“TRUMP IS RUNNING A SHADOW GOVERNMENT!” screamed the subject line of an email sent Monday to followers of religious-right author and pundit Steve Turley. The email linked to a Turley video that began with a clip of former President Donald Trump telling rally-goers in Alabama, “Everything ‘woke’ turns to shit.”
“He’s back and better than ever!” squealed a gleeful Turley, who used his video to promote his “New Conservative Patriot” online event to be held Sept. 3-4, which he said would show participants how to “create a parallel society” and “help build a society free from all things woke.” Turley’s YouTube channel has 767,000 subscribers; by Wednesday afternoon his “shadow government” video had logged more than 215,000 views.
Even “leftist activists masquerading as journalists” are concerned that Trump has managed a “Trumpian coup” and “is effectively running a shadow government,” he claimed. Turley noted that former White House aide Steve Bannon recently called on Trump to put together “a more formal body” or “shadow government “ to counter what Bannon called “this illegitimate regime.”
Turley also noted former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ recent comments calling Trump “a president who is fully engaged, highly focused, and remaining on task.” Meadows said Trump was meeting with his “Cabinet members.”
“President Trump is in fact forming a de facto shadow government that is effectively directing the new Patriot-inspired GOP and the policies that they’re either advocating or enacting in their governments over the nation,” Turley said.
“There is a relatively widespread concern” among mainstream media, Turley added, that by continuing to fire up his supporters and by raising massive amounts of campaign cash, Trump “is indeed effectively governing a significant portion of the nation through a combination of denouncing the Biden regime as inherently illegitimate and incompetent on the one hand, and radically influencing if not indeed directing GOP policies at the state and federal levels on the other.”
Turley touted Trump’s influence over Republican state legislators, citing the hundreds of voter-suppressing “election integrity” bills introduced at Trump’s urging—bills that are justified by Trump’s lies about voter fraud and a stolen election.
Trump has Republican members of Congress “in his pocket,” Turley claimed, because his Save America PAC has outraised the Republican National Committee.
“With that kind of money, Trump has established an iron grip over the Republican Party,” he said. “For tens of millions of Americans, President Trump is the President of the United States, as his governance manifests itself through the Republican Party. He controls state Republicans as they pass electoral integrity laws across the nation, and he controls federal Republicans, as he’s got ‘em in his pocket with his astonishing fundraising.”
Trump “may be even more powerful today than ever,” Turley concluded.
Turley has been in the Trump camp for a long time. Back in 2017, Turley described Trump as playing a “redemptive” role and as “an indispensable part” of the “trajectory” that he said would ultimately elevate a “morally upstanding evangelical” like Mike Pence to the presidency. Both before and after the 2020 election, Turley’s podcast had promised listeners that Trump would return to power, with such headlines as “Sidney Powell Reveals EPIC Lawsuit Coming! ‘IT WILL BE BIBLICAL’!!!” and “BREAKING! Vice President Pence Poised to REJECT Biden’s Electors!!!”
Turley has praised the rise of populist nationalism around the world as one sign that secularists are doomed to represent a shrinking portion of the world’s population, a message he delivered at the 2019 World Congress of Families global summit. Last year, he cheered Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s moves to consolidate power, because he views the autocratic leader as a champion of Christian civilization who is “crushing left-wing liberalism in Hungary.” Turley, who postures as a champion of freedom, celebrated Orbán’s threat to imprison journalists, delighting in imagining Trump with the power “to hold left-wing activists disguised as journalists accountable for their blatant anti-conservative cultural Marxist bias.”
Right Wing Watch reported in 2020:
In his book “The Return of Christendom: Demography, Politics, and the Coming Christian Majority,” Turley argued that because religious conservatives have so many more children than secularists, the world is seeing “nothing less than a conservative Christian resurgence in our demographics and politics that promises not suicide but rather the salvation of the West.” He told the World Congress of Families audience that America’s future will be “evangelical, Mormon, and Amish.” Last year, in a podcast titled “WHITES Projected to Become Dominant SUPERMAJORITY in U.S.,” Turley said that multiculturalism is “slowly and surely dissipating” and it will be replaced by “the restoration of a distinctively American culture, custom, and tradition that will continue to define our nation for generations to come.”
