reports that the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased three times as fast last year as it did in 2023. “What you’re seeing at the moment is a billionaire president taking oaths today, backed by the richest man,” said Executive Director Amitabh Behar, referring to RePresident Donald Trump and his patron, Elon Musk. “So this is pretty much the jewel in the crown of the global oligarchies.”

• A senior Taliban political deputy is calling out Afghanistan’s vaginally-based education ban. Current Taliban policy is not to educate people who have vaginas. That’s partly so they won’t learn just how bad the Taliban’s other vaginally-based discrimination is. Political Deputy Minister Sher Abbas Stanikzai said in a major speech this weekend that sexism isn’t Islamic, while other Taliban say it is, just as in the U.S some Christians say sexism isn’t Christian while others say it is and secularists say stop basing policy on what you think invisible wizards wrote in their books of magic.

TCB

LIVE CHAT! Join us for today’s TFN live chat just before noon, eastern time, as we live-fuck the news when Donald Trump gets a mulligan on his first inauguration speech.

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And I get it! Facts are depressing. Which is why I do TFN as a daily corrective, to present context and analysis that Newsfuckers won’t easily find from corporate media, ignoring the soul-crushing shit they focus on, finding rays of hope, and illuminating ways forward. If you’ve found a place here at TFN, if it steels you for the day and connects you with fellow Newsfuckers, and if you can afford it, please consider supporting both my original reporting and the weekday TFN newsletters with a donation or by upgrading to a paid subscription:

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Go get ‘em, kids! Remember, we did this once, and together we’re gonna show who America really is…

1. Thanks, diversity, equity, and inclusion!

2. Not a judgment.

3. I know both those plurals are wrong, but they’re funnier, so it’s out of my hands. I don’t make the rules.

4. Not that women are magically immune to committing the kind of atrocities you get when you send a bunch of brainwashed militants against a dehumanized enemy. Abu Ghraib being an example.