On June 9, 2024, ten days after Donald Trump was convicted in the New York hush money case involving Stormy Daniels, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told a Las Vegas rally, “The man that I worship is also a convicted felon. And he was murdered on a Roman cross.” The maneuver reframes legal accountability as martyrdom and democratic procedure as a Passion narrative, collapsing two registers at once. In the religious register, Trump becomes the persecuted innocent. In the political register, the judiciary becomes the Sanhedrin. Once that framing takes hold, criticism is no longer criticism; it becomes sacrilege. This is not Trumpism going too far. It is Trumpism becoming fully legible.
My thesis is simple and uncomfortable: in Trumpism, religion and vulgarity do not cancel each other out. They amplify each other. The sacred provides the moral absolute (Good versus Evil, mission versus treason). The crude provides the energy, with the insult and the dehumanization. Together, they produce a political machine that is harder to counter than either element alone.
A Long Genealogy
To understand why this mixture is so explosive and powerful in the United States, we need to resist the temptation to treat Trump as a rupture. He accelerates a formation that long preceded him, as Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy already suggested. Phillips, a Nixon campaign strategist whose voting-pattern analysis became closely associated with the Republican Southern Strategy and who later became one of his party’s sharpest critics, argued that Americans have long understood themselves as a “chosen” people with a “redemptive” role in history, an idea running from the Puritan settlers through Manifest Destiny and Cold War civil religion. When a nation imagines itself as called by the divine, political conflict becomes a test of fidelity rather than a negotiation of interests: dissenters do not merely disagree, they obstruct the mission.
Michael Walzer’s The Revolution of the Saints pushes the genealogy further back, reading Puritanism as a political project: purification, the disciplined remaking of a corrupted world. Variants of that political-religious language reappeared in later fundamentalist and evangelical movements and eventually in the consolidation of the religious right as an electoral force.
By the 1980s, the particularly American mixture of religion and politics had hardened into an electoral machine. Phillips’ “God gap” redrew the electoral map, Ronald Reagan’s public courtship of evangelical conservatives gave the shift a presidential language, and the Moral Majority and later the Christian Coalition converted moral anxiety into votes, donors, and disciplined constituencies. The Republican Party came to function, in Phillips’ idiom, as an “ecumenical religious party,” gathering different religious constituencies around a common adversary: secular liberalism.
The shift had a material dimension as well. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue that religiosity tends to remain stronger where existential security is lower. My own hypothesis goes a step beyond theirs: where politics has failed to provide protection, representation, or a feasible future, the promise of moral order, demonized enemies, and divine mission moves into the gap that is left.
The Evangelical Engine
No group has been more central to this formation than white evangelical Protestants. Roughly eight in ten voted for Trump in each of the last three presidential elections: Pew estimates 77 percent in 2016, 84 percent in 2020 and 81 percent in 2024. Institutional alignment explains more than cultural sympathy does: megachurches function as voter registration networks, evangelical media as amplification, and charismatic and Pentecostal preachers as translators who convert political events into the language of spiritual warfare. Within the coalition, the theology varies, and Katherine Kelaidis has traced a decisive mutation in the “new religious right”: where the late twentieth-century movement still held politics accountable to a prior religious order, religion has now been reshaped into a legitimating arm of nationalist power, subordinated to the project rather than standing in judgment of it.
The subordination of religion to politics in the US right is clearest in the charismatic network around Trump. Preachers like Hank Kunneman have described his legal troubles as “a battle between Good and Evil” and invoked “the anointing” upon him; televangelist Paula White, who became a senior adviser to the White House Faith Office in 2025, had already drawn attention in November 2020 for a prayer invoking “angelic reinforcement” as the presidential election was being decided; his survival of an assassination attempt in 2024 was narrated as evidence that the divine “saved him for a purpose.” Yet the same tradition has generated resistance. Networks of pastors, relief organizations, and congregations cite the same texts—welcome the stranger, love the enemy—to reach diametrically opposite conclusions, and they represent the most important line of internal critique: one that challenges the instrumentalization of faith from inside Christian language rather than from outside it.
Against this backdrop, Trump condenses and spectacularizes a language that already existed. He does so through three mutually reinforcing moves.
Sacralizing the Leader
The first is the theatrical sacralization of the leader. On June 1, 2020, Trump walked across Lafayette Square shortly after law-enforcement officers had forcibly dispersed protesters and posed with a Bible outside St. John’s Church. A later Interior Department review found that the Park Police had planned the clearance in order to install unscalable fencing rather than to facilitate the president’s visit. The gesture communicated nothing theological; it communicated authority, order, and impunity. The Bible was a prop, and props carry meaning.
Trump did not enter the church to pray. Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of the Episcopal diocese to which St. John’s belongs, learned of the visit from the news and called it an abuse of sacred symbols. Within hours, the White House had cut the footage into a short film with orchestral music following the president striding past lines of riot police. The walk was staged for the camera.
In his second inaugural address, Trump attributed his survival of the Butler assassination attempt to divine intention, telling the country he had been saved by God to make America great again. An executive order established a White House Faith Office in February 2025. A year before that, he began promoting the God Bless the USA Bible at $59.99, the King James text bound together with the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the chorus of Lee Greenwood’s song.
Sacred authority once stood above the office and judged whoever occupied it. Here it descends to decorate the man.
Slopaganda and the Disposable Sacred
The second move consists of the colonization of sacred iconography as a public demonstration of impunity. In May 2025, an AI-generated image of Trump dressed as the pope circulated through his own social media channels before spreading widely across political and media networks. Catholic organizations protested. The protest was beside the point, and understanding why this is so requires making a distinction. The image belongs to what we might call AI-assisted symbolic appropriation. The logic is one of domination. Possessing a symbol, desecrating it without cost, and remaining at the center of the conversation: this very sequence is, in itself, a political act.
This is adjacent to, but not the same as, slopaganda: unwanted AI-generated content spread at scale to manipulate beliefs for political ends. Slopaganda requires mass production and micro-targeted distribution, leveraging psychographic profiling to reach specific audiences with personalized content. Its defining features are scale, speed, and personalization implemented with generative AI, which already produces disinformation that can be more persuasive than human-authored and verified content.
Douglas Kellner has shown how the Bush administration staged the Iraq invasion as a managed aesthetic event, designed to produce emotional identification before critical scrutiny could take hold. The image preceded the argument and saturation replaced analysis. Slopaganda updates this logic for the age of generative AI and accelerates it: a single synthetic image released through a personal account can achieve significant reach in seconds. The propaganda becomes ambient.
The pope image is a symptom; slopaganda is what keeps the whole symbolic economy permanently unstable. When fabricated content multiplies faster than it can be verified, the cognitive burden of fact-checking becomes exhausting, and many people disengage from the question of truth altogether. Repetition does the rest: the first AI image of Trump as messiah shocks; the tenth normalizes; by the hundredth, the sacred has become just another aesthetic register available for political costume.
The theological dimension of slopaganda is underappreciated. Political theology, from Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies to Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, supplies the vocabulary here, if not the thesis. Kantorowicz describes a sovereign whose immortal second body is sustained by ritual, effigy, and tightly controlled visibility; Schmitt traces the passage of theological concepts into the machinery of the modern state. What I take from them is a condition: sacred authority has relied on separation and on scarce, regulated appearance. Generative AI subjects those symbols to frictionless reproduction and remix. The sacred image becomes infinitely available, deliberately desecrated, and converted into proof that desecration carries no penalty. Blasphemy, historically a transgression, becomes a signal of impunity. What such an image says is, “I can do anything to this symbol, and nothing will happen to me,” which is a claim about power.
Slopaganda works without belief; circulation is enough. An obviously fake image of Trump as pope that millions share, argue about, and react to has already accomplished its political aim: Trump is placed at the center of a symbolic field that includes the papacy; his opponents respond, amplifying the image in the process; and the information ecosystem proves itself floodable at virtually zero production cost. Sincere and ironic consumption become indistinguishable. The image functions regardless of how it is received, which is precisely what makes it so hard to counter.
Vulgarity
In November 2023, Trump promised to ”root out” opponents described as living ”like vermin.” A month later, undocumented migrants were said to be ”poisoning the blood of our country.” The register here is biological, not political. Where political language names opponents, biological language names pathogens—and pathogens must be eliminated, not negotiated with. The national body becomes an organism under threat; the response becomes hygiene rather than violence; the machinery of harm acquires the grammar of necessity. Calling this rhetorical excess would be a serious misreading. Under the intensified immigration enforcement of Trump’s second term, people have died in raids, shootings, and ICE custody. Dehumanizing language arrives before policy, not after—it builds the moral conditions under which certain actions become sayable, and then routine.
Vulgarity also performs work inside the movement. A crowd that cheers a line none of its members would feel comfortable repeating individually has agreed to something, and the agreement binds. Transgression distributes complicity and explains why the apology never arrives: it would refund the price of membership and hand the audience back to the moral world it paid to leave.
During Trump’s second term, vulgarity has moved into the organs of the state. On February 14, 2025, the official White House accounts posted a Valentine’s Day card bearing the faces of Trump and border czar Tom Homan: “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you.” Four days later the same accounts published forty-one seconds of chains laid out on a Seattle tarmac and shackled men climbing the stairs of a plane, captioned “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” Elon Musk enthusiastically reposted it.
The choice of genre carries the meaning. ASMR is what people use to fall asleep, and the humiliation of deported men was offered inside that form as something soothing, to an audience assumed to enjoy the sound. Here the two halves of this analysis meet: the crude and the synthetic issue from the same desk. A polished communiqué would have read as bureaucracy while the meme reads as candor, and candor is what this audience has been trained to accept as proof of sincerity.
The War on Empathy
This brings us to what may be the most revealing development in recent Trumpist discourse: a growing strand of conservative Christian and MAGA-adjacent discourse that reframes compassion itself as a moral defect. In January 2025, Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde delivered a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral, addressing President Trump directly and asking him simply, in unambiguous moral language, to “have mercy” on those who were frightened, including immigrants without legal status and children who are gay, lesbian, or transgender.
Much of the response went well beyond policy disagreement. Trump’s defenders argued: Mercy is weakness. Compassion is betrayal. Empathy is poison. The theological scaffolding was already in place: for example, Joe Rigney’s 2019 essay “The Enticing Sin of Empathy,” published on the evangelical platform Desiring God, argued, in a Screwtape-style essay written in a demon’s voice, that empathy understood as total immersion in another’s feelings corrupts when it displaces truth as the standard of judgment. Rigney distinguishes this from compassion, which he defends. Once that premise circulates, refusing empathy can be presented as righteousness and the absence of mercy moralized as fidelity.
This move solves a contradiction that would otherwise be destabilizing: how can a movement that invokes Christianity, a tradition dense with mercy and grounded in love, simultaneously normalize exclusion, hate, and dehumanizing language? The answer is to redefine mercy as naïveté and empathy as spiritual failure. Cruelty is rebranded as clarity. Empathy is one of the last restraints against dehumanization; once it is stigmatized as a moral defect, the imaginative permission to harm becomes widely available.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Revisited
Greene has since travelled a long way from that comparison of Trump and Jesus. By late 2025, she had broken publicly with Trump over foreign policy, opposing the strikes on Iran, criticizing his handling of the Epstein files, and announcing her resignation from Congress effective January 5, 2026. On CNN in February 2026, she said that MAGA, as people were coming to realize, “was all a lie.” Trump had already branded her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene” on Truth Social, and a White House spokesperson dismissed her as a quitter.
Most telling was her theological turn. In a text message to a New York Times reporter, Greene contrasted Erika Kirk, who had forgiven her husband’s killer at his memorial, with Trump, who told the same audience that he hates his opponents. Kirk’s response, Greene wrote, showed “a sincere Christian faith” while Trump’s “proves that he does not have any faith.” The woman who once placed Trump alongside Christ now measures him against a standard of Christian authenticity and finds him wanting.
This biographical detail is analytically revealing. The reversal makes an instrumental reading of the Christ comparison plausible: religious language stays politically useful even when its target changes. The idiom that once sacralized Trump now serves to disqualify him. The container changes; the logic does not.
What Remains
Kevin Phillips warned that the theocratic drift in American public life could be at once ridiculous and dangerous, and that religion had become the most accurate lens for describing what had happened to the Republican Party. A Vatican in Washington was never the scenario. The scenario was a style of legitimation in which religious criteria come to govern who speaks in the name of Good and who gets assigned the role of Evil.
Trumpism has perfected that drift. The leader gets sacralized, the enemy biologized, and the absence of mercy turned into a virtue. Slopaganda keeps the whole system running at scale, producing sacred transgression at zero cost and converting desecration into a demonstration of power.
Resistance will need more than exposure. Hypocrisy has lost its sting in a political culture that rebrands inconsistency as strength.
Coalition-building against Trump’s theopolitics is already under way. When the administration revoked the guidance that had kept immigration enforcement away from churches and schools, the National Association of Evangelicals objected within days, and religious plaintiffs went to court—Quakers in one lawsuit, a coalition of more than two dozen Christian and Jewish denominations in another—arguing that enforcement inside sanctuaries obstructed their ministry. In February 2025 Pope Francis wrote to the American bishops about the “major crisis” of mass deportations and rejected the ordo amoris argument the vice president had offered in its defense, returning the phrase to the parable of the Good Samaritan. What these interventions share is their idiom: each contests the meaning of texts the opponent already accepts as binding. Secular condemnation confirms the persecution frame; a fellow believer quoting Matthew 25 has to be answered.
Rebuilding material trust is slower and rarely produces headlines. The reverse correlation Norris and Inglehart identify between religiosity and existential security becomes tangible at the level of a county where the hospital has closed, and the congregation remains one of the few institutions still present when a family is hungry or somebody dies. Since 2010, well over a hundred rural American hospitals have closed or stopped providing inpatient care. In many of the communities they once served, churches still run food pantries, organize after-school programs and provide forms of assistance that have disappeared elsewhere. Political authority follows this presence.
Telling someone who receives church assistance that their pastor is implicated in an authoritarian political project asks them to set an abstraction against an institution they know through experience. The abstraction is unlikely to win. A credible alternative therefore depends on institutions capable of the same material constancy: a clinic that does not close, a union that can defend its members, a properly funded school. None of this offers the instant visibility of a viral image. It requires money, continuity, and years of work, which helps explain why it is so often neglected.
But the deepest question cuts beneath strategy. A political community turns uninhabitable when dislike hardens into permission to erase, when those we fear or simply do not want among us can be treated as though their disappearance would solve the problem they represent. Shackles laid out on a tarmac become soothing content. The sacred loses its power to set limits on violence and is recruited to authorize it.
There may be another way of understanding charisma. The word carries the trace of charis: grace, favor, a gift received rather than a power possessed. Read from that root, charisma need not name the leader’s capacity to command devotion. It can name an obligation created by what has been given, an authority answerable to those over whom it has power. This is Christian vocabulary, turned against the use being made of it. Grace binds us to the existence of others, including those we would rather turn away from. A democratic community lasts only as long as it is so bound, only as long as no person becomes disposable because we fear them or fail to recognize ourselves in them. Care for the other begins with the refusal to make disappearance a political solution.
