Trump went beyond this attempt to build his own army. To win his cause, he told his followers that they were fighting a war for the soul of America, giving them a perverted version of American history. “We will never cave to the left wing and the left-wing intolerance,” he told a crowd. “They hate our history, they hate our values, and they hate everything we prize as Americans.”
He rejected the multicultural society that democracy promised, telling them: “Our country didn’t grow great with them. It grew great with you and your thought process and your ideology.” And he echoed fascists who promised to return their country to divinely inspired rules that, if ignored, would create disaster. At a rally, Trump said: “The left-wing mob is trying to demolish our heritage, so they can replace it with a new oppressive regime that they alone control. This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country!”[1]
In his rewriting of history, the ideological threads of global authoritarianism came together with America’s peculiar history to overturn American democracy.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán had defended replacing self-government in their own countries because, they said, liberal democracy was obsolete. Because democracy welcomes minorities, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ people as equals, they argue, it undermines the virtue necessary for society to function. Orbán was open about his determination to overthrow the concept of Western democracy, replacing it with what, on different occasions, he called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” He wanted to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with what he called “Christian culture,” stop the immigration that he believed undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.” What he wanted, in short, was to destroy the equality before the law on which democracy depends and restore a traditional, patriarchal society dominated by white men.
During Trump’s term, the American right openly embraced this ideology. In 2019, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson endorsed Hungary’s antiabortion and anti-immigration policies. The next year, Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, spoke at a forum in Budapest, where he denounced immigration and urged traditional social values. He told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump had put on the court.
Those attacking democracy insisted they were defending traditional America. They focused relentlessly on immigration and insisted that traditional families were under attack: “real” America was being destroyed by multiculturalism and secular values.
That idea thrilled the evangelical voters who had flocked to Trump, believing he would overturn abortion rights and restore a world in which they felt important. Getting rid of secular values meant insisting that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that anyone trying to embrace secular values was attacking those foundations.
In 2019, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, attempted to use the Framers’ words to justify this radical reworking of the nation’s founding principles. He told an audience that by “self-government,” the Framers did not mean the ability of people to vote for representatives of their choice. Rather, he said, they meant individual morality: the ability to govern oneself. And because people are inherently wicked, that self-government requires the authority of a religion: Christianity.
This sleight of hand directly contradicted the actual work of the Framers. James Madison stood passionately against the establishment of any religion by the government, explaining that what was at stake was not just religion but also representative government itself.
The establishment of religion attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience, Madison said. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Madison warned specifically that they could control the press, abolish trial by jury, take over the executive and judicial powers, take away the right to vote, and set themselves up in power forever.
The idea of using government power to establish a “traditional” form of society relied not on the nation’s founding principles but on its dark history of inequality. In mid-July 2020, under the guise of supporting human rights, a report from the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights reworked American history into a vision of white Christian nationalism that looked much like the worldview of the southern enslavers before the Civil War.
The report, written under evangelical secretary of state Mike Pompeo, began by stating that the primary tradition “that formed the American spirit” was “Protestant Christianity . . . infused with the beautiful Biblical teachings that every human being is imbued with dignity and bears responsibilities toward fellow human beings, because each is made in the image of God.” It claimed that the Founders established the United States to secure property rights and religious liberty and that the Constitution imposed strict limits on the government in order to protect that liberty.[2]
In the 1850s, southern enslavers used a similar argument to try to take over the United States government, keep it from doing anything but protect property, and throw the power in the country to the states, where a minority could enforce its will unchecked by a popular majority. The stunted version of history embraced by Trump and his allies translated this old ideology into an authoritarian argument for the future. It erased the victory of democracy in the Civil War, the ongoing struggle for equal rights that followed and that lasted until the 1970s, and the liberal consensus that finally tried to make those rights real.
In August, Trump finally recognized that the Republican National Convention would have to bow to the pandemic and be virtual. He announced he would hold a three-night television event from the White House, a plan that deliberately bound his leadership and authoritarian ideology to the historical symbols of the nation. Vice President Mike Pence spoke at Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”; First Lady Melania Trump spoke from the newly renovated Rose Garden; and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke from Jerusalem in front of sites important to Christian evangelicals while on an official taxpayer-funded trip to the Middle East, although Senate-confirmed State Department appointees are not allowed even to attend a political party convention, let alone speak at one.
Even before the convention, the Trump campaign had been quietly incorporating Nazi imagery into its messaging, as both a dog whistle for right-wing supporters and a way to get free press from outraged observers, and the White House convention drew on imagery from dictatorships. A parade of family members described Trump as wonderful, subordinates offered generic over-the-top praise, and every speaker demonized anyone who didn’t support Trump’s continued rule. The convention included demonstrations of mercy from the president as he pardoned a criminal and granted citizenship to five immigrants (who were apparently not told they would be part of the convention).
And the convention had the trappings of dictators, from the First Lady’s dress that evoked a Nazi uniform—almost certainly to provoke a response while appealing to the alt-right—to carefully chosen cathedral ceilings and impressive architecture, to the wall of flags, all evoking tradition, majesty, and might. The televised spectacle concentrated all that power not in our democratic government, but in one man.
Trump turned the White House, the people’s house, into the background for a political rally, emblazoned with flags and sporting jumbotrons that spelled out “Trump/Pence.” It looked like a futuristic movie dystopia as Trump tried to sell the classic alternative reality of authoritarians who have little actual good news to report. In his now-familiar refrain, he claimed that the country was in chaos caused by his lawless opponents and that he alone could solve the problem. He would return his supporters to the positions of authority they felt they had lost, ushering back in the good old days when the country was great.
The Republican Party, which had formed to stand against the enslavers who had all but taken over the nation’s government and restore democracy, was now on board with Trump’s dictatorship. Party leaders wrote no campaign platform to outline policies and goals for the future. Instead, they passed a resolution saying that “the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.”[3]
In September, just before the 2020 election, Trump made American history central to his reelection effort. He attacked the 1619 Project, a historical initiative by The New York Times that centered human enslavement and the racial patterns it set at the heart of American history. In response, Trump established the 1776 Commission, saying it would end the “radicalized view of American history” that vilified the nation’s Founders and taught a “twisted web of lies” that he called “a form of child abuse.” He claimed—without evidence—that “students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.” Calling studies that emphasize American racism “one-sided and divisive,” he opposed their view of “America as an irredeemably and systemically racist country.”[4]
Trump’s handpicked 1776 Commission was made up not of historians but of right-wing activists and politicians. Although the federal government does not determine school curriculum, he placed the commission inside the Department of Education and charged it with promoting “patriotic education” in the nation’s schools, national parks, and museums.
Meanwhile, Democratic nominee Joe Biden recalled the nation’s greatest achievements with much greater perception. In October, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a town hallowed by history, he called for the nation to put aside division and come together. He talked about race: “Think about what it takes for a Black person to love America. That is a deep love for this country that for far too long we have never fully recognized.” He talked about disparities of wealth: “Working people and their kids deserve an opportunity.”
And he talked about Lincoln and how at Gettysburg, he called for Americans to dedicate themselves to a “new birth of freedom” so that the men who had died for that cause “shall not have died in vain.” “Today we are engaged once again in a battle for the soul of the nation,” Biden said. “After all that America has accomplished, after all the years we have stood as a beacon of light to the world, it cannot be that here and now, in 2020, we will allow government of the people, by the people, and for the people to perish from this earth.”[5]
But Trump had done his work too well. His propaganda, cruelty, and demonstrations of dominance had empowered his followers and made his leadership central to their identity. At a debate in early October he snarled, spat, lied, bullied, badgered, and apparently tried to infect Biden with Covid-19, for it later turned out he had tested positive for coronavirus before the debate. Determined not to admit he had been wrong about a deadly virus, he attempted to demonstrate his strength over it, but his illness turned the final days of the campaign into chaos. Nonetheless, his supporters stayed with him. By late October, when Trump supporters in Texas organized to drive a Biden campaign bus off the road and Donald Trump Jr. cheered them on, it was clear: they had turned against democracy.