Trump Won on Identity Politics No One's* Talking About
Trump Won on Identity Politics No One's* Talking About
Trump and Vance are a presidential first in the history of personal identity
Nov. 7: Historic first: Neither president nor vice president will be Protestant … College didn’t matter among non-white voters … Jewish voters were very, very bad Jews in Trump’s eyes … Non-Christian voters rejected Trump …
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TFN wasn’t planning another screed today. But here we are. Rest assured, TFN has banked tons of news items to share with you and we’ll be newsfucking those and some bigger think pieces on what the fuck we do now in the coming days. You can support TFN’s independent accountability journalism with a PayPal donation or by becoming a paid subscriber. I see you, Newsfuckers. Thank you.
A lot of fuss is made over the disparity between college-educated voters, who backed Vice Pres. Kamala Harris, and non-college-educated voters, who didn’t. The assumption, you can practically hear it, is that college teaches you democracy good, dictatorship bad.
I don’t know about you Newsfuckers, but I feel like I nailed that one in high school. I think we all figured out bullies in kindergarten.
So maybe it’s that college is a more liberal setting generally, more diverse than the places a lot of kids come from. And, without evidence, I think there’s something to that. But consider this, the exit polls show no disparity in the non-white vote between college- and non-college-educated voters.
Non-white people voted virtually the exact same way regardless of college. So maybe those college numbers reflect something other than education. My first thought was money. Turns out, first thoughts are often bad thoughts!
College degrees do tend to correlate with income, but income doesn’t fully explain this year’s vote.
The poors preferred Harris. She decisively won the votes of people whose households have $30,000 in annual income — which is Jesus-Christ-how-are-you-alive? money.
Those voters went for Harris 50% to 46%. Also voting Harris, voters from households with more than $100,000.
It’s folks in the middle — poor enough to live paycheck-by-paycheck and medical-bill-by-medical-bill and rent-by-rent but not poor enough to get big government aid — who voted for Donald Trump. For them the government is invisible. The only thing they can see is the Invisible Hand, taking their money every month.
And nothing in the Democratic Party platform sounded remotely likely to change that.
I know there’s an ongoing debate about where and whether voters of color really abandoned Democrats and by how much. But even if it’s only some and only in some places, that’s a super-helpful reminder that demographics aren’t destiny.
Even if Republicans amplify Trump’s racist rhetoric, there’s nothing magical to ensure that Black people or Hispanic people are going to hear it as applying to them. Some immigrants voted for Trump because they don’t think of themselves as immigrants anymore.
Which, I mean, kinda great, I guess? Assimilation, yay? The color-blind future Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed of, right? Right?!?
But it does mean that Democrats can’t actually count on an electoral boost from changing demographics anymore. Gulp!
Still, that college gap was capturing something. So maybe it’s this…
I haven’t seen it getting a lot of attention in the big outlets, but where Trump dominated — which we know he likes to do — more than before, and as in no other category, was with Jesus.
Christians made up almost two-thirds of the electorate. And they overwhelmingly chose Trump.
Jewish voters, it turns out, are great at democracy! According to Trump, a whopping 78% of American Jews are bad Jews. If only they controlled the media!
But there’s very few of them — only 2% of the electorate. And even every other non-Judeo-Christian religion makes up only 10% of the electorate. They, too, clearly preferred Harris, 59% to 34% for Trump.
So, to pose a question lingering since the Inquisition, what is the deal with Christians?
I don’t think it’s just a question of like voting for like. Catholics voted Republican in smaller numbers than Protestants did, even though Trump killed abortion rights and even though they’re getting a Catholic vice president.
And while 63% of Protestants voted for Trump, even that doesn’t seem to be identity politics. I had forgotten this, but Trump isn’t Protestant anymore. Several years ago he announced he was now, uh, non-denominationally Christian.
His soul had transcended humanity’s petty sectarian taxonomies to achieve pure, perfect, Trumpian love of Jesus Christ. So, not a Protestant.
Combine Trump’s Platonic Christianity with Vance’s (recent) Catholicism and as far as I can tell, this will be the first time in history that there’s no Protestant in the White House.
We’ve had two Catholic presidents (and look how they turned out) and Thomas Jefferson was atheist-curious, but I’m pretty sure his vice president was Protestant.1 But we’ve never before had neither a president nor a vice president who was Protestant.
Plus, unlike the vast majority of presidents, neither Trump nor Vance practices the faith in which they were raised. Vance was raised evangelical, while Trump was raised demonical.
And both have been openly dismissive of the sect that’s now selected them.
Trump clearly can’t be arsed even to play-act Christianity. He disdains the performative crap, like saying “Two Corinthians,” and even fucking up his Bible-brandishing.2
Trump literally metaphorically shat on Jesus’s core tenets at the National Prayer Breakfast when he rejected the idea of praying for one’s enemies.
And Vance? Do not tell me you forgot about The Vance Files, forgetful Newsfuckers! This summer, TFN archaeologized Vance’s obscure writings and found him absolutely contemptuous of Protestant evangelical Christianity.
Nevertheless, the whiter Protestants got on Election Day, and the more evangelical they got, the more they turned out for Trump/Vance.
So why did Protestants turn out for them? It’s not the identity politics of voting for your own kind, it’s the identity politics of voting for someone who will empower your own kind.
It’s a Faustian bargain! And who doesn’t love a bargain?
Every religion prefers secularism to theocracy … except their theocracy.
But only Christianity is in position for a theocracy in modern America, so of course they’re gonna back the guy who’s willing to pretend their religion is special.
Trump is willing to give religion unprecedented power in return for unprecedented power. And evangelicals obviously have no problem with a perfect, all-powerful father figure.
All around the country, we have theocrats in churches and statehouses blaspheming against the Constitution by jamming “chaplains” and religious texts intopublic institutions and passing laws based on and/or codifying their religious beliefs.
The most towering achievement of the (first) Trump presidency was a religious one: Abortion. It doesn’t matter how thin scripture is on abortion; poorly written and poorly edited religious texts succeed because they’re self-contradictory or ambiguous enough for anyone to find any justification for anything in there.
And there’s more coming. The Republican opposition to contraception and divorce rests on religion. And you’ll see it in the states and Congress a lot more starting in January. That’s a prophecy!
And Trump’s about to appoint four more years worth of judges to rubber-stamp it all.
Insanely, though, right now we have a Democratic Party that goes way beyond just protecting freedom of religion. It’s coddling and nurturing the theocratic vein of American religion.
Remember how the post-Jan. 6 reports were largely scrubbed of the Christian element?
And Democrats are welcoming right-wing theocrats to bring their events into the halls of the Capitol (as I first revealed over on my grownup-reporting Substack).
Democrats today are still play-acting Christianity. (Long ago I read Barack Obama’s memoir, or parts of it, curious about how he discussed his faith. Not his spiritual feelings, but specifically how this particular multi-cultural person came to believe that once upon a time a magician showed up without the involvement of any sperm and then did magic stuff. Obama explains that he saw the good that churches did in Chicago. Seeing humans do good work is actually not a real reason to believe there was a magic man 2,000 years ago. It’s a fig leaf.)
Hell, — I mean, Fuck, — I revealed two years ago that Democrats passed the Respect for Marriage Act, ostensibly to codify same-sex marriage, without even knowing that the concessions they made would strengthen the right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people on religious grounds.3
Two years after the death of Roe, Democrats haven’t even reckoned with the reality that the single greatest motivating Trump action they’re rebelling against — killing abortion — was entirely a religious one.
In other words, toxic, evangelical Christian religion is what put Trump in the White House and the worst of what he’s doing there is in the service of that religion.
And Democrats aren’t even talking about let alone fighting it.
Pause for shoutout to the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), who are and do.
Are there specific things Democrats should do as champions of secularism? Newsfucker, you fucking bet.
But first they have to name the enemy.
This is a concept I’ve been banging on about for years, and I’ve seen others say it, too (I’ll be writing about it and dig up those references so I can credit them).
Climate change and economic inequality and the assaults on the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people aren’t just “happening.” Individual biological human beings are doing these things.
But how often do Democrats name them?
In the case of religion, Democrats don’t even name the cause, let alone the people leading it. That’s partly the fault of the media — which are terrible at reckoning with the role religion plays in our politics.
I’ve seen this for myself, writing about the religious right reeling in Ukraine — something the Washington Post has touched on but without mentioning the nefarious aspects of it (as I’ve complained about before on Twitter because for some reason I’m still creating content for Elon Musk for free fml.)
And outlets that do have a religious bent did not miss this at all. From Mormon Country, here’s the Salt Lake Tribune, proving I’m not making this up:
And you can fucking bet the evangelicals know what Trump owes them. How do they know? Because the same day Trump won, the evangelical Bible told them so. I mean, not the literal Bible, the newspaper that’s the evangelical, uh, Bible. Here’s Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham:
See that subhed? Gains among Catholics and Hispanic Christians?
Evangelizing Catholics and Hispanics didn’t end with Graham’s death. While Democrats were sending no secular missionaries around the world, evangelicals have been flipping entire South American countries from radical leftie Catholicism to evangelical Catholicism or, in the case of Guatemala, as I wrote about at length, to literal Protestant evangelicalism.
There are lots of things Democrats can do. Okay, there’s nothing legislatively they can do for two years. But they’re now in a re-identity-creating phase and they can absolutely make secularism a core part of it, naming theocracy and actual theocrats in the process.
It shouldn’t come as a shock to a nation that is literally America, but secularism was a founding ethos and public religion is an enemy of the state. Not all churches, but the ones that operate in the public space, telling their dwindling congregations how to vote. Enforcing authoritarian, theocratic cultures.
And no, I wasn’t planning to write all this beforehand, despite my history of reporting on theocracy shit. It didn’t even occur to me until I saw the polling data.
But, but, you stutter, politicians can’t take on religion! It’s political death. Ah, that’s where we finally get some good news.
Finally, Some Good News
First of all, we’ve already had political death. Remember yesterday?
What we’re talking about now is political resurrection. There is now a massive coalition that supports secularism.
One more note from that religious breakdown of voters: 36% — more than a third — of the country is not Christian.
One out of four Americans is not even religious. One out of four.
And the one quarter of the country who have zero time for mythology and scientific illiteracy are almost as good as Jews at democracy! Look how they voted! Seventy-one percent of them voted for Harris.
And their numbers are growing. But unlike ethnic minorities, whose self-image can shift over generations to detach from ethnic identity, secular people are defined by what they believe. And what they believe is directly opposed by the Republican platform and its core voters.
Was any effort made to mobilize them? Was anyone talking about their issues or their oppression? Where was the pandering?
We kept hearing how great democracy was — but never why. And it’s great for lots of things! You can use democracy to prevent the rise of a billionaire class, for instance. But you can also use it to protect America’s non-Christian one-third from the imposition of religion explicitly or in statute.
But only if you tell them that’s what you stand for and then actually stand for it.
Because if secular identity is invisible on the national stage, just like poor people didn’t turn out for a Democratic Party that ignored them, secular people won’t turn out for a party that ignores them.
Or, worse, they’ll gravitate towards the other party because they’re looking at other issues. And because no one’s speaking to theirs.
Luckily, as I mentioned, we now have an actual, established caucus dedicated to rectifying this. Huffman’s not the only leader. The co-chair is Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Democratic hero of the impeachment.
There’s a Democratic vacuum of leadership now. But secular Democrats already have leaders in place. And fighters.
They’ll fight these fights — if we back them with armies.
TCB
POST-MORTEM I was pretty useless yesterday. I mean, I was working, harvesting all kinds of stuff I wanna share with you Newsfuckers. But I didn’t have a high-larious mordant conceit to execute, let alone a coherent theme I wanted to tackle, until I saw the religious exit-polling this morning.
That said, there are definitely things to talk about going forward — some counterintuitive and hard — and I am reading and thinking and I will be here for you with what I hope is helpful, bonus commentary on who we need to be and what we need to do. And I’m also still thinking about and hopeful for your input about what TFN should be going forward.
A Washington Post reporter contacted me about quoting something from yesterday’s TFN, so at the moment I’m sort of living in terror of being outed. Ideally, if it happens, it’ll be a net positive. Ideally.
Point being, this is a moment of flux for TFN. A lot of new Newsfuckers signed up yesterday, which made up for the cancelations. Still, the cancelations break my heart because Jesus fuck the one thing we have to do is keep talking to each other and especially hearing things that may not sit well with us.
I do that, following some pretty yucky Twitter accounts and reading conservative outlets. And TFN has to be able to voice orthogonal views. That said, I feel extraordinarily grateful that during this churn — I lost something like 100 followers on Twitter! — TFN’s subscriber numbers remain steady. So, welcome new Newsfuckers and thank you from the bottom of my metaphorical heart to the longtimers sticking around and supporting what we’re trying to do.
The other thing I’m grappling with is TFN’s growth. It’s easy to just spout off when no one’s listening. But even as a lowly Substack, if you get big enough, the responsibilities of publisher-dom accrue. TFN keeps moving up the Substack leaderboard (yay!) and now the Washington Post is reading us (gulp).
Which means a bigger platform and the challenges of speaking to a bigger audience in a way that’s uniting but honors everyone in it. In short (I know, too late), I’m working on it.
Your support sustains me. Thank you.
And remember this is a team effort. I need to hear what you’re thinking — I read all the comments even if I don’t respond to them all. You can also email TFN. And of course we’re on all the socials: Threads, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Spoutible, and (still) Twitter.
I still maintain that the vast majority of Americans are not evil and didn’t vote for evil. We just need a movement that gives them something good to be for. The only way to build that movement is not to despair.
Go get ‘em, kids.
* No one in the mainstream outlets, anyway!
Could’ve looked it up; didn’t.
Fun fact: Trump did not hold The Bible upside-down! What he did hold was a Bible offensive to evangelicals because its translation refers to Mary, Jesus’s Mom, as a young girl, not as virgin.
The RMA strengthened a previous Democratic law that was intended to protect indigenous religious rituals involving peyote use. But once you say it’s okay to break the law if your magic people tell you to, then evangelical Christians are logically correct to argue that they, too, should be able to break laws like, fer instance, laws prohibiting them from discriminating against women, LGBTQ+ people, and sex-havers when it comes to what Christian-owned companies cover in their employee health plans.
I’m really confused at where you’re getting this “no Protestants” in the White House thing. There are three main branches of Christianity: Protestantism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The dominant two in the US are Catholicism and Protestantism. After Protestantism split from Catholicism in the 1500s, it kept splitting and splitting and splitting into hundreds of denominations (Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc). But there are thousands of Protestant Christians in the US who attend nondenominational churches, meaning churches that don’t subscribe to a particular denominational doctrine. These people would call themselves nondenominational Christians. Now, Trump doesn’t know any of this, and he seems to only use Christianity as a label to appeal to Christian voters, but what he’s calling himself still falls under the Protestant umbrella.
Sometime in the early 2000s. The US Government began a policy of funneling foreign aid through evangelical organizations.