Donald Trump’s approval ratings have ticked up since the State of the Union address. But they’re still pretty brutal for a newly-elected president at this stage–an average of 41 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight. And they’re likely to dip even lower than that soon; the first poll taken entirely after the Rob Porter imbroglio broke only has Trump at 39 percent.
But Trump should be very lucky to even be in the 40s. His support among white evangelicals may have dipped substantially since a whopping 81 percent of them voted for him in 2016, but at last report stands at 61 percent–far ahead of his support among the nation at large. Initially, it looked like there was one main explanation for this discrepancy. For the last two years, the religious right has engaged in a concerted effort to bully evangelicals into bowing down to Trump–by convincing them that those who oppose Trump are driven by witchcraft, demons, and the like.
But if one of the more prominent speakers on the hyperfundie circuit is to be believed, there may be another reason. Apparently a number of those fundies who are still bowing down to Trump are doing so because they think Trump is fulfilling God’s agenda for this country–and in the process, is making the devil mad.
On Friday, one of the leading generals in the Trumpvangelical Army, Rick Wiles of TruNews, welcomed one of his frequent guests, Paul McGuire. He may not be a familiar face even to religious right watchers, but he’s made enough noise to merit his own dossier at Right Wing Watch. For instance, he believes that Pope Francis is working hand in glove with the UN to build a “Communist world government.” He also claims that the Russia investigation is part of an anti-Trump plot orchestrated by “powerful globalist secret societies” who rule this country “from behind the scenes.”
Recently, he’s been making the rounds of the religious right tubes promoting his new book, “Trumpocalypse,” which argues that Trump may be laying the ground work for the end times and the Second Coming. While speaking with Wiles about the book on Friday, McGuire claimed that the growing opposition to Trump is actually a good thing. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
About nine minutes into the show, Wiles asked McGuire why Trump was so “hated and despised by so many people so quickly” both in this country and abroad. McGuire had a ready answer.
“The very fact that Trump is opposed worldwide by the mass media, by the international banking families, by the globalist elite. On every level, Trump is demonized, he’s the enemy. He’s the enemy of the deep state.”
As McGuire sees it, the intelligence community and other “secret societies” are on the payroll of the “globalist elite” who are out to get Trump. He thinks it’s the only way to explain the constant attacks on Trump by comedians, CNN, The Washington Post, and others.
To hear McGuire talk, Trump is under assault from “everything evil” and “against the United States” because he poses a direct threat to a “Luciferian system.” He thinks it should be a wake-up call to any Christians who are wary about Trump.
“If the witches are united against Trump, if the globalist elite that are deeply involved in Satanism and the occult and Luciferianism are against Trump, if every manner of evil is against Trump, you would think that the little light bulb would come on it people’s brains and they would say, ‘Gee, Trump must be doing something that God wants because the entire world system is opposing him.'”
This is a new twist on an old shibboleth that has been floating around religious right circles for almost four decades, especially among hypercharismatics like Wiles and McGuire. As the story goes, good, decent Christians have been persecuted for years by the big, bad libruls just because of what they believe.
I saw this mentality first-hand during my days as a student at the University of North Carolina. As many of my longtime readers both here and at Daily Kos know, I was tricked into joining a hypercharismatic and borderline cultish campus ministry in my freshman year. We were told constantly that people hated us because of what we believe. This was coming from a group that had no qualms about out-and-out deceiving people about who they really were in order to get them to join, and then laid the guilt-tripping on thick in order to keep you in.
I found out just how deep this persecution complex ran when I burrowed back into this outfit in my sophomore year in order to get hard evidence of their deceit. They actually likened me to the Apostle Paul, since I’d gone from speaking out against them to supposedly joining back up with them. Uh huh. So merely speaking out against someone is the same thing as having people killed? Even now, I still wonder where their sense of proportion was. Read more at my chronicle of my experiences with this outfit, Child of the Truth.
In the last few years, I’ve seen more and more parallels between my experience with this nutcase outfit and our current state of affairs. This is yet another. In their world, Trump isn’t being attacked because he is the most unfit and unqualified president in recent memory, and has displayed a staggering disregard for both the Constitution and basic standards of decency. No, no–it’s because he’s obeying God.
When you think about it, it explains a lot. How else do you explain the nation’s so-called moral guardians throwing domestic violence victims under the bus in order to stand by him? Or how, at best, they ignore his outrages on Twitter? They actually think that those who call him out are doing the devil’s work–and thus proving that God hacked the election for him. The mind reels.
(featured image: screenshot courtesy GOD TV via McGuire’s Facebook)
