There’s a quote typically attributed to Sinclair Lewis that has gone viral time and again since Donald Trump first ascended to the White Home, fodder for liberal memes on Fb and reposts on the platform X: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”
There’s no proof that Lewis, the early Twentieth-century novelist, ever mentioned or wrote that sentence — its origin stays unknown — nevertheless it’s comprehensible why folks assume he did. Lewis, in spite of everything, wrote “It Can’t Happen Here,” the broadly learn Thirties dystopian novel depicting an Adolf Hitler-like determine rising to energy within the U.S. — the kind of fascist who eschewed the phrase “fascist” itself however “preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty,” and who “could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson” — and establishing focus camps for members of sure marginalized teams, in addition to for his political enemies.
The guide’s sardonic title has served because the genesis for innumerable op-eds and journal options within the many years because it was printed, with headlines like “Could It Happen Here?” and “Did It Happen Here?” musing whether or not the horrors of Thirties and Forties European fascism may be arriving on America’s shores. These musings, in fact, typically elided the truth that many People, particularly Black and Indigenous folks, have been already dwelling below a kind of fascism: white supremacy.
Nonetheless, with the 2024 election victory of Donald Trump, there’s an excellent argument that the notably virulent pressure of fascism imagined in Lewis’ novel, and the destruction of no matter semblance of democracy this nation has loved, are on the cusp of taking place right here and now. Just like the apocryphal quote mentioned, it’s wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
Jessie Wardarski by way of Related Press
Trump’s connection to Christianity has at all times been tenuous, with critics speculating whether or not his religion was genuine or crafted out of political expediency, particularly after a 2015 interview wherein he was requested to call his favourite Bible verses and repeatedly demurred. However since his preliminary ascent to the White Home, and particularly after a July assassination try this yr, his spiritual rhetoric intensified.
“My faith took on new meaning on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, where I was knocked to the ground, essentially, by what seemed like a supernatural hand,” Trump mentioned final month, suggesting that divine intervention saved him from a would-be murderer’s bullet. “And I would like to think that God saved me for a purpose, and that’s to make our country greater than ever before.”
Whereas Trump’s rise to energy in 2016 instigated an explosion in fascist teams — the Proud Boys, Id Evropa and so many extra — lots of these organizations have since collapsed, falling to infighting and scandal, their members arrested or doxxed. These teams, in some ways, served as shock troops for the “Make America Great Again” agenda, sacrificing themselves to open the Overton window — that’s, the spectrum of acceptable political discourse — so large that Trump ceaselessly parrots their phrases and concepts today, overtly speaking about “remigration,” for instance, a widely known euphemism for ethnic cleaning.
But essentially the most enduring fascist formation, the one which has survived and thrived out within the open over the previous eight years, counts hundreds of thousands of members amongst its ranks. As HuffPost has reported extensively, they collect at a unfastened confederation of church buildings on Sunday mornings, converse in tongues, carry out religion healings and are led by self-described prophets and apostles who declare to have a direct line to God. Their revealed phrase at all times bears a placing resemblance to the most recent MAGA or Republican Occasion speaking factors you would possibly hear on Fox Information, and incorporates prophecies that Trump is destined to rule over the U.S., returning to the White Home to implement a reign of terror and vengeance over those that ever dared oppose him.
Trump has repeatedly threatened revenge, lashing out on the “enemy from within,” calling the press “the enemy of the people” and promising “retribution” and to be a “dictator” on day considered one of his subsequent administration. His work will start in earnest this January.
And he’ll have the assist of churches within the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR — a burgeoning motion of charismatic evangelical church buildings which can be characterised by a perception within the supernatural, in modern-day miracles and in modern-day apostles and prophets, in addition to an embrace of Christian dominionism, the concept America was based as a Christian nation and must be ruled with an ultraconservative interpretation of scripture. This latter perception is articulated in one thing referred to as the Seven Mountain Mandate, which states that Christians should conquer the “seven mountains” of societal affect — the monetary system, the church, training, arts and leisure, household, media and authorities — to type an ideal world. As soon as that’s completed, the prophecy goes, Christ will return to Earth.
It’s a motion that’s essentially hostile to the kind of democracy required for equal governance in a various and pluralistic society just like the U.S., which is why it’s no shock that NAR prophets and apostles performed such a elementary position in fomenting the antidemocratic Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, and why they’ve discovered a house within the highest reaches of a Republican Occasion more and more beholden to a politics of outright domination.
The GOP’s official get together platform is rife with NAR-inflected language, together with a name to “keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America.” Such language may also be present in Venture 2025, the sprawling fascist blueprint for a brand new conservative administration that was spearheaded by The Heritage Basis assume tank and depicts Christians in America as below siege by “woke” enemies.
Trump and JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, have repeatedly courted the New Apostolic Reformation, together with in September when Vance spoke at an occasion hosted by an apostle who believes that Trump was destined to save lots of America from Kamala Harris, with the Democratic presidential nominee purportedly despatched by the satan to “take Trump out.”
Fascist actions typically imbue their leaders with mythological, divine qualities, and the NAR is not any exception. Trump was destined to rule for “such a time as this,” in line with the motion’s prophets and apostles, who’ve at varied factors over the past eight years “made a hobby of connecting the famously profane, philandering, greedy real estate mogul to biblical heroes and quotable Bible verses,” wrote Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar on the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Research and the creator of “The Violent Take It by Force.”
Taylor, writing simply earlier than the election for Faith Information Service, chronicled how these prophets and apostles have alternately in contrast Trump to Cyrus, the traditional Persian emperor; “a modern Job, defiantly enduring devilish persecutions”; “Esther, positioned by providence ‘for such a time as this’”; or “David, a flawed but anointed man of God.”
However essentially the most bone-chilling biblical comparability Taylor noticed was from final month, as NAR prophets and apostles rallied for Trump in Washington, equating the billionaire former president to King Jehu.
“Donald Trump is a type of Jehu, and Kamala Harris is a type of Jezebel. As you know, Jehu cast out Jezebel,” apostle Ché Ahn mentioned on the rally. “I decree in Jesus’ mighty name, and I decree it by faith that Trump will win on November the 5th, he will be our 47th president, and Kamala Harris will be cast out, and she will lose.”
As Taylor famous, Jehu within the Bible not solely “cast out” Jezebel, however killed her in a horrifying method. “He demands her servants cast her out of a high tower, then tramples her body with his horse,” Taylor wrote. “Wild dogs come and eat her corpse. The message of the story: Jezebel was so profane, so heinous, that all memory of her was eradicated.”
Afterward, Taylor mentioned, “Jehu goes on a rampage, slaughtering all of Ahab and Jezebel’s children, piling up their heads at the city gates. He goes on to murder hundreds of Israelite citizens, including religious leaders who backed Jezebel. One of the most brutal and vindictive scenes in the Bible, Jehu’s vengeance is being offered as the divinely ordained template for a second Trump term.”
It may be straightforward to wave this all away as scorching air or bluster, to say that these Christian nationalists don’t imply such comparisons actually. Eight years in the past the press, the commentariat, Democratic politicians and teachers who examine fascism hesitated to name Trump a fascist. However in current months they’ve largely turn out to be snug with the time period, observing Trump’s more and more hostile anti-immigrant rhetoric and experiences that he admired the ur-fascist: Hitler.
“We might dismiss the comparisons to Jehu as metaphor if we had not listened to Trump’s recent rally speeches,” Taylor wrote. “These biblical citations echo Trump’s own campaign rhetoric, which itself has taken a more vengeful, violent turn. He launched his 2024 campaign by declaring, ‘I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.’ He’s closing it with promises to eradicate ′the enemy within’ and calling his American opponents ′vermin.’”
In the end, the quote so typically misattributed to Lewis has confirmed really prophetic. There’s a fascist motion with actual energy in the united statesnow. It’s draped in a flag. And it’s carrying a cross.
