With respect to Ginni Thomas’ notorious coup texts, let us hold these truths to be self-evident: (1) Justice Clarence’s wife is a loon whose brain, thanks to the influence of Fox News and QAnon, has been boiled to the circumference of a pea, (2) Justice Clarence, by clinging to his robes, is rotting the reputation of the Supreme Court, and (3) Not a damn thing will likely happen to either of them.
So rather than lament anew about her treason and his conflicts of interest (I’ve already done the latter), let’s focus on what’s arguably the most detestable – and dangerous – text in all the exchanges between Ginni and Mark Meadows. The date was Nov. 24, 2020, and Ginni was actually on the receiving end. The author was Meadows, the lame-duck chief of staff still in service to election loser Donald Trump. She was peppering Meadows with all kinds of nonsensical swill (Joe Biden should be jailed at Guantanamo, blah blah), so Meadows decided to buck up her spirits with a heaping dose of religious certitude. He declared that Biden’s victory would be overturned because….
“This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it.“
Wow. As Johnny Carson used to say, “This I did not know!” Until that Meadows text was leaked, I had no idea that Jesus Christ Himself was working the phones for a Trump coup d’etat.
That’s what Meadows apparently believed. (One of his White House duties was evangelical outreach.) That’s what Trump’s sizable coterie of Christian nationalist theocrats believed. But what’s truly dangerous is their conviction that the separation of church and state is fiction. What’s truly dangerous is their insipid belief that they had – and still have – a divine right to lord their “King of Kings” over the rest of us, to the point of destroying democracy in the process.
Meadows, in those four texted sentences, was merely echoing many of his fellow conspirators. At the Jan. 6, 2021 rally when Trump incited his acolytes to attack the Capitol, Florida evangelist Paula White (Trump’s spiritual adviser) blessed the impending insurrection by calling on God to “give us a holy boldness in this hour…right now in the name of Jesus.” When rioters ransacked the Senate chamber, they stood on the podium and prayed “to send a message…in Christ’s holy name.” Indeed, that day was the culmination of five years of evangelical zeal on behalf of the thrice-married serial stalker who’d been credibly accused of sexually assaulting at least 18 women.
If you’re still flummoxed about that love affair with Trump, perhaps Sarah Posner can help. Posner, who wrote a book about it, told NPR in 2020: “It’s such a common belief in the Christian right that Trump has somehow been chosen by God…Some people will say, ‘sometimes God just chooses an unlikely leader to lead a country at a very critical moment in its history. So God chose Donald Trump, who, you know, seems very unlikely to be our Christian favorite or an unlikely leader for us, but there’s a reason that God chose him. And he’s fulfilling America’s destiny or restoring it as a Christian nation.’ Another example is, ‘well, in the Bible, God chose unlikely leaders or God chose someone who was maybe not of the same religion. So maybe he’s not a Christian. But just like in the Bible, God chose King Cyrus, the Persian king, to help restore the exiled Jews to Jerusalem. And he helped rebuild Jerusalem.’ And so the analogy there is that ‘Trump may not be a Christian, but he’s restoring Christian America.'”
OK, maybe that didn’t help. Bottom line: There’s no way to reason with religious zealots.
Sane conservative commentator David French – a longtime attorney who often defended evangelical Christians in court – points out, in response to the Meadows text, that the theocrats in thrall to Trump “shed any form of critical thinking in favor of embracing the most outlandish of false allegations. And those Christians weren’t just the January 6 rioters. They included believers at the pinnacle of American power.”
French says, “It is notable that precious few have uttered the slightest hint of an apology to the American people for their role in wrongly and recklessly attempting to instigate what could have been the gravest constitutional crisis since 1861 – all in service of an obvious lie…To see (Meadows’) religious zeal in the pursuit of profound injustice is to remember that Christian power does not always result in Christian ethics, and that Christian moral corruption was and is a sad hallmark of the age of Trump.”
It would be futile to tell these people to save their zeal for church on Sunday. They have no intention to leave the public square. “Saving America” in the name of Jesus is their long-term mission, and if the rest of us – because of apathy or exhaustion or whatever – fail to flood the polls en masse in the upcoming elections, this democracy will become deader than a Russian general.