The New York Times profiled the MAGA movement organization America First Policy Institute this week. AFPI was created as a sort of Trump administration in exile after voters dumped Donald Trump from office. AFPI has provided jobs and salaries to a lot of Trump loyalists, who are working to put Trump—and themselves—back into power. And they’re preparing to make the most of that power.
AFPI’s own version of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for a new administration reportedly includes nearly 300 executive orders for a returning Trump to sign. Right Wing Watch reported last year on an AFPI summit called “Laying the Groundwork for the Next America First Administration,” at which the group’s president Brooke Rollins bragged about the “revolutionary” nature of its ambitions to “seize control of the administrative state and use it—while also dismantling it,” describing “an America First confrontation against anti-conservative institutions.”
Now that there’s bad blood between MAGA insiders and the Heritage Foundation over the unfavorable publicity Project 2025 brought Trump’s campaign, AFPI is positioned to be in control of the transition team and domestic policy agenda if Trump wins. One example of what that could look like: the Times reports that AFPI’s plan to allow Trump to fire federal employees and replace them with political loyalists is even more radical than Project 2025’s proposal—it would essentially turn the entire federal workforce into a political patronage system.
One important aspect of AFPI’s work that this week’s Times story did not explore is AFPI’s partnership with dominionist Lance Wallnau and his “Courage Tour” to turn out conservative Christian voters in crucial swing-state counties in the upcoming election. As the Times noted, one of AFPI’s funders and board members is Texas pastor-billionaire Tim Dunn, whose funding and theocratic vision have been aggressively pushing the Texas Republican Party further to the far right.
Right Wing Watch has reported that the Courage Tour blends religious revivalism, spiritual warfare rhetoric, right-wing politics, and targeted voter turnout work all designed to overcome “demonic strongholds” and put Trump back into the White House. Some other media reports on the Courage Tour have noted the partnership and described the participation of America First Works—AFPI’s political action affiliate—and its voter registration efforts. Wallnau and AFPI have focused on 19 crucial counties in swing states that they believe could swing the election for Trump with increased turnout from MAGA-minded Christians.
The extent of the partnership between AFPI and New Apostolic Reformation dominionists like Wallnau is revealed in video from a Michigan stop on the Courage Tour in May. Wallnau described AFPI as “the group I work with,” adding that it “is holding the key appointment for the hoped-for Trump administration….They’ve got all the placeholders for who’s going in.”
Wallnau introduced Richard Rogers, who is affiliated with Georgia-based MAGA pastor Jentezen Franklin’s Free Chapel church, and who is serving as AFPI’s national director of faith engagement. He got that assignment, Rogers said, when AFPI called Franklin saying that the movement did not have enough resources on the ground to actually do the necessary voter registration and turnout in those targeted counties. Rogers went to work, he said, and now AFPI has a “faith department” that has been built “to put boots on the ground to motivate the voters in those states to turn the tide on the election in 2024—and we’re doing it.”
Rogers said that AFPI has developed closer collaboration between other groups doing voter registration and turnout among conservative Christians, citing Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition as examples. Rogers also said AFPI has raised enough money to have paid attorneys ready to intervene in key precincts and counties.
Also reflecting the increasingly Christian nationalist orientation of the MAGA movement—and the agenda of AFPI funder Dunn—is the think tank’s effort to claim a scriptural basis for every part of its social, economic, and foreign policy agenda.
AFPI calls its policy agenda “10 Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God,” though some of its claimed scriptural foundations seem strained, to say the least. To buttress its opposition to “Marxist and Socialist ideology in our healthcare,” AFPI offers four Bible verses, including ones that describe our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit and a prayer for good health.
AFPI’s “Biblical Foundations” project was launched last year at an event featuring Trump spiritual adviser and former White House aide Paula White, who chair’s AFPI’s Center for American Values. At the event, AFPI President Rollins said that in her White House role running Trump’s domestic policy agenda, “we saw the benefit of policy driven by faith.” Policy, said White, must be “guided by eternal truths, biblical truths.” Also speaking were Jentezen Franklin and New Apostolic Reformation figure Jim Garlow.
Goya CEO and AFPI board member Bob Unanue declared, “We are in a spiritual war.”
That kind of spiritual warfare rhetoric can also be found on the Biblical Foundations portion of AFPI’s website, which reads, “This fight is not just about the culture of America; it’s about the kingdom of God and the Church’s divine mission to be the salt and light of our day in an era of increasing darkness.”
