Welcome to our weekly “Trumptastrophe” series that serves to remind us of the destructive policies, decisions, and actions we encountered during the Trump presidency and the threats that he and others in the MAGA movement still pose – and to keep those moments clear in our memory as we fight to defeat Republican extremists during the upcoming elections.
This week’s Trumptastrophe highlights how former President Trump sought the backing of the religious right to secure his 2016 win, granting them unprecedented access to push their agenda during his administration. Now, they're pouring millions into Trump’s reelection bid, hoping to continue imposing their oppressive agenda and stripping away even more of our rights and freedoms.
On October 13, 2017, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to attend the Values Voter Summit, the Family Research Council’s annual conference for religious-right political activists. Trump had also spoken in 2015 and 2016 as a candidate.
Trump’s appearance as president was a chance for him to thank conservative evangelicals who voted in overwhelming numbers to put him in power—and take credit for finally making it safe for Americans to say “Merry Christmas.”
And it was a chance for FRC to thank Trump for making 2017 what Right Wing Watch called “the year the religious right moved into the White House”:
Once he was elected—with 80 percent of the white evangelical vote—Trump kept his evangelical advisory board intact and promised to give it unprecedented access to the White House. He stacked his Cabinet with friends of the religious right, including Tom Price at Health and Human Services, Betsy DeVos at Education and Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development. Far-right pastor Ralph Drollinger worked with Trump’s transition team to set up weekly Bible studies for Trump’s Cabinet members. The conservative Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society vetted potential judicial nominees.
Religious-right leaders gushed at the “unprecedented access” they had in the Trump administration—and a level of influence that turned the executive branch into a virtual policy-making arm of the religious-right movement, undermining progress toward LGBTQ equality, restricting access to reproductive information and health care here and around the world, and more.
That access and influence continued throughout Trump’s term, and unfortunately continues today through the three Trump Supreme Court justices and hundreds of lifetime federal judges. Some of those judges—like the now-notorious Matthew Kacsmaryk--came directly from religious-right legal groups, and thanks to Trump they are wielding their judicial power to further dismantle church-state separation and undermine Americans’ freedoms.
Trump’s running mate Sen. J.D. Vance recently joined a stop of the “Courage Tour”—a traveling religious and political road show led by Seven Mountains Dominionists Lance Wallnau and Mario Murillo designed to break “demonic strongholds” in battleground counties and states and deliver the election to Trump, who they believe has been anointed by God to lead America a second time—a sentiment recently echoed by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
The policy-making ability Trump gave religious-right activists—and the unprecedented influence he gave dominionist Pentecostal leaders—seems to have whetted the movement’s appetite for power and control. The MAGA movement’s takeover of the Republican Party has been accompanied by an increasingly overt and aggressive Christian nationalism, which is a serious threat to freedom and core democratic values like religious pluralism.
Scholars and pollsters have documented that conservative white evangelicals who hold Christian nationalist views are more likely than other Americans to support authoritarianism and political violence, along with nurturing racial resentment and hostility toward immigrants. Those reactionary attitudes infuse the Project 2025 policy agenda drawn up by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of former Trump administration staffers.
In recent months, Trump has disillusioned some religious-right activists by publicly abandoning their long-held goal of banning abortion nationwide—a calculated political shift he made when it became clear how unpopular Republican abortion bans really are, and how the issue could hurt his bid for reelection.
But the frustration that some anti-abortion leaders are feeling hasn’t changed the fact that religious-right political groups are spending tens of millions of dollars to turn out Trump voters. After all, they still want federal agencies being run by anti-abortion, anti-equality activists. And they want more Trump Supreme Court justices and hundreds more MAGA-minded federal judges to force America into alignment with their anti-freedom right-wing “biblical worldview.”
We may be just 23 days away from Election Day but it’s not too late to help get out the vote. Every single vote is going to be crucial in helping to defeat Donald Trump and prevent the religious right from furthering their antiquated and out-of-touch agenda. Sign up today to volunteer with a campaign near you or rush a donation that People For can put to work now to support our GOTV efforts. >>
These are just some of the reasons we need YOU in this fight. So, find your favorite way to unwind after reading through this week’s recap, and then make a plan for how you will fight back this week, this month, this election cycle.
