While political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation. NBC News reported that on Christmas Day, Jack Smith, the special counsel in charge of two federal prosecutions of Trump, was “swatted.” On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that Tanya S. Chutkan, the judge presiding over one of those two cases, was also recently swatted. Swatting — a grotesque tactic in which the police are called to respond to a nonexistent crime or threat at someone’s home — is a shockingly dangerous act that can threaten the victim’s life and property. The police will often descend in force on the home, anticipating a possible violent confrontation. In 2017, a swatting call over a video game dispute resulted in the death of an innocent man at his own front door.
But most consequential of all is the religious response to Trump. On Dec. 20, The Economist reported on the astonishing number of Christian Republicans who believe Donald Trump is God’s chosen man to save America. Writing in The Times just a few weeks later, my colleagues Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported on the ways in which, during the Trump era, evangelicalism has become more cultural and political and less pious, theological or concerned with church attendance. Graham and Homans spoke, for instance, to a retired corrections officer named Cydney Hatfield. “I voted for Trump twice, and I’ll vote for him again,” she said. “He’s the only savior I can see.” Capitalizing on sentiments like these, Trump himself shared a blasphemous video modeled on Paul Harvey’s famous video “So God Made a Farmer,” that proclaims “God Made Trump.”
The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”
But in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.
For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”