Christian nationalist organizations that have zealously backed President Donald Trump are energetically amplifying his administration’s attacks on judges who are performing their constitutional duty to act as a check on the president’s lawbreaking, while the administration’s lawlessness has reached new and frightening heights by openly defying court orders.
Right Wing Watch reported last week on Intercessors for America using its platform among pro-Trump “prayer warriors” to promote Trump’s anti-judiciary propaganda. Over the weekend, the Family Research Council chimed in to criticize a federal judge for having “decided to slam the door on the president’s deportation strategy,” in the words of FRC’s Suzanne Bowdey. She called it a “breathtaking display of judicial activism.”
Let’s pause here to review what we know about the administration’s “deportation strategy.” The Trump administration has claimed the power to declare someone to be a gang member or terrorist and ship them to a foreign prison camp with no chance to prove their innocence. It is kidnapping students and throwing them in detention camps for having expressed opinions about public policy issues that the administration disagrees with. It shipped a make-up artist with no criminal record to a gulag in El Salvador based on the bogus claim of a disgraced former cop who claimed—contrary to expert opinion—that a certain tattoo marked him as a gang member.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her newsletter Sunday,
Let's be very clear about exactly what's happening here. President Donald J. Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country. and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.
Are the religious-right groups who screamed about “tyranny” under the Biden administration standing up for the Constitution and rule of law? Of course not. They view Trump as God’s anointed and apparently, therefore, above the law. MAGA pastor and “prophet” Shane Vaughn recently declared that judges who rule against Trump "should be put in prison for treason," and called the female SCOTUS justices a "Jezebel army."
MAGA Republicans in Congress are on board, too. Last week, House Republicans passed legislation to restrict federal judges’ ability to act as a check on the president’s lawbreaking.
FRC and congressional Republicans are also keeping company with the likes of right-wing activist and gadfly Larry Klayman, who sent a letter to activists Monday, claiming that federal judges he calls “leftist radicals” are “torching Trump’s agenda” and “defying 77 million voters to stall Trump ‘til the 2026 midterms.”
Klayman complained that Rep. Jim Jordan’s judiciary committee hasn’t moved more aggressively to impeach judges who rule against Trump. “We’re gutting all 833 judges—every corrupt dollar, every socialist scheme—to ram impeachments down Jordan’s gullet. $250,000 gets it done,” reads Klayman’s confusing but vaguely threatening message. “I need warriors, Patriot—$25, $50, $100 now saves Trump and our republic. Donate TODAY, or the left’s jackboot stomps us flat!
New Apostolic Reformation figure and Trump sycophant Jim Garlow doesn’t mind Trump deporting “the chaff,” but he is politely raising concerns about the fact that the mass deportations envisioned by Trump and Stephen Miller may end up deporting tens of thousands of Latino evangelicals, including pastors. Garlow is counting on Trump aide Paula White to cut a special deal for them.
Speaking of Christian nationalists, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and MAGA movement insider William Wolfe have published a column that may be a new milestone in the religious-right’s increasingly brazen and aggressive Christian nationalism. “Now that Trump is President, he can remind America that Christ is King,” reads the headline. In alignment with the Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel that Wolfe co-authored, he and Roberts assert that “America is a Christian nation” and go well beyond calls for protection of religious freedom and straight into official government promotion of Christianity, asserting “if we want to restore our country’s greatness for the next 250 years, we must start by recognizing and celebrating our Savior’s glorious triumph over sin and death.”
