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Maybe it was always building to this: thousands of people singing and dancing to “Macho Man,” some sporting neon safety vests, others in actual trash bags, a symbolic expression of solidarity with their authoritarian hero whose final week on the campaign trail has revolved around the word garbage.

Where will the MAGA movement go from here? Trump had an answer last night, at least for the short term. He wasn’t telegraphing an Election Day victory—he was preparing, once again, to label his opponents “cheaters” and to challenge a potential defeat.

The evening’s host, Tucker Carlson, said that for most of his life as a journalist, he’d imagined that one would have to be “bereft of a soul” to stand onstage and support a politician. “And here I am with a full-throated, utterly sincere endorsement of Donald Trump.”

On with the show.

As I wandered around Desert Diamond Arena, in Glendale, Arizona, last night, this iteration of Trumpism felt slightly different, if not wholly novel. Nine years ago, Trump held one of his first MAGA rallies not far from this venue. “Donald Trump Defiantly Rallies a New ‘Silent Majority’ in a Visit to Arizona” read a New York Times headline from July 11, 2015. Charlie Kirk, one of last night’s warm-up speakers, put it thusly: “This state helped launch the movement that has swept the globe.” All of the elements Trump needed to stoke the fire back then were still here last night: the Mexican border debate, inflamed racial tensions, metastasizing political extremism. Trump’s movement has grown, and his red MAGA hat has become a cultural touchstone. As the Arizona sun set, though, his nearly decade-long campaign of fear and despotism also had a surprising air of denouement.

Trump told Carlson he doesn’t like to look back. But last night, as he rambled (and rambled), he was sporadically reflective about all that had led to this point in his life. Trump sat in a leather chair with just a handheld mic—no teleprompter, no notes. He mostly ignored Carlson’s questions and instead tossed out ideas at random—what he calls “the weave.” In reality, it’s less lucid than he believes; more of a zigzag across years of personal triumphs and troubles. Remember “Russia, Russia, Russia”? Remember the “China virus”? Remember the time he courageously pardoned Scooter Libby? Remember how good he used to be at firing people on The Apprentice? Remember the crowd at that one Alabama rally? All of this, in his mind, amounted to something akin to a closing argument.

The event was a hurricane-relief benefit billed as Tucker Carlson Live With Special Guest Donald J. Trump. But Carlson barely spoke. Instead, he sat back in his own chair, occasionally picking at his fingers, looking somewhat mystified that this was where he’d ended up in his career, hosting Inside the Authoritarian’s Studio. He had taken the stage to the sounds of Kid Rock, but he looked as preppy as ever in a navy blazer, a gingham shirt, a striped tie, and khakis. He insisted, twice, that he had bent the knee to Donald Trump without shame. Trump, he marveled, had shown him what a sham D.C. was. He lamented how those inside the Beltway treated Trump “like he was a dangerous freak, like he’d just escaped from the state mental institution.”

Carlson has grown more radical since Fox News fired him. Last night, he claimed, for instance, that the CIA and the FBI have been working with the Democratic Party to take Trump down. He implied that funding for Ukraine isn’t going to the military but is instead lining the pockets of the Washington elite: “Have you been to McLean recently?”

The man he unabashedly endorsed, meanwhile, again spoke of “the enemy within,” and attacked the enemy of the people (the media). Trump once again demeaned his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “low-IQ individual” and “dumb as a rock.” He claimed that members of the January 6 “unselect committee” had burned, destroyed, and deleted all the evidence it had collected because, in the end, they found out that Nancy Pelosi was at fault (this bit was especially hard to follow). He called for enlisting the “radical war hawk” Liz Cheney into combat: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Trump blew some of his usual autocratic dog whistles, saying, for instance, that anyone who burns an American flag should be sentenced to a year in prison. He suggested that loyalists and extremists will fill his next administration, should it exist. He implied that he’d bring in Elon Musk to find ways to slash the federal budget, and let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist, examine public-health matters. “He can do anything he wants,” Trump said of Kennedy.

But perhaps the most meaningful moment of the night was when Trump said matter-of-factly that he won’t run for president again. He instead hinted that his vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, will be a top 2028 contender. Win or lose, this was it, his last dystopian rodeo. Trump spoke almost wistfully about suddenly approaching the end of his never-ending rally tour. He sounded like a kid moving to a new neighborhood and a new middle school. He told his friends he’d miss them. “We’ll meet, but it’ll be different,” he said. He was in no rush to leave the stage.

The big question going into Tuesday’s election is whether the MAGA movement will fizzle out should Trump lose. Although Trump himself seems more exhausted than usual these days, his supporters are as fired up as ever. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chants— a reference to Trump’s now-infamous response to the July attempt on his life—broke out among the crowd as people waited to pass through Secret Service checkpoints. I passed a man in a brown wig, a pink blazer, and a green top that read Kamala Toe, the words gesturing toward his crotch. I saw a woman wearing gold Trump-branded sneakers, and many people with Musk’s Dark MAGA hat. The latter seemed particularly notable: In addition to getting behind Vance, Trump might be inclined to pass the torch to another nonpolitician—namely, someone like Musk.

For now, though, Trump is returning to his conspiratorial election denialism. Four years ago, he tried to undermine the results in Arizona, Georgia, and other states. Last night, he singled out Pennsylvania. (A day earlier, his campaign had filed a lawsuit in the state, alleging voter suppression.) “It’s hard to believe I’m winning, it seems by a lot, if they don’t cheat too much,” he said, alleging malfeasance in York and Lancaster counties. Whether he succeeds or fails, the detritus that Trump has left behind will likely linger. “Look around, Mr. President, because there’s a lot of garbage here!” Charlie Kirk said earlier in the night. “Go to the polls on Tuesday and make sure that we all ride that big garbage truck to Washington, D.C.,” Kennedy, who was one of the warm-up speakers, implored.

Trump, though, opined with uncharacteristic nostalgia: “When I was a young guy, I loved—I always loved the whole thing, the concept of the history and all of the things that can happen.” He sounded fleetingly earnest. He has undoubtedly cemented his place in history. Or, as Carlson put it earlier in the night: “Almost 10 years later, he has completely transformed the country and the world.”

Related:

Trump suggests training guns on Liz Cheney’s face. A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks

Today’s News

The White House altered its transcript of President Joe Biden’s call with Latino activists, during which official stenographers recorded that Biden called Trump supporters “garbage,” according to the Associated Press. The White House denied that Biden had been referring to Trump voters. During a meeting in Moscow, North Korea’s foreign minister pledged to support Russia until it wins the war against Ukraine. The price of Donald Trump’s social-media stock fell another 14 percent today, amounting to a loss of more than 40 percent over three days.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Although AI regulation is the rare issue that Trump and Harris actually agree on, partisanship threatens to halt years of bipartisan momentum, Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: These books are must-reads for Americans before Election Day, Boris Kachka writes.

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More From The Atlantic

MAGA is tripping. Five of the election’s biggest unanswered questions The Georgia chemical disaster is a warning. The five best books to read before an election

Evening Read

Illustration by Katie Martin

This Might Be a Turning Point for Child-Free Voters

By Faith Hill

When Shannon Coulter first started listening to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she thought it seemed fairly standard. “All women,” he said, “should have the freedom to make their own decisions, freedom over their own bodies, freedom about whether to pursue IVF.” But then he said something that she rarely hears from political leaders: Women should also have “freedom about whether to have children at all.” Beshear was recognizing that some Americans simply don’t want to be parents, Coulter, the president of the political-advocacy nonprofit Grab Your Wallet, told me. And that handful of words meant a great deal to her as a child-free person, someone who’s chosen not to have kids. “People are just looking,” she said, “for even the thinnest scraps of acknowledgment.”

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Robert Viglasky / Disney / Hulu

Watch. Rivals (streaming on Hulu) is the silliest, sexiest show of the year, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Listen. We Live Here Now, a podcast by Lauren Ober and Hanna Rosin, who found out that their new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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When the presidential-election results begin rolling in on Tuesday night, a sizable audience of pro-Trump Christians will not turn to Sean Hannity, or Tucker Carlson, or Right Side Broadcasting. Instead, they will stream their news directly from God, on a show called FlashPoint, where an affable host named Gene Bailey sits behind a desk with a large red phone.

“This is God saying ‘This is my program!’” Bailey says in a promotional video for the show, which airs three times a week and, at peak moments, draws hundreds of thousands of viewers on YouTube alone.

“We have a responsibility to report what we hear from heaven,” a prophet from Omaha named Hank Kunneman has said on the show.

One of the many signs that FlashPoint is a departure from the usual televangelism is that the o in its logo looks like the view through a rifle scope. Another is that the audience is referred to as the “FlashPoint Army.” A third is that the red phone is a hotline to Donald Trump. A fourth is that, sometimes, heaven sends not just news of the End Times, but earthly instructions. This was the case during the run-up to January 6, when FlashPoint was getting millions of views, and the prophets told the FlashPoint Army to claim the U.S. Capitol for God’s kingdom.

In an episode last month, there were no such instructions, not yet. Just breaking news that a hurricane was heading for Florida, and the question of how that fit into demonic plans to thwart victory for Trump. “What do you think, supernatural impact here?” Bailey said to Kunneman.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The woman who bought a mountain for God]

“There are a lot of conspiracy theories about whether man can manipulate weather,” the prophet said at a moment when such disinformation was leading to death threats against FEMA workers. “I do know this: Evil spirits work with man. And there are some very evil men who cooperate with evil spirits. And God did say in the prophecies that these storms would be sent to interrupt the flow of our election process.”

It was a relatively typical night for FlashPoint, which I can say because I have watched hours and hours of episodes going back to its launch in September 2020. That was when the show first entered the sprawling media ecosystem that has risen alongside a growing movement of apostles and prophets known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), whose theology includes the idea that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. The movement has become the vanguard of America’s Christian right, and its media wing is not the realm of prosperity-gospel preachers or Sunday services on basic cable. It is part of another propaganda universe—an unruly world of YouTube prophets broadcasting from basements about a dream God gave them about World War III, or a TikTok prophecy about what the war in Gaza means for the End Times, or a viral video about what the Almighty told a pink-haired prophet named Kat Kerr, who claims to have spoken with Trump 20 minutes before the first attempt to assassinate him. Such prophecies can rack up millions of views on social media.

Within that world, FlashPoint has emerged as the premier outlet for the most trusted prophets with the largest followings, and a venue for politicians eager to reach that audience. By now, Bailey has interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Trump himself. Most important, the show has become a kind of command center for the people Trump refers to as “my Christians.” In a sense, FlashPoint is where God’s memo goes out, which makes it all the more noteworthy that, in recent weeks, the prophecies have become more apocalyptic.

From the beginning, the show has framed politics as a great “spiritual war.” It launched on the Victory Channel, a streaming platform and satellite-television network that is part of the well-funded empire of Kenneth Copeland, an old-guard televangelist in the multifaceted world of charismatic Christianity. Copeland himself never exactly belonged to the apostle-and-prophet crowd. But he was part of the broader mobilization of charismatic Christians behind Trump, and provided the most prominent prophets with the platform they needed to build a movement they likened to a new Great Awakening. Among these was Lance Wallnau, the chief marketer of the idea that God anointed Trump. Wallnau quickly became a FlashPoint regular.

The Victory Channel had virtually no presence on YouTube before FlashPoint debuted, according to Matthew Taylor, a religion scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies who has documented the involvement of NAR figures in the January 6 insurrection. As FlashPoint began amplifying election-fraud conspiracy theories, viewer data show, the Victory Channel’s overall YouTube views grew from 152,000 in October 2020 to 32.4 million in January 2021. On the evening of January 6, 2021, FlashPoint covered the insurrection that its guests had helped foment, broadcasting live from Copeland’s Texas church, blessing what has become a lasting narrative of the day for millions of Americans.

Bailey brought on a pastor who cast himself as a reporter, who said that he had “confirmed that the FBI had a busload of antifa people come in and infiltrate the rally.” The host tossed to a prophet named Mario Murillo, who said, “I know that there is a spirit in the land that wants to take away our Christian rights and our freedoms and that today we demonstrated to them we are not going to let this happen—and anyone who thinks this ends tonight is totally mistaken.” Wallnau Zoomed in from Trump International Hotel in Washington. He described the march to the Capitol as a “giant Disney parade,” and said the violence had been carried out not by “our people” but by antifa and Black Lives Matter, calling them “the devil’s people.” Bailey turned to Kunneman: “What’s God showing you?” Kunneman videoed in from Omaha, calling the violence “a smokescreen from the Devil.” “Remember,” he continued. “Big God, little devil. Big God, little corrupt Democrat rat. Big God, little Republican pathetic person that cannot stand for their democracy.” People clapped.

“Here are your orders from heaven: Be strong, fear not … Your God will come with a vengeance,” Kunneman said, declaring FlashPoint to be “part of the new spirit of truth in media that’s going to rise in the land.”

In the four years since then, the hour-long show has offered regular sustenance for Americans who believe that a great spiritual battle against demonic forces is under way, one that could culminate any moment. Production values improved. The red phone was added. Each show opens with urgent, triumphant music and a red, white, and blue montage of apocalyptic images—dire headlines, hands praying, a tattered American flag flying, and the slogans “We are believing patriots!” and “It’s time to stand up!”

Bailey and the prophets have often hit the road for live broadcasts, part of a circuit of pro-Trump events meant to keep followers energized. In Georgia last year, they led a crowd of thousands in a pledge called the “Watchman Decree,” in which the audience promised allegiance “first and foremost to the kingdom of God,” declared the Church to be “God’s governing body on the earth,” and committed to be “God’s ambassadors” with “legal power from heaven.”

Most of the time, Bailey has been behind the desk, with the prophets Zooming in from offices and basements as they did on a Tuesday last January, kicking off the election season with news from the Iowa caucuses, where Trump was winning. “It’s election season!” Bailey said, showing a clip of the freezing weather in Iowa, and another meant to suggest that Democrats were trying to tell people to stay home. “Hank,” he said. “What do you see as we get into this?”

Kunneman said the freeze meant that God was “freezing the efforts” of Democrats to “manipulate things to alter our election integrity and our freedom.” He said Trump was winning Iowa because voters “recognize the voice God has raised up that is going to bring a deliverance to this country.”

“I want to go to Dutch,” Bailey said, turning to a popular South Carolina prophet named Dutch Sheets, who claims that God speaks through dreams, including one Sheets talked about on January 1, 2021—a few days after he visited the White House—in which he described charging on horseback to the U.S. Capitol. As he usually does, Sheets joined from a studio lit with blue lights. His blue eyes glowed.

“I feel like God is exposing evil and opening the eyes of a nation,” he said in a soothing voice, and then he described a cryptic dream God had given him that could be taken as prediction or instruction or some sort of coded plan.

“Watchmen are supposed to be watching for the enemy,” he began. “In this particular dream, 50 people found themselves in a military strategy room. They had been summoned there, one from each state. And Gene in the dream was one of them. I was one of them. We were all gathered. Then a general and an admiral came into the room, and said, ‘We have asked you to come because we need your help.’ There was a map of all 50 states on all the walls. And the dams and waterways were highlighted.” Sheets said that this was God’s “advance warning” of a terrorist attack on the nation’s water supply, a sign of how far the enemy was willing to go, and told people to pray for the safety of supply lines.

“Amen,” Bailey said, turning to Wallnau. “Tie it all together for us.”

Wallnau said the show was God’s way of bringing the disparate prophets together ahead of the election. He said the movement was “apostolically maturing” and would not make the same mistakes it had made on the day of the Capitol riot. “When I was up at January 6, I was upset when it happened, because I could see that Trump did not have the voices that he needed to be there speaking in proximity to him,” he said. “That will not happen this time.”

He did not clarify what he meant by “this time,” and Bailey did not ask. “Amen to that,” the anchorman said.

That is how FlashPoint has been going all year long, each episode rolling current events into an ever-escalating End Times narrative building toward the election. After a helicopter crash killed the president of Iran in May, the usual panel of prophets convened. “What does this mean?” Bailey asked.

Kunneman shuffled through some papers and pulled out a prophecy about Iran that he’d delivered five years earlier, in which he stated that “God is literally going to tear their leadership from them and there would be a regime change.”

“The Lord said 2024 would be his justice,” Kunneman said.

When Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in a scheme to silence a porn star before the 2016 election, Bailey Zoomed in from his beach vacation. “Rick?” he said to Rick Green, a regular on the show who runs something called the Patriot Academy in Texas, and who began trashing the judicial system.

“Joseph Stalin would be so proud of Joe Biden right now,” Green said. “He’s looking up from hell right now saying, ‘Great job, Joe. You’re doing this even better than I did with my show trials during Communism.”

“Talk to the people,” Bailey said, turning to Kunneman.

“God said there are two he’s put his hand on: Netanyahu, and Donald Trump,” Kunneman said, explaining that Netanyahu was reelected prime minister despite corruption charges, and that Trump would also triumph. “Same scenario.”

When Trump survived the assassination attempt in July, the panel invoked prophecies and Bible stories about ears. Wallnau spoke of God being “in control of every fraction of what’s happening with this man.” He said angels had turned Trump’s head. As he always did, he spoke of Trump as a King Cyrus, the ancient Persian ruler whom God uses in the Bible to liberate the Babylonians and return Jewish people to their homeland.

“As history teaches, in the final battle, King Cyrus had a wound to his head,” Bailey said as the program ended. “There you go.” The episode got more than 300,000 views on YouTube, which was not unusual.

On a Tuesday in August, FlashPoint promoted a new prophet from Colorado Springs, a fit-looking, bald-headed young man who calls himself “Joseph Z,” who said God had told him that the anti-Christ is working through the “deep state” to assassinate Trump, and scapegoat Iran. “The spirit of the Lord forewarns, to forearm, to prepare us for these moments,” said Joseph Z, who publishes a newsletter for his followers, one of which recently began, “There is a war coming against the will of the antichrist.”

One day in September, the subject was the upcoming debate between Trump and Kamala Harris. “The thing we are dealing with, I believe, is witchcraft at a very high level,” Wallnau said. “You’re dealing with a whole lot of mind control.”

“I think we are going to see the colliding of two kingdoms,” Kunneman said. “The kingdom of God. And the kingdom of the enemy.”

“I am decreeing that the angels of the Lord are on that stage,” Sheets said.

For days, the show had been posting a short promo video of the red phone ringing, signaling that the anointed himself was coming, and now Bailey played the videotaped interview.

“We want to bring religion back into our country, and let it get stronger, bigger, better,” Trump told Bailey just before the debate, pledging to get rid of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits nonprofits such as churches from endorsing political candidates. “You will be in great shape,” Trump added. Bailey then prayed over the former president, who bowed his head but kept his eyes open.

“It was a great moment,” Bailey said on the show.

“I could feel the spirit of the Lord on his words, on you,” Kunneman said.

“He saw the genuineness of your faith,” Wallnau said, and Bailey cried.

On a Wednesday in October: “We keep turning on the lights and showing where the cockroaches are running,” Wallnau said, referring to the mainstream press, and the work that FlashPoint was doing to unearth satanic plots against Trump.

In recent weeks, the show has shifted into mobilization mode, promoting pro-Trump events such as A Million Women, a recent march on the National Mall organized by some of the NAR movement’s most prominent apostles and prophets. A conservative estimate is that tens of thousands of people showed up. Many in the crowd wore camouflage FlashPoint Army T-shirts and hats. The event was rich with symbolism invoking violent moments in the history of Christianity. Organizers described the march as “an Esther call,” invoking the biblical story of Esther, the Jewish queen of the Persian king, who persuades her husband to save her people from persecution, after which the king grants them permission to kill their enemies.

“What they are wanting is to give the nation back to God,” Bailey said of the crowd gathered in the sunshine on the Mall, where people were praying, crying, laying prostrate, blowing shofars, and waving the Appeal to Heaven flag, white with a green pine tree, that has become a symbol of the movement to advance God’s kingdom.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The Christian radicals are coming]

FlashPoint aired many of these scenes during its recap of the event. But the episode did not show the culmination of the march, when apostles and prophets surrounded a cement altar on a stage in view of the U.S. Capitol. The altar was meant to symbolize demonic strongholds in America, and as music swelled, Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jewish pastor, prayed to cast out these demons. Then he began smashing the altar with a sledgehammer. Others, men and women both, took turns smashing until the altar was in pieces. Later, a California apostle named Ché Ahn, one of the most powerful figures in the movement, declared that Trump would win the election and that Harris was a “type of Jezebel,” an evil biblical figure who was thrown from a tower to her death and eaten by dogs. Ahn decreed that Harris would be “cast out”—a moment that Matthew Taylor, the religion scholar, interpreted as a veiled way of blessing violence against her. (Ahn did not respond to a request for comment but told The Guardian after the event that his message was “all spiritual.”)

“It was a great thing,” Bailey said, describing the march.

During that show and others in recent weeks, Bailey reminded viewers to subscribe to FlashPoint on Rumble, a social-media platform favored by Trump supporters, in case YouTube removes the show. He and the prophets have continued likening the election to epic Biblical battles. They’ve spoken about God’s lawyers preparing to fight demonic “shenanigans” in Pennsylvania. They’ve spoken of “taking territory back.” Kunneman has started calling Harris “cackling Hamas.”

At a recent live show in North Carolina, he told Bailey that the nation was in “an Exodus 32 moment,” when thugs were “trying to steal the leadership and take over the nation, just like today, and God called them out, and he opened up the ground and swallowed those evildoers, and I believe we are going to see that.”

Kunneman said that God is saying, “What will my people decide? Are you going to choose life, or are you going to choose death? You gonna choose good, or you gonna choose evil?”

Bailey said that he was having visions of a decisive moment on a battlefield. The question now was whether the FlashPoint Army that the show had been cultivating for the past four years was ready to follow orders from heaven. “We see an opening,” Bailey said, adding that he believed “this is the time that we’re going to have to go harder, faster, and take back what the devil stole.”

The show ended, and the conversation continued offline.