As the convention opened, word came that longtime Trump surrogate and Trump advisory board member Mary Ann Mendoza, the “angel mom” of a police officer killed by an undocumented drunk driver, would not be speaking as promised. Earlier in the afternoon, the Daily Beast reported, she’d tweeted a QAnon thread promoting the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A step too far. The RNC, which had not objected to Mendoza’s previous declaration that George Soros, the Rothschilds, and the U.N. deploy undocumented immigrants in an attempt to destroy and replace America with “ONE WORLD GOVT,” canceled her. But we still had the more mainstream Florida lieutenant governor, Jeanette Núñez, who turned the customary RNC anti-Castro nod into a broadside against the “radical left” that “chisels away” at our freedoms in order to “peddle dangerous ideologies, cower to global progressives, and normalize socialism to dismantle our constitution.” Chisel; peddle; cower; global. Four words to describe a secret plot to undo America. Call it the Protocols of the Puppet Biden.
So it went, bouncing back and forth between God and the economy. Each was twinned within itself as well: faith forged in hope and also in opposition to insidious forces, paradoxical tales of Trumpian largesse and of “communist bankers.” There’s a word used by the more esoteric Christian nationalists for this particular blend of theology and economics: theonomy. Others call it, more simply, “biblical capitalism,” an idea that, after a lifetime of religious indifference, perhaps comes naturally to a man who now names as his two favorite books The Art of the Deal and the Bible. Where the Republican Party once tried to cater to both “business conservatives” and “social conservatives,” always leaning toward one or the other but usually gaining some modicum of conservative balance through the negotiation between them, biblical capitalism declares the concerns one and the same. To be for God is to be for business, and to be for business is to serve the Lord and His “chosen one.” That’s a designation Trump first granted himself as a joke, but, as I wrote here Monday, Trump’s “jokes” rarely remain as such. They’re always becoming greater, like America, or darker, depending on your eschatology.
It’s simple, really, suggested Eric Trump, the second of the night’s three speakers (besides the man himself) bearing the name bestowed also on towers, spirits, and water, a which-side-are-you-on kind of deal. Eric opened his speech by framing Trumpism in terms borrowed from a version of a quote often misattributed to Gandhi and actually cribbed from an early-20th-century socialist: “First we were ignored. Then we were laughed at. Then they fought us. And then together we won.” But this is a battle best understood in spiritual terms, good vs. evil—and since evil (the media, Black Lives Matter, Barack Obama) never rests, opportunities for more winning never end. Eric ticked off the front lines: First they ruined football, then they came for the police, and now they are after God. “It is a fight,” Eric decreed, “that only my father can win.”
And there it was. His father, our father, Trumpism’s greatest truth and also its only truth, the relentless consistency of ego that becomes a measure against which democracy itself appears to his followers as chaos. It’s also QAnon’s core messianism, the lodestar that for all that movement’s strange variety makes it more coherent and thus more potent than the Tea Party before it or Bircherism earlier still.
Liberalism’s too-common mistake is to suppose that Trump’s presidency remains transactional. That appeals can still be made to reasonable businessmen or to people of honest faith, that within conservatism remain constituencies bound together in an uneasy marriage, troubled, as they were in the past, by that which each faction, businesspeople and believers, once saw as the party’s concessions to the crudities, impracticalities, or absurdities of the other. That is, for all Trump’s early rhetoric, how Trumpism began. What this Republican convention has revealed more starkly than before is what it has become: a fusion, a biblical capitalism of apocalyptic tendencies.
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