Former President Trump won a resounding victory at the Iowa caucuses over his rivals for the GOP nomination, and multiple networks responded by condemning his base.
Unlike many caucuses of the past, the Iowa caucus of 2024 wasn't particularly dramatic as Trump coasted to an expected landslide win.
But one of the biggest takeaways of the night, rather than about electoral politics, was about how many figures in the media wrote about Trump’s supporters themselves.
Columnist Sarah Posner wrote on MSNBC.com that Trump was victorious at the Iowa caucuses not because of his status as the leader of the GOP, but because he is the "leader of the Christian right," arguing that endorsements from actual faith leaders "have faded from must-have endorsements to utter irrelevance."
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Posner argued that in the past, the contemporary Christian right of American politics "projected an image (largely accepted at face value by political reporters) that evangelicals are church-going, patriotic ‘values voters’ who simply want to elect wholesome, biblically literate candidates who would enact ‘moral,’ family-friendly policies."
"Trump didn’t ask evangelicals to change their goal of a government controlled by [W]hite conservative Christians," Posner argued. "He just tore away the pretense that they wanted to accomplish that by democratic means."
Posner also suggested that the secret sauce to Trump’s ability to co-opt the Christian right’s power was his understanding of the culturally religious and tribal forces behind politics.
"In the evangelical world, particularly in the charismatic world where Trump has a firm foothold, people believe they are waging a spiritual war against demonic enemies of Christianity and America," The MSNBC columnist wrote. "Other Republicans, including DeSantis, tried unsuccessfully to campaign on similar themes. But Trump embodies the us-vs.-them mentality of this cosmic battle between the godly and the satanic and uses it, along with his savior status, to his full advantage in falsely portraying his criminal prosecutions as the work of an evil, corrupt political system."
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MSNBC host Joy Reid turned the conversation about Trump's win this week specifically to "White Christians," relaying an earlier exchange she had with Robert "Robbie" Jones, the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and author of "The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy."
She asked him why White Christians support Trump with such loyalty, despite his history of electoral losses, and read Jones' response, "’They see themselves as the rightful inheritors of this country, and Trump has promised to give it back to them.’"
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Reid expanded and told her co-hosts, "All the things that we think about, about electability, about what are people gaming out, but none of that matters when you believe that God has given you this country, that it is yours, and that everyone who is not a White, conservative Christian is a fraudulent American, is a less real American. Then you don’t care about electability. You care about what God has given you."
Later that evening she reiterated her point, arguing, "They’re not trying to convince people and win people over through politics. What they’re saying is, ‘We own this country, and everyone will bow down to us.’"
That same evening, MSNBC host Alex Wagner argued that Christian evangelicals believed Trump was a "Second Coming," referring to Jesus Christ, adding that she felt "fascinated" by the evangelical voting bloc "because the number of really esteemed reporters have been talking about the way in which the Trump coalition, the MAGA coalition, has absolutely just devoured the evangelical coalition."
Salon’s senior politics writer Amanda Marcotte condemned American evangelicals, arguing that their portion of America has always been morally bankrupt, long before they embraced Trump as their "lord and savior." Marcotte slammed pundits for believing a "fantasy" that "American evangelicals are morally upright people" and argued that their support of Trump has more to do with right-wing views on race and gender than Christ-following.
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"Trump is an avatar for the current mood of [W]hite evangelicals," she wrote. "They are done pretending to be ‘compassionate.’ The mask is entirely off. Evangelicals are not the salt-of-the-earth types idealized by centrist pundits. They are what feminists, anti-racists and pro-LGBTQ activists have always said: authoritarians who may use Jesus as cover for their ugly urges, but have no interest in the ‘love thy neighbor’ teachings of their purported savior."
Marcotte cited a piece from The New York Times observing that many modern evangelicals who support Trump are often the ones who don’t attend church regularly and are more acutely concerned by immigration.
"’Being evangelical once suggested regular church attendance, a focus on salvation and conversion and strongly held views on specific issues such as abortion. Today, it is as often used to describe a cultural and political identity: one in which Christians are considered a persecuted minority, traditional institutions are viewed skeptically and Mr. Trump looms large." Ruth Graham and Charles Homans of the New York Times wrote in their piece.
Marcotte appeared to respond that such findings vindicate arguments that White Evangelical identity is "constructed less around spirituality and more around a very racist, sexist set of political preferences."
"Trump may not believe in faith or salvation, but he sure believes in racism and sexism," Marcotte wrote. "That Iowa evangelicals turned out to back Trump isn't a betrayal of their values. It reveals the values that always fueled their movement. It's just the last bit of plausible deniability has faded away."
Alex Woodward of The Independent condemned Trump for speeding forward "with a Christian nationalist agenda."
Woodward slammed Trump for catering to a "key Republican voting bloc of evangelical Christians" by "leaning into a fantasy among supporters and social media influencers depicting him as something of a messianic figure, who was sent by God as a ‘shepherd to mankind.’"
"His campaign has relied on the mountain of criminal charges and lawsuits against him to cast himself as a victim of political persecution. His evangelical support has cast him as a Biblical David against the ‘deep state’ Goliath," Woodward wrote, "while he echoes [W]hite supremacist manifestos and plots his revenge against the justice system."
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The Independent then shared a statement from executive director of Faithful America Rev Nathan Empsall who appeared to equate Trump with some form of Christian fascism.
"It’s disheartening, if not surprising, that Donald Trump and other MAGA politicians have been able to consolidate so much evangelical Christian support in Iowa, following years of lies that portray their violent cause as a holy war," he told the Independent. "Most American Christians reject the Christofascism and Christian nationalism that Trump and MAGA stand for, and will continue to do so throughout this election season and beyond."
