Trump Called for American Theocracy and No One Said Shit

Trump wished for right-wing religious leaders to get more of a voice than other people and alleged fictional "anti-Christian bias"

Pres. Donald Trump addresses the second public hearing of his administration’s Religious Liberty Commission Monday at the Museum of the Bible in Washington. (Screengrab / Justice Department video.)

In a speech on Monday, Pres. Donald Trump told an audience of right-wing, evangelical Christians “[Y]ou should be the most powerful people on Earth in a sense … We have to give you your voices back.”

Twenty-four hours later, that quotation showed up in only 13 hits after searching the entire internet. Only one search result was a news report¹.

Trump was speaking at the second public hearing of the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission, which fights for exceptions to laws that apply to everyone else. The chair is Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R-TX); an opponent of LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights; and advocate for funding religious schools and injecting Christianity, including creationism, into public schools.

The vice chair is Dr. Ben Carson, the right-wing evangelical who became a Christian cause célèbre by using the National Prayer Breakfast to lecture Pres. Barack Obama about abortion. (Carson also used the event to help its organizers radicalize Mike Lindell.)

Members of the commission at Monday’s speech included Franklin Graham, crusader against LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights who uses his philanthropic organizations for proselytization, including disaster evangelism.

Trump was discussing the Johnson Amendment, a law that requires religious organizations to pay taxes just like everyone else if they also want to get involved in partisan politics. Trump this year neutered its enforcement.

The right wing have described the Johnson Amendment as a free-speech issue and Trump on Monday said he was horrified to learn about it when he was first running for president.

(It’s so well known that most people in politics would probably be horrified to know that that’s when he first learned about it. And that he doesn’t understand it.)

Trump described learning about it at a 2016 meeting with some 50 religious leaders. In Monday’s speech he described how he responded and what he said at that meeting:

“I never heard of that before, and I said we're going to get rid of it and we got rid of it. You have got — because you're the people we want to hear from, we want to hear from you.”

He then doubled down on wanting to hear from religious leaders. He shifted from that 2016 meeting to apply the same idea to Monday’s audience of right-wing Christian and Jewish leaders.

And he said that, even as president, there are some people whose views he doesn’t care about.

“I don't want to hear from a lot of people. I hear from too many people. You're the people we respect. Franklin [Graham] is incredible. All of the people that are up here, I want to hear from these people. … [Y]ou're the people that I want to hear from.”

Trump went beyond that, shifting from the voice of evangelicals to their power. The average person, Trump said, should have less power than religious people, a blatant violation of the constitutional principle of equal representation under the law.

The Johnson Amendment, Trump falsely claimed, robbed religious leaders of power (it only requires them to pay taxes like anyone else playing politics).

In fact, Trump said, conflating his 2016 religious leaders with Monday’s audience, right-wing religious leaders should have more power than anyone:

“[Y]ou should be the most powerful people on Earth in a sense, and yet you have less power. And I pointed down to Fifth Avenue, which was 68 stories below, and I said that means that anybody on Fifth Avenue, in theory, has more power than you do. And that's not the way it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be the opposite.”

“We have to give you your voices back,” Trump told the audience, some of which speak to and are heeded by millions but still imagine themselves oppressed and stifled.

“And I've given you voices back,” Trump said. “[T]hat's one of the reasons that we see upticks now, I think, in religion.”

It’s not clear what uptick he was referring to. If anything, recent polls see religiosity decreasing in the U.S., although that trend has slowed somewhat.

(As of last year, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian had fallen by almost ten points since 2014. There has been no credible reporting about an uptick of religiosity caused by whatever policies Trump was crediting for it.)

Trump also placed putative “anti-Christian bias” alongside antisemitism as a U.S. priority. The Trump administration has exploited the reality of genuine antisemitism, violent and otherwise, to justify suppression of political protected speech. International students, for instance, have been kidnapped off the streets and threatened with deportation for nothing more than criticizing the Israeli government.

Meanwhile, as I revealed earlier this year, the White House Bible study teaches the primal smear of antisemitism — that the Jews killed Jesus — as biblical fact.

Now, however, Trump is suggesting he’ll crack down on policies that the Christian right interprets as discriminatory. “Now you have a strong anti-Christian bias,” Trump falsely claimed, “but we're ending that rapidly.”

Trump gave few specifics, but suggested that he plans to force some version of right-wing Christian orthodoxy on independent, private colleges and universities.

Referring to Columbia’s financial settlement over alleged antisemitism — permitting speech against the Israeli government — Trump said:

“[M]any more settlements are soon to follow. And they're going to be behaving because they understand we're coming back. They would not let you have your voice. They wouldn't let the people in this room, any of them, have the voice because that's not the voice they wanted to hear from. They wanted to hear from a very sinister voice. And we're not going to allow that.”

Trump also announced, or hinted, at some sort of new policy regarding prayer in public schools. Students, of course, are already allowed to pray, as it’s truly difficult to ban activities that typically take place silently in one’s head. They’re just not allowed to do it whenever and however they want.

Trump on Monday suggested he’ll change that, forcing schools to recognize and permit religious activities in the name of religious freedom that wouldn’t be recognized or permitted if they were secular activities. Let alone unapproved religious ones, ranging from Islamic to Satanic.

“[I]n many schools today, students are … indoctrinated with anti-religious propaganda and some are punished for their religious beliefs,” Trump lied.

He didn’t elaborate, but another speaker at the event was a student who had been made to read something in school that conflicted with his supposed religious beliefs. Having to read things you don’t want to is, of course, a core experience in school — and something you can’t get out of for reasons that don’t involve supernatural claims.

Politico did cover this aspect of the speech, the implications for education policy. And the Education Department gave Politico a vague statement that the department “looks forward to supporting President Trump’s vision to promote religious liberty in our schools across the country.”

But most noteworthy about Politico’s coverage was how blithely the headline and subheadline reflect the canard that this is about protecting religious liberty — which historically has meant preventing government from punishing religious beliefs or activities that are allowed otherwise.

Trump is talking about the opposite: Carving out exemptions for religion from rules that apply to everyone else. Employers, for instance, having to provide health insurance for something they don’t like, unless they claim God doesn’t want their health plans to cover it. Kids having to read books in school, unless they claim God doesn’t want them to.

Politico’s coverage didn’t reflect that reality. The headline and subheadline were:

A casual reader could be forgiven — absolved, even — for reading this as a positive development. Protecting is good, after all. So is freedom.

But unless Democrats and corporate media start covering what this is really about, everyone’s going to have less freedom. And need more protecting.

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TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.

1. Hilariously, it was the Advent Messenger, which warned that Trump’s statements were heretical and paralleled End Times prophecy.