Donald Trump and American evangelicals have never been natural allies. Trump has owned casinos, flaunted mistresses in the tabloids, and often talked in a way that would get him kicked out of church. In 2016 many people doubted whether Trump could win over evangelicals, whose support he needed. Eight years later, a few weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, evangelical support for the former president and current Republican frontrunner is no longer in question. In fact, there are now prominent evangelical leaders who have come to believe that Trump is “God’s instrument on Earth,” says Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

How did evangelicals shift from being reluctant supporters of Trump to among his most passionate defenders? How did some evangelicals, historically suspicious of politicians, develop a “fanatical, cult-like attachment” to Donald Trump? And what happened to the evangelical movement as some bought into Trump’s vision of America and others recoiled?

Alberta is a political reporter and also a Christian himself. After a dramatic and unexpected conversion, Tim’s father became a pastor at a prominent church in Michigan, which means Alberta grew up playing at the church, inviting dates to Bible study. He remains a believer. But he has watched with concern over the last few years as a lot of worship services have started to sound like “low-rent Fox News segments,” as he puts it—and as his own father, before his death, began justifying some of Trump’s behavior. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk to Alberta about the alliance between Trump and evangelicals, and what it means for the church he loves.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: The Iowa caucuses are coming up in just over a month, and despite the primary challengers, it’s very likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.

Now, a lot has changed since 2016, when Trump first ran. Back then, one of the biggest questions he faced was whether he could win over evangelical Christians.

After all, he was a casino owner, used to hang out at the Playboy Mansion, and he was on his third wife. If he preached anything, it was the gospel of wealth.

Trump needed evangelicals back then and, eventually, they held their noses and voted for him.

Now the dynamic is very different. In this election, evangelical support is no longer a question. In fact, so popular is Trump that some evangelical leaders have come to think of him as a kind of messiah, the leader they have always been waiting for.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. And today: how Trump has transformed the evangelical movement.

[Music]

In the early 2000s I was a beat reporter for The Washington Post, and my beat was evangelicals. George W. Bush was president, and he was a self-declared born-again Christian. And I watched his relationship with evangelicals up close, but that’s nothing like what we have today.

Many evangelical leaders now have an intense devotion to Trump that I find mystifying.

So today on the show, we have Tim Alberta to help explain it. Tim is a staff writer at The Atlantic who just wrote a book called The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

Also, Tim’s dad was a pastor, which meant Tim grew up in the Church.

Tim Alberta: So when I say that I grew up in the Church, I mean literally physically grew up inside the church. My mother was on the staff there. I spent my childhood playing hide-and-seek in the storage spaces, doing my homework in my dad’s office.

Tim Alberta watched the movement change during the Trump years. He watched his own dad change. It unsettled him. But it also gave him a unique insider’s perspective. Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: So first basic question: Why write a book about evangelicals right now? It’s not like they’re a new force in American politics. They’ve, you know, been around for a while. They’ve had influence for a while. So why now?

Alberta: Well, I guess I would have to give you both the macro and the micro answer. So the macro answer is that I really do sense that something new and something urgent and something dangerous, frankly, is happening in the evangelical world—specific to not just its alliance with Donald Trump, its alliance with the Republican Party, but its processing of everyday, run-of-the-mill, partisan political disputes through this prism that’s no longer red versus blue, no longer even, you know, conservatives versus progressives, you know, God-fearing Christians versus godless leftists. It’s good versus evil.

There is really a sense within American evangelicalism today that the end is near, that the sky is falling, that the barbarians are at the gates, and that if we don’t do something about it now, then this country, this ordained covenant country that God has so uniquely blessed, that we’re going to lose it—and that if we lose it, we’re not just losing America. It’s not just a defeat for America; it’s a defeat for God himself. So that is the macro.

The micro as to why I wrote the book now is because, I suppose for lack of a better way of putting it, I finally found the courage to do so. I finally found my voice in addressing this thing that I have known for a very long time to be a problem but just wasn’t brave enough until now to really speak out about it.

Rosin: So, okay, let’s get down on the ground and paint a picture for people. And possibly this is starting at the extremes, but there’s a church you wrote about called Floodgate.

Alberta: Floodgate is a church in Brighton, Michigan, which is my hometown. They had about 100 people, 125 people on an average Sunday for their worship services. So it’s a pretty small church—roadside congregation—in my hometown.

And I grew up, like, a few miles from there. I had never heard of it. Fast-forward to COVID-19: Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, had issued shutdown orders that implicated houses of worship. And most of the churches in the area, including very conservative churches—theologically, culturally, politically conservative—they decided to shut down for some period of time.

And that included my home church, where my dad had been the pastor—the church that I grew up in, you know, spent my whole life in. They closed down, and basically at that moment, this massive schism was opened in the community, not only in the community I grew up in, but in the faith community that I grew up in, sort of universally speaking when we talk about evangelicalism in America.

Because this same thing that happened in Brighton, Michigan, was happening all over the country, which was to say that churches that closed down had some number of their congregants who were up in arms, who were furious, who basically believed that the pastors there were cowards and that they were succumbing to the forces of secularism that had the Church in the crosshairs.

And meanwhile, churches like Floodgate that took a bold stance against the government and stayed open, those churches were doing the Lord’s work. And so what you saw at Floodgate was a congregation that had about 100, suddenly within about a year had gone to 1,500. And now they’re even much bigger today than they were at that time.

And so when you go into Floodgate on a Sunday morning, as I did many times, instead of some of the traditional Sunday-morning worship rituals—you know, the church creeds and the doctrines being read aloud, the doxology sung, you know, some of the standard stuff that you would become accustomed to in an evangelical space—really what you would see was the pulpit being turned into a soapbox and the worship service turning into a low-rent Fox News segment, with the pastor just inveighing against Anthony Fauci, against Joe Biden, against the Democratic Party, against the elites who are trying to control the population—very dark, very angry, very conspiratorial. And that’s what you would see inside of a church like Floodgate.

Rosin: It’s not exactly an evolution. It’s more like an intensification. And I’m curious how the dots got drawn between a theological argument and COVID-19 masking, and then went all the way to Fox News.

Alberta: Well, you’re right that it’s intensification. It is also evolution. I’ll explain, I think, what is the arc that led us to this place. To understand this moment is to understand the sweep of the last 50 or 60 years in the evangelical world. So, during the mid-to-late ’70s, and certainly into the ’80s through the Reagan years, the Moral Majority is ascendant.

You’ve got tens of millions of evangelicals who are suddenly energized, galvanized, mobilized politically. And then you begin to see, after the Iron Curtain falls and the Cold War ends and we move into this period of a kind of peace and prosperity, that some of that panic starts to fall away a little bit.

A lot of churches sort of ratchet it back, and things return to normal for a period. And you see that, you know, really into the early 2000s, with a notable exception, I would add, of the Bill Clinton impeachment, which I think was a major moment for a lot of evangelicals—certainly my own father, my own church, where a lot of evangelicals wanted to take that moment to emphasize that character matters, morality matters, and that our political system depends on having moral leaders.

And then you kind of fast-forward, and things are still at kind of a low simmer for a while there.

Rosin: I think at the same time during the period that you’re describing, we do come to think, in our cultural imagination, of evangelical as equivalent to conservative, eventually as equivalent to Republican conservative, and then eventually as equivalent to white Republican conservative. Those definitions are also getting hardened during the period that you describe as quiet.

Alberta: I think that’s right, and I think that some of that owes to just a self-identification phenomenon. So, you know, during George W. Bush’s presidency, he’s talking about his relationship with Billy Graham. He’s talking about evangelicalism. And so that is becoming a part of the political lexicon all over again.

I think really what starts to trip the alarms inside of evangelicalism is the end of the Bush presidency and the election of Barack Obama, for some reasons that are obvious (i.e., we’re talking about a white evangelical movement, portions of which, perhaps significant portions of which, are deeply uncomfortable with a Black president).

I also think that during Obama’s presidency, you see a significant move in the culture. I mean, even just on the issue of same-sex marriage, for example, Obama runs for president in 2008 opposed to same-sex marriage, and by the time he leaves office, he is in favor of it and the Supreme Court rules to legalize same-sex marriage nationally. All of that is happening in the space of, like, less than a decade, and you’re seeing major cultural movement toward the left. And a lot of evangelical Christians during this period of time are really beginning to sound the alarm.

They’re really hand-wringing, saying, Okay, this is it. This is the apocalypse we’ve been warning about for 50 years. Even if that apocalypse was once sort of an abstract thing, something that they gave voice to but maybe didn’t really believe it, suddenly this convergence of factors is causing a lot of churches to become not just more conservative, not just more Republican, but really more militant in a lot of ways—in the rhetoric you hear from the pulpit, with the tactics that they will choose to engage in some of the culture-war issues with. And so that leads us to Trump coming down in the golden escalator.

And Donald Trump is not exactly a paragon of Christian virtue. The thrice-married, casino-owning Manhattan playboy who parades his mistresses through the tabloids and uses terrible, vulgar rhetoric—I mean, this is not someone who the rank-and-file evangelical would point to as an ally, much less as a role model.

Rosin: Right.

Alberta: And I reported extensively in 2016 on a really well-organized, well-financed effort to rally evangelical leaders around Ted Cruz, because they at least viewed him as one of their own. But he also had all of that same pugilism, all of that same attitude, that We’ve been pushed around too long, and now it’s time we fought back and we did something about this.

Donald Trump secures the Republican nomination, and then he realizes that he can’t get elected president without the support of these white evangelical voters and, frankly, without overwhelming support of those voters. And so, methodically, he starts his courtship of them.

He chooses Mike Pence as his running mate. He releases this list of Supreme Court justices. He promises explicitly that they will be pro-life Supreme Court justices, something that had never been done by a presidential nominee. He’s doing all of this signaling to evangelical voters. Perhaps most importantly, he goes to New York in the summer of 2016, and he meets with hundreds and hundreds of these prominent evangelical pastors from around the country, and he basically promises them, he says: Look, I will give you power. If you elect me, I will give you power, and I will defend Christianity in this country.

And so there’s sort of this transactional relationship where Trump gets the votes from these people, and they get not just the policies in return, but they get the protection in return. It’s almost as though Trump becomes, like, this mercenary who, on their behalf, is willing to fight the enemies out in the culture, in the government.

Anyone who is hostile to the Christian way of life as they view it, Donald Trump is going to fight on their behalf.

Rosin: Now, you use the word transactional. Did everybody understand it was transactional? I mean, from how you described it, Trump certainly understood it was transactional: I’m going to come out there and get your vote. How did evangelical leaders understand what was happening?

Alberta: The incredible part, Hanna, is that they really did. I mean, I have all of the reporting on the record from the time to back this up. I wrote about it in my first book, American Carnage. They understood exactly the relationship that they were entering into with Donald Trump. They were under no illusions that God’s hands were on him. They didn’t believe any of that.

They didn’t even bother trying to sell that to their flocks. Really, what they said was: Look, this is a crummy situation. We’ve got a binary choice. There are multiple Supreme Court justices hanging in the balance here. And if you care about abortion—which is the number-one issue for a lot of these folks—then you have an obligation to vote for this person, no matter how gross and wretched we find his personal conduct to be.

Rosin: This is the beginning of the first election. This is their attitude. Now we’re just at the beginning of the Trump administration.

Alberta: That’s right. And so what starts as this transactional relationship, it morphs into something else entirely. What we see today is this fanatical, cult-like attachment to Donald Trump in some quarters of the evangelical universe. Now, I say some quarters because I really need to stress this point. When we talk about white evangelicals in this country, we’re talking about tens of millions of people, right?

They are not a monolith. We have to understand that these are points plotted across this vast spectrum. So on the one hand—on the one end of that spectrum, I should say—of course you have some of these folks who are just all in on Trump. They have almost sold their souls for Trumpism, and they view him as a messianic figure. They really do. And they’ll tell you that.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have some of these white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016, held their nose, begged for forgiveness after doing so, but they still cared so much about the abortion issue that they felt compelled to do so.

And then pretty quickly thereafter, they walked away from it all and washed their hands and said, I cannot be a part of this. Right?

And then in the middle, you’ve got the great majority of these folks who are floating somewhere in the middle of this, trying to figure out, you know, I find this guy abhorrent, but I’m also terrified of what I see from the left. I can’t possibly vote for Trump again, but I can’t vote for somebody who’s pro-choice either. What do I do?

There’s this identity crisis now deep inside the evangelical movement, where a lot of these folks feel completely lost and completely homeless. And their relationship with Trump is not something that can be sort of caricatured, because for a lot of these folks, even folks who voted for him a second time, in 2020, they find the man to be completely immoral and reprehensible.

And yet they still voted for him twice.

Rosin: Yeah, I understand the second group, the bargain they’re making. I understand the third group that regrets the bargain that they made. It’s the first group that is a mystery to me, how people came to be all in. So can you try and describe that first group to me?

Like, how did they morph from holding their nose and choosing a flawed leader to deciding that he was the messiah? How did that evolution happen?

Alberta: There are many, many, many Christians in this country who are deeply invested in the idea of sort of supernatural intervention and transformation and the idea that God speaks to us through the unlikeliest of sources.

And so for some chunk of that first group that you’re asking about, there’s no question. And I’ve talked with plenty of these folks. They believe Donald Trump is God’s instrument on Earth. And not only that, they believe that Donald Trump has become a Christian, that Donald Trump underwent a transformation while he was president, And why else would he be fighting for us the way that he’s fighting for us?

And it’s difficult to overstate just how meaningful that language of transformation is to people whose entire lives revolve around notions of transformation and of holy intercession.

Rosin: Can I ask, is there any part of you who’s familiar and knows that language that can believe that maybe he did have some kind of transformation?

Alberta: No.

Rosin: No.

Alberta: The short answer is no. And I don’t want—listen, I don’t want to be disrespectful. I don’t want to be cute in my answer here. But, you know, scripture says that by their fruit you will know them. You know, a good and healthy tree bears good and healthy fruit. If one were to just spend a day studying the language Donald Trump uses, the behavior he exhibits, the way that he treats others—you know, Jesus tells us to love our enemy and pray for those who persecute you, to turn the other cheek, to love your neighbor as yourself.

I have studied Donald Trump as closely as anyone in the last decade, and I have yet to see him exhibit any of those qualities or follow any of those biblical commands. So, I’m sorry, but no. It strikes me as entirely improbable that he has had a real encounter with the risen Christ and has committed his life to Jesus.

Rosin: One thing that is mystifying me is that now that evangelicals are so deeply in that us versus them—sort of, It’s us in a war against the evil Americans. The rest of you are not even Americans. You’re our enemies, basically—what is evangelizing?

I mean, I recall that when I spent a lot of time around evangelicals (and I am Jewish), there was nothing I could say or do or confess about myself that would prevent them from wanting to evangelize me. Like, I was always a reachable soul. Everybody was always a reachable soul. And now it seems like, What is evangelizing?

There’s a whole swath of America that just isn’t—they’re beyond contempt. You know, they’re the enemy. And so that seems very different to me than what it used to be.

Alberta: Hanna, first and foremost, people will ask, understandably, Well, what does it mean, evangelical? What does that even mean? Right? There’s always been some disagreement over the terminology itself.

And what I like to say is, Listen, at its core, there’s a verb in there, which is “to evangelize.” It is to take the gospel of Jesus Christ out to all the nations and to reach the unbelievers and to share with them this story—of not only of God’s perfect love, but of humanity’s brokenness and how God ultimately had to take on flesh and be fully God and fully man in the form of Jesus, and that Jesus was the mediator between a broken humanity and a perfect God—and to share that message with an unbelieving world so that they might see him and they might believe in him.

The problem today is that we, in the modern American context, have taken the New Testament model of what a church should be, and we have completely flipped it on its head. What I mean by that is if you study the New Testament model of what the early Church looked like and how it operated, there was boundless, abundant grace and forgiveness and kindness shown to those outside of the Church, because the thinking was: They don’t know God. They don’t know any better, so we can’t possibly hold their behavior against them. We need to show them the love of God.

But inside the Church, for fellow believers there was strict accountability. There was a very high standard. In fact, they basically said, You are held to the highest of standards for your behavior, for your language, for your conduct inside of the Church, because you do know God. You do know better.

What we see today in the American context is the complete opposite. We see, inside of the Church—despite all of the scandal, the abuse, the misconduct, the terrible behavior, the damaging rhetoric—we see forgiveness. We turn a blind eye to it. We enable it. We justify it.

But when we see those outside of the Church who disagree with us, it is nothing but condemnation. It is nothing but fire and brimstone. There is no grace. There is no forgiveness. And I just—it breaks my heart because, in so many ways, the entire identity of the Church is rooted in that mission, in that purpose of evangelizing. But we today cannot reach the outside world with that gospel of Jesus Christ, because the outside world looks at us and says, We want nothing to do with you guys. We want nothing to do with evangelicals. And it’s just, it’s tragic.

Rosin: And also vice versa, I have to say. I mean, that’s so interesting what you just said. But I was thinking, as much as I resented the millions of times that as a reporter and, you know, a Jewish person I’d have to sort of sit through people trying to evangelize me as I was trying to do my work, at least they were talking to me.

Like, at least that was like a—that was a bridge, you know? That was like, they were interested. And now I look back at that and think, like, If I were out there now, that wouldn’t happen. You know, a lot of people just wouldn’t be interested. I might be the enemy.

Alberta: Yeah, they would view you with hostility. Right?

Rosin: Yes, exactly.

Alberta: And suspicion.

Rosin: Yeah, exactly.

Alberta: Right. Which is, you know, listen, I plead guilty at times to probably—although I was just talking with a dear friend of mine, a journalist friend who’s Jewish, who told me, You know, I’m only about halfway through the book, but I have to say, you’re kind of, you’re intriguing me with your case for Jesus here.

And I said, Listen, you know, I figured that I might be annoying some of my non-Christian friends with parts of the book that are unapologetically trying to evangelize. But, ultimately, that is what we are called to do, and if we annoy people in the process, so be it. But boy, I’d rather annoy people with the gospel than denigrate them and antagonize them and dehumanize them with a twisted version of the gospel.

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, so we’ve talked about the evangelical movement as a whole. Let’s talk about your own story. Your father was a pastor.

Alberta: Yes, he was. The Dr. Reverend Richard J. Alberta. My dad was an amazing guy who would have been the unlikeliest candidate to ever become a pastor. He was an atheist, actually, and he was working in finance in New York and making a lot of money and had a beautiful house and a Cadillac and a beautiful wife, my mother, and they had it all. They were flying high, living the dream.

And my dad, he just felt this rumbling emptiness. Something was missing in his life. And what could it possibly be? I mean, you look from the outside in: What could you possibly be missing? And so, he set out looking. And that search led him to a little church in the Hudson Valley called Goodwill. And it was there that he heard the gospel for the first time, and he gave his life to Jesus that day.

And it was a pretty radical transformation in his life. Suddenly he was waking up at 4 in the morning to read the Bible for hours, silently meditating, praying. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. She was not a Christian at the time. And then things got even weirder, because not long after that, he felt the Lord calling him to enter the ministry. And my mom had just become a Christian at this point, but she and his brothers and parents and their friends—everybody who knew him—thought that he’d lost his mind. And he just said, Listen, I don’t know what to tell you, but I feel an anointing from God to do this with my life. And so he did.

They left everything behind. They sold all their possessions. They spent the next couple of decades living on food stamps, working in little churches around the country. And eventually they put down roots at a church called Cornerstone, in Brighton, Michigan, which is where I grew up.

Rosin: Wow, you know, no matter how many times I’ve heard conversion stories like that, it’s very hard for me to, like, know or understand what that spark is.

Alberta: It’s hard to describe just how radical of a change that was for him and for his life and how much he sacrificed for it.

And my dad’s always been my hero because of that, because I think there are very few people in this life with the courage to follow a conviction in the way that he did.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so let’s take those feelings that you have about your dad, and it seems like belief has lived on in you, and overlay them on the political transformation that you’re describing. Because it sounds like from what you write in the book, your father went through that whole political transformation.

He started out suspicious of politics. He started out thinking Trump was a narcissist and a liar. And then over time, you watched him go through the same changes that you watched the rest of the evangelical community go through, right? Like, it started to feel to you, as you write in the book, like he was justifying some of the things that Trump has done. Did I get that right?

Alberta: Yeah, that’s right. And I would be clear—not just, like, to defend my dad’s honor or whatever, because I’ve been very open in discussing all of this, and I try to just be completely transparent in the book—but my dad was never, like, a Trumper, but he did become sort of defensive around Trump.

And I think the explanation I ultimately reached there was that my dad felt guilty, frankly, about voting for Trump. I think he felt vulnerable almost, because, again, here was someone who had lived his life in such an incredibly upright manner, who taught his kids to know right from wrong, who wouldn’t cheat anybody out of a penny.

It just, like, you know, he set a standard for us. And then he votes for this guy who was, in so many ways, just, like, a walking rebuke to everything that he’d ever taught us about how to be a man, how to be a husband, how to be a neighbor. And I think he felt guilty about it.

And he and I would sort of go back and forth on this and, ultimately, I would say that to him, which I think was, like, the deepest cut of all.

I’d say, Pop, like, you’re the one who taught me right from wrong. Like, Don’t be mad at me for acting on it. Like, This guy, what he’s doing, what he’s saying, it’s wrong.”

And I think that when we would have those conversations, I could sense in him this feeling that, you know, attacks on Trump’s character became an attack on his character, that he processed criticisms of Trump as criticisms of him personally.

And I think a lot of evangelicals felt that way. And in some strange sense, that almost drove them deeper into the Trump bunker, where if they were to concede any criticism, any attack on Trump as being legitimate, then it was sort of ipso facto a legitimate attack on them. And that was the sort of weird dynamic that took hold in my relationship with my dad.

Rosin: So, okay, here we are coming on another election. What do you think the future of evangelicals is in the near future, the next election?

Alberta: So Trump is obviously the runaway favorite to win the Republican nomination, and that is due, in no small part, to his continued stranglehold on the evangelical vote. What’s interesting, I would add as a quick aside, is that we really saw, for the first time, Trump’s support with those voters beginning to dip after the 2022 midterms, when Republicans underperformed so badly.

And then Trump responded to the results of the midterms by throwing the pro-life movement under the bus, basically saying it was their fault that Republicans had lost all these races. And Trump saw his numbers decline pretty noticeably with those voters.

But then something happened. Alvin Bragg delivered that first indictment of Donald Trump, which was, of course, then followed by all these subsequent indictments. And you saw Trump’s numbers with those same evangelical voters who had started to bail on him, they went right back up, and they have continued apace.

And I mention all that just to say that this idea of a persecution complex is so deeply embedded in the evangelical psyche. When Donald Trump goes to these rallies and says, you know, We are under siege. They’re coming for us. They’re coming for me first so that they can get to you, these people, they believe that deep in their bones. That is their entire political consciousness at this point.

So Donald Trump is almost surely going to win the Republican nomination, but transitioning to the general election next November, I don’t necessarily foresee any great defection of these white evangelical voters away from Donald Trump. He’s won roughly 80 percent of them in the last two elections. And if he is the Republican nominee in 2024, as we expect, he’ll probably win about that same rough percentage.

However, the thing that I have observed, and the thing that I would point out to our listeners to keep a very close eye on in the coming year, is that this is the first post-Roe v. Wade presidential election held in this country. And for so long, for 50 years, single-issue evangelical voters have been mobilized to turn out in presidential elections because of the abortion issue, because of the federal stakes, because of Supreme Court vacancies hanging in the balance. This is the first election where that will no longer be the case.

We now have abortion as a decentralized, defederalized issue. So you see all of the mobilization at the grassroots level in the states over abortion, but not in a federal framing.

Now with Roe v. Wade having fallen, there’s real consideration being given by a lot of these folks to either vote for a third party or even just perhaps to stay home and not vote at all, because they no longer feel obligated, they no longer feel compelled to choose the lesser of two evils in a presidential context because the abortion issue is pretty much off the table.

So you could see some significant drop off in terms of the raw votes cast by evangelicals in this upcoming election, and that would be unprecedented.

Rosin: Interesting. Okay, so what happens if Trump wins? What happens if Trump loses? What do those two scenarios look like?

Alberta: Well, if Trump wins, the folks around him who are advising him, they have made no secret of the fact that there will be elements of an explicitly Christian nationalist agenda pursued in a second Trump term. In fact, the West Wing will be populated by some individuals who would openly identify as Christian nationalists.

Some of them would probably even openly identify as theocrats, or at least if you stuck the needle of truth serum into their veins. So when Donald Trump, for instance, recently on the campaign trail, floated this idea of no longer allowing non-Christian migrants to enter the country, Trump said that a few weeks ago, and I mean, we just barely even batted an eye, right?

But that is the sort of idea now circulating inside Trump’s orbit, and there are a lot of people around him who really, truly, deeply believe in this idea now of partisan politics as a proxy for good versus evil.

And these are the folks who will be helping to shape the legislative agenda inside of the Trump White House. I think we need to buckle up if, in fact, Trump is elected, because some of this talk of a holy war, of a spiritual battle, good versus evil—we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of what we could see if Trump were to be elected again.

Rosin: Oh, that sounds very undemocratic and un-American to me. Okay, and what if he loses?

Alberta: Well, if he loses, boy, I mean, I think the question becomes, for a lot of these folks, you know, Donald Trump was able to sell himself as a martyr once, right—in 2020 with the “Stop the Steal” and “the election was rigged” and all of this—and if he loses again, does the label of “consistent loser,” does that somehow break the spell?

Is there some opportunity here for some of these evangelicals to sort of step back and reevaluate their relationship with Trump and wonder? Okay, maybe we’ve been investing too much in the political arena. If, in fact, we believe that there are these great moral problems in America, then maybe the solutions aren’t political. Maybe we need to reevaluate.

That could happen. I pray that it does. Or the exact opposite could happen. There could be a doubling down or a tripling down. And there could be an attempt to—I mean, I hate to even voice this, but I mean, January 6 was not an outlier. It was not something that we should have been surprised by.

And if you study some of the behavior, some of the calls to arms—figurative and literal—that we see coming out of some of these far-right evangelical spaces, this could turn into something really dangerous.

And I think that is why, even if you are not an evangelical Christian yourself, even if you are not a believer, even if you are not an adherent to any sort of religious tradition, you should be paying very close attention to this. And I wrote this book for you as much as for anyone else, because we have to understand that in the interest of holding together a pluralistic society, these schisms inside the Church, they have to be addressed, and they have to be addressed soon.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. I think we’re going to hang on to the phrase, or it sounds like you’re going to hang on to the phrase, break the spell. I mean, that’s what you’re hoping for.

Alberta: That is what I’m hoping for. I think we should all be hoping for it, but I’m not holding my breath at the same time.

Rosin: All right. Well, Tim, you’ve explained a lot to me. Thank you for coming on the show.

Alberta: Thank you for having me, Hanna. This has been great.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sam Fentress, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup—a quieter one—was in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as “disparate impact.” The memo was quickly overshadowed by the events of January 6, and, in the chaotic final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was never implemented. But Barr’s proposal represented perhaps the most aggressive step the administration took in its effort to dismantle existing civil-rights law. Should Trump return to power, he would surely attempt to see the effort through.

Since the legislative victories of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, legal and civil rights for people on the margins have tended to expand. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were followed by voting provisions for Indigenous people and non-English speakers, a Supreme Court guarantee of the right to abortion, increased protections for people with disabilities, and formal recognition of same-sex marriage. The trend mostly continued under presidents of both parties—until Trump. Though his administration could be bumbling, the president’s actions matched his rhetoric when it came to eroding civil-rights enforcement.

[From the March 2021 issue: American democracy is only 55 years old—and hanging by a thread]

Under Trump, the Justice Department abandoned its active protection of voting rights. The Environmental Protection Agency ignored civil-rights complaints. The Department of Housing and Urban Development scaled back investigations into housing discrimination. Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court, for their part, have whittled away at landmark civil-rights legislation and presided over the end of affirmative action.

In a second term, the most effective way for Trump to continue rolling back protections would be to dismantle disparate-impact theory. Under the theory, the federal government can prohibit discriminatory practices not just in instances of malicious and provable bigotry, but also in cases where a party’s actions unintentionally affect a class of marginalized people disproportionately.

The theory is important because discrimination can be perpetuated without ill intent; even seemingly benign or neutral policies can perpetuate a legacy of bias, or create new inequities. But disparate impact is also essential because landlords, business owners, and municipal officials who do wish to discriminate have learned how to operate without expressing overt bigotry. Under disparate impact, the government’s burden is not to prove that these actors intended to discriminate, only that their actions resulted in discrimination.

For decades, lawyers have invoked disparate impact as a means of fighting discrimination. The standard has been applied across the federal government. After the housing crisis of 2008, the DOJ brought a series of lawsuits against banks that had charged higher mortgage rates and fees to minority borrowers, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements from the lenders. In 2015, the DOJ released a damning report on the practices of the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, after an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a police officer. Disparate impact was mentioned at least 30 times in the report, including in its main takeaway: “African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system.”

[Adam Serwer: Trump is making it easier to get away with discrimination]

Many conservatives have long been suspicious of disparate impact. The most principled objections center on the claims that it invites government overreach and inefficiency, that it impedes state and local policy development, and that it always entails some degree of ghost-chasing—in a country as unequal as America, discerning what exactly contributes to a disparate outcome can be difficult.

But these philosophical and practical objections to the theory have always served to disguise a more visceral disdain. Many conservatives simply believe that ensuring equality is not a legitimate federal priority. In the Trump era, as the Republican Party has embraced white nationalism, its leaders have been emboldened to abandon the guise. They edge closer to the line once held by the architects of Jim Crow: Equality is undesirable because people are not equals; some of us might not even be people.

Trump himself has always had a preternatural gift for identifying and channeling grievance; white backlash against civil-rights legislation was one of the major forces behind his advancement to the presidency, and that backlash can be traced directly to disdain for civil-rights legislation and enforcement. Once Trump was in office, one of his early targets was HUD. In 2020, the department finalized a rule that demolished its discriminatory-effect standard, which had been the basis for enforcement at the department for at least 40 years. Trump’s HUD secretary, Ben Carson, said that the move would spur efficiency at the local level without undermining the department’s antidiscrimination work. But Carson has long been a skeptic of desegregation; during his 2016 presidential campaign, he described desegregation efforts in cities as “failed socialist experiments.” Ultimately, Carson’s attempt to undermine the discrimination standard was stymied by lawsuits. But the cause of fighting bias suffered nevertheless. In 2020, at the end of Carson’s tenure, the number of secretary-initiated complaints had gone from several dozen in 2015 to three.

Trump did serious damage to disparate impact as president; there’s little question that he would finish the job if given another chance. A second Trump administration could go beyond simply abandoning the theory, perhaps even bringing lawsuits seeking to declare the entire concept unconstitutional. Trump could thus attack civil-rights law from both sides, sabotaging the government’s capability to adjudicate cases while also arguing that it should not have that capability in the first place. If this two-pronged strategy succeeds, it will be difficult for any future administration to undo the changes. With today’s conservative-dominated judiciary and high levels of political polarization, any substantive changes Trump makes to civil-rights enforcement could effectively become permanent.

Without disparate impact, the DOJ would lose its primary tool for addressing brutality in police departments, and current efforts to finally enforce environmental laws in communities of color and hold cities accountable for creating slums in Black and Latino neighborhoods would be stalled. Given the damage that has already been done by the courts, there is a future—perhaps a likely future—in which the remaining foundations of the civil-rights era are undone. If Trump were to win in 2024, he would see the victory as a mandate to tear everything down now.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Civil Rights Undone.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

After decades of gains in public acceptance, the LGBTQ community is confronting a climate in which political leaders are once again calling them weirdos and predators. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has directed the Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate the parents of transgender children; Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to purge Florida classrooms of books that acknowledge the reality that some people aren’t straight or cisgender; Missouri has imposed rules that limit access to gender-affirming care for trans people of all ages. Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump seemed to think that feigning sympathy for queer people was good PR. “I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens,” he promised. Then, while in office, he oversaw a broad rollback of LGBTQ protections, removing gender identity and sexuality from federal nondiscrimination provisions regarding health care, employment, and housing. His Defense Department restricted soldiers’ right to transition and banned trans people from enlisting; his State Department refused to issue visas to the same-sex domestic partners of diplomats. Yet when seeking reelection in 2020, Trump still made a show of throwing a Pride-themed rally.

[Carter Sickels: Being trans shouldn’t exclude me from health laws]

Now, recognizing that red-state voters have been energized by anti-queer demagoguery, he’s not even pretending to be tolerant. “These people are sick; they are deranged,” Trump said during a speech, amid a rant about transgender athletes in June. When the audience cheered at his mention of “transgender insanity,” he marveled, “It’s amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I’m talking about cutting taxes, people go like that.” He pantomimed weak applause. “But you mention transgender, everyone goes crazy.” The rhetoric has become a fixture of his rallies.

Trump is now running on a 10-point “Plan to Protect Children From Left-Wing Gender Insanity.” Its aim is not simply to interfere with parents’ rights to shape their kids’ health and education in consultation with doctors and teachers; it’s to effectively end trans people’s existence in the eyes of the government. Trump will call on Congress to establish a national definition of gender as being strictly binary and immutable from birth. He also wants to use executive action to cease all federal “programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.” If enacted, those measures could open the door to all sorts of administrative cruelties—making it impossible, for example, for someone to change their gender on their passport. Low-income trans adults could be blocked from using Medicaid to pay for treatment that doctors have deemed vital to their well-being.

The Biden administration reinstated many of the protections Trump had eliminated, and the judiciary has thus far curbed the most extreme aspects of the conservative anti-trans agenda. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that, contrary to the assertions of Trump’s Justice Department, the Civil Rights Act protects LGBTQ people from employment discrimination. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the investigations that Governor Abbott had ordered in Texas. But in a second term, Trump would surely seek to appoint more judges opposed to queer causes. He would also resume his first-term efforts to promote an interpretation of religious freedom that allows for unequal treatment of minorities. In May 2019, his Housing and Urban Development Department proposed a measure that would have permitted federally funded homeless shelters to turn away transgender individuals on the basis of religious freedom. A 2023 Supreme Court decision affirming a Christian graphic designer’s refusal to work with gay couples will invite more attempts to narrow the spaces and services to which queer people are guaranteed access.

[Listen: When the state has a problem with your identity]

The social impact of Trump’s reelection would only further encourage such discrimination. He has long espoused old-fashioned ideas about what it means to look and act male and female. Now the leader of the Republican Party is using his platform to push the notion that people who depart from those ideas deserve punishment. As some Republicans have engaged in queer-bashing rhetoric in recent years—including the libel that queerness is pedophilia by another name—hate crimes motivated by gender identity and sexuality have risen, terrifying a population that was never able to take its safety for granted. Victims of violence have included people who were merely suspected of nonconformity, such as the 59-year-old woman in Indiana who was killed in 2023 by a neighbor who believed her to be “a man acting like a woman.”

If Trump’s stoking of gender panic proves to be a winning national strategy, everyday deviation from outmoded and rigid norms could invite scorn or worse. And children will grow up in a more repressive and dangerous America than has existed in a long time.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Stoke a Gender Panic.”