Today’s midterm elections are a battle for the soul of the nation.
President Trump is a fascist hate preacher. MAGA is a form of fundamentalist religious politics in which Trump functions as God.
As retired Judge Michael Luttig wrote on Sunday: “The existential ‘danger from within’ has finally arrived. America’s time of testing has come.”
The polls point to a massive defeat for Trump and his MAGA Republicans by the Democrats. The midterms are a referendum on Trump’s presidency. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll has Trump at 32%.
Trump’s party will likely lose the House. Republican control of the Senate is also imperiled. Even in deep-red states such as Texas and Florida, Republicans face serious competition from the Democrats.
Writing in Politico, Jonathan Martin describes a growing “Blacklash” against Trump and the Republicans: “I warned Republicans in a column earlier this year about the unintended consequences, namely galvanizing Black voters, they were tempting with their redistricting push. It was bound to infuriate Black Americans and particularly those community leaders already uneasy with the shift in power in Washington.”
A blue wave would feel like an apocalypse for Trump, the Republicans, the MAGA movement, and the broader right. Trump is responding by feeding his MAGA flock some of that old-fashioned White racism and White rage.
In a recent Truth Social post, Trump attempted to incite “race riots” and other violence against Black Somalis, urging (White) people in Minneapolis to fight back, promising that he would send federal forces to help them. He has also portrayed Black Somalis as primitives who don’t wear clothes, and as thieves who come to this country to commit fraud and steal from good hardworking (White) Americans. Trump has repeatedly attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar as human “garbage,” said that she is not a real American with any rights, and wants her locked up and deported for committing citizenship fraud.
Trump is continuing to attack Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a “jihadist” who hates America. Trump believes that El-Sayed’s Black and Jewish supporters are “crazy.” At a rally in Iowa on Sunday, Trump engaged in a racist diatribe, saying that Congress would have to “get a special metal detector for Abdul” if he were elected. He continued: “If you vote for this jihadist lunatic that wants to destroy you, you’re crazy.”
Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s other deacons have also been feverishly preaching to the MAGA flock.
Despite their efforts, MAGA is increasingly a very “sick church,” exhibiting symptoms such as declining attendance, a lack of enthusiasm among the parishioners, and discord among the leadership.
Attendance at Trump's rallies is waning. His MAGA followers still cheer and clap at Trump’s greatest hits, but the enthusiasm and awe are fading. Some seem to be operating on autopilot. There are even hecklers in the pews. Trump’s MAGA congregation responds with violence.
What about Trump’s White right-wing Christian evangelicals? They have been the bedrock of his support, consistently giving approval ratings of around 80% throughout his presidency. A new Pew Research Center poll found that their support for Trump has fallen some 20 points to 58%.
At a campaign rally speech in Cleveland, Ohio on Saturday, October 24, Obama needled Trump, mocking his “renovations” of the White House as tacky, like a Cheesecake factory restaurant with a cheap gaudy gold aesthetic that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would have loved. More importantly, Obama connected the democracy crisis to a deeper crisis of morality:
We’re not stuck with a spineless Congress and Republican governors who are enabling lawlessness and carelessness and cruelty and indifference for working people….
After two years of chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence … you get a chance to say enough is enough.”
Trump could not resist the bait. The president and his MAGA followers despise Obama. They see him as their Antichrist, the embodiment of all that is wrong with America. Amplifying that belief, Trump recently shared a Truth Social post in which “Jesus Christ” condemns Obama and declares Donald Trump to be his prophet. A 2010 Harris Interactive survey found that 24% of Republicans believed Obama might be the mythical Antichrist.
In a Sunday post on Truth Social, Trump attacked Obama, calling him “a grossly incompetent President!” The following day, before departing for a campaign rally in Mississippi, he continued his tirade, telling reporters that Obama was “stupid” and that “for you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president.”
By Wednesday, Trump was still obsessing about Obama’s remarks. At a rally in Ohio, he responded with racist stereotypes about Black people being dirty. Obama “doesn’t understand cleanliness” or “broken, cracked stone and sidewalk,” Trump said.
Obama draws both inspiration and authority from the moral traditions of the long Civil Rights Movement and the Black church. At a campaign rally in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, on Wednesday, October 28, Obama continued with his moral teaching, channeling one of America’s greatest leaders: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
There is a moral component to the choices we face right now…. We are not going to fix the system that’s broken, we’re not going to unrig our economy, so long as we’ve got a culture where anything goes, where people in the highest offices of the land think it’s OK to lie and cheat and bully, if we continue to have a culture where money is deemed the only measure of our worth…
We need to remember the words of a 25-year-old preacher who gave a sermon in 1954, where he said, if we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind and that preacher was Martin Luther King Jr….
We haven’t learned how to be just and honest and kind and true and loving and that that is the basis of our problem and Dr. King’s words are as true today as they were when he spoke them before I was born….
But we also need to rediscover our North Star. We also need to rediscover what’s best in us.
Trump’s conception of political power stands in stark contrast to the values Obama invoked. Trump has no conception of public service, or any sense of obligation to the common good. He does not recognize universal values of right and wrong. As Trump told The New York Times earlier this year, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Trump is attempting to make his rule permanent and dominate every aspect of American life and memory. He is trying to build monuments to himself, including a proposed 250-foot-tall arch, while demolishing the White House East Wing and replacing it with a ballroom and bunker. He has put his face on US passports and money. He wants his name on everything from buildings, airports, to oceans and even the moon. Trump is trying to be a new Ozymandias, a ruler who imagines that his name and power will last forever.
This is what is at stake today. The question is whether enough Americans will choose, again, to follow a fascist hate preacher and his movement, or reject it. The midterms will not end the country’s profound political crisis or undo the damage already done. But the midterms can mark the beginning of a moral reckoning and a huge step towards escaping this wilderness.
Chauncey DeVega is a politics and opinion writer. His essays, commentary, interviews and other writing have been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, NPR, The Atlantic and other leading publications. He hosts two podcasts, The Chauncey DeVega Show and The Truth Report.
Read the full, expanded version of this essay at his newsletter, Indomitable.
