U.S. Google Map users now see Gulf of America. Several webpages, including those related to HIV and LGBTQ youth, went dark on Friday. President Trump is purging government websites, language and history he doesn't like. From WNYC in New York. This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Owinger. Meanwhile, agencies that could curb the power of the new administration and its friends are also in line for the quote-unquote woodchipper. It's characteristic of... authoritarianism.
to represent politically neutral organizations as biased against you. Because the rule of law is biased against you if you're a criminal. Once Christian nationalists saw a partner in Trump, but now he's part of their iconic... And I think in some ways it started out that Trump was going to be their vehicle and now they're his vehicle. It's all coming up after this. On Radiolab, what is the answer to one of the world's oldest biological mysteries?
How do migrating birds navigate so well? Could only be found by taking our most complicated. Oh boy. Out of this world science. This is where we go seriously off the rails into the deep sci-fi stuff. Whoa. And look for it. Somewhere inside the eye of a migrating bird. Quantum Birds from Radiolab. Listen wherever you get podcasts. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Owinger.
The president doubled down this week on his threats to tax imports of steel, aluminum and other goods from Canada, speaking here at the Oval Office last Monday. We have big deficits with Canada like we do with all countries. Hmm, good question. Who the hell made that deal? Today we're finally ending the NAFTA nightmare and signing into law the brand new U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement. Very special.
Whether Trump forgot that it was his deal or he thinks we forgot, the effect is the same. This administration seems to believe it can justify its current policies by rewriting the recent past. Sound familiar? Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. George Orwell's 1984.
I pardoned J6 people who were assaulted by our government. Trump last weekend arguing with a reporter about his pardons for rioters who had attacked police officers, as his administration deletes online footage from January 6th. They were assaulted. And what I did was a great thing for humanity. And there you go. The insurrection is now Donald Trump's day of love.
For some of the same reasons, Trump is also re-litigating South African apartheid, which officially ended 30 years ago, leaving three quarters of privately owned land in the hands of white Afrikaners. who make up just 10% of the population. An executive order he signed on Friday provided for resettlement in the U.S. of, quote, Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination as refugees. Who put that bug in his ear?
On a related note, South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, for all of his talk of waste and government efficiency, would like us to forget that his businesses have raked in some $18 billion in government contracts. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the latest government agency that may be headed to Elon Musk's woodchipper. Musk tweeted RIP to the agency over the weekend. The CFPB, which has saved American consumers billions of dollars,
would have overseen the payment system Musk plans to roll out on his social media site. Just one of 11 regulatory agencies that have issued complaints, investigations, or regulations affecting his companies.
Mr. Musk, the White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency? Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. Elon Musk at an Oval Office press conference on Tuesday. We post our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website.
He's referring to doge.gov, a site that shows you posts from X featuring the information his team has chosen to share with us about its cuts. Trump placed Doge under the Presidential Records Act, which would shield it from FOIA, the most basic mechanism for journalists and citizens to request information about government action.
Denying the basic definition of the word transparency is just one salvo in the war on language. A DOJ directive orders that undocumented immigrants should now be called aliens. site honoring Stonewall, an important place for the LGBTQ movement, no longer references trans people. Terms like hate speech, multiculturalism, and oppression have been deleted from a host of federal websites. And then there's the executive order on the quote-unquote weaponization of government.
Donald Trump has used executive orders to lay out the groundwork for his future plans for retribution via opening investigations into his perceived political enemies. One executive order in particular titled Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government stands out.
Up is down, black is white. The day one executive order restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship apparently did not apply this week when the White House barred an Associated Press reporter from attending an event at the Oval Office. office. The reason the naming of the Gulf of Mexico, this is coming after President Trump's order to rename it the Gulf of America. At time of recording the AP with its careful style guide and editorial policies has.
not yet capitulated to the president's lexicon. What about Google? Google map users now see Gulf of America, formerly known here and everywhere as Gulf of Mexico. Google says its policy is to change names when they have been updated by official government sources. Across the internet, the administration's crackdown on language has been used as a pretense to take thousands of government webpages offline.
Tonight officials at the USDA have ordered the removal of climate change information from the department's public website. The USDA had included extensive resources on climate science and strategies for farmers. The NSA is about to hit delete on a ton of websites and internal content. Just because they contain 27 banned words. Words like privilege, bias, inclusion, and even confirmation bias. The NSA uses words like privilege in cybersecurity. Privilege escalation is a hacking term.
Even reliable information on policies that the Trump administration supports is hard to come by. Take the mass deportation effort from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. One of the big questions I think a lot of reporters have right now is actually how many arrests have there been. Dara Kerr is a tech reporter at The Guardian.
She recently wrote about something very strange happening on Google. When she typed in search terms like Georgia ice raid or Maryland ice arrests. The very top Google search results will be an ice press release. talking about some major arrest or raid in that area. I did it for Louisiana, and I got a hit saying 123 people arrested in New Orleans. Colorado, there's a press release for 85 people who are arrested. Wisconsin, ice arrests, 83 criminal aliens was the headline.
The press release headlines appear to be from 2025, but if you actually click on the search results, you'll see that that operation in Colorado, which took place over four days, happened in November 2010. And those 123 people targeted in New Orleans, that was a year ago in February last year. And the 83 people arrested in Wisconsin, September 2018.
And you can do this anywhere, every state, every major city, even small cities. A lot of times people will see that headline, they may not click through. And even if they do click through, they might not actually look at the original date that it was published. Because of all these press releases were updated to 2025.
That would give them another boost to the top of the algorithm. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a common technique to make links show up higher in Google results. Dara could not confirm that ICE did this intentionally to trick people. since it didn't respond to her request for comment. And Biden also. But it's kind of like a flipping, rewriting history on its head, grabbing old history and making it new again.
I want to leave you with one more example of the current war on good, timely information. Right-wing attacks on another source that also ranks near the top on Google search, Wikipedia. The richest person in the world. Elon Musk has made himself an enemy of Wikipedia, and he claims it's because he's opposed to the woke. The woke mind virus! Much of his early concerns about Wikipedia centered around articles that spoke about him or his companies where he didn't feel he was being portrayed fairly.
Molly White is an independent journalist and author of the Citation Needed newsletter. She's also a Wikipedia editor. Whether it was articles not describing him as a founder of Tesla, but instead as an early investor, or articles describing him as prone to repeating conspiracy theories, he was clearly very angry at how he was being. described on the website.
Last month, after Musk's article was updated to include information about how far-right figures were celebrating what they perceived to be his Nazi salute at Trump's inauguration, he posted on X, writing, until balance is restored. Before that, he shared a conspiracy theory video alleging a cover-up of Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. They're deleting Epstein connections off of Wikipedia right now. I was working on something for a little documentary today.
and went to go and look at Bill Clinton's Wikipedia page to get the number of times he flew on Epstein's plane. And it turns out that Epstein is only mentioned one time on Bill Clinton's Wikipedia page. They have taken an event in which an editor moved a portion of the very long article about Bill Clinton to a related article about
Bill Clinton's sexual assault and misconduct allegations, and also to post-presidency of Bill Clinton, both of which are linked from the primary page about Bill Clinton. And this is very common on Wikipedia, where extremely long articles are split into sub-articles to try to make them more readable and accessible to readers. I went to the Wayback Machine and found out when did they delete all of this. There used to be a whole section about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Elon Musk has reposted this claim repeatedly, even though far before Elon Musk re-shared this video, the content was actually restored to the primary article. More recently, the foreword, a Jewish-American outlet, reported on leaked PowerPoint slides from the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025, demonstrating its plan to target Wikipedia editors for alleged anti-Semitism.
It seems that the Heritage Foundation is attempting to both intimidate Wikipedia editors to be less likely to edit and also to actively go after Wikipedia editors who they would like to see facing. real-world consequences for their volunteer activities. What do you think is at stake for the free and open internet? if they succeed in bullying the Wikimedia community into submission. I think a lot is at stake.
I think it's very clear that the Trump administration, including Elon Musk, are very keen on rewriting history, on limiting access to information to people that they disagree with.
really controlling the narrative in the media. And I think they see Wikipedia as a threat to that effort. And I think that... as we're seeing the quality of information that was once available from the U.S. government degrade, and as we're seeing more media organizations bow to pressure and legal threats and other threats.
from the administration right now. Projects like Wikipedia are going to be only more important. Molly, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Molly White is author of the newsletter Citation Needed. and an editor at Wikipedia. Coming up, a look at reality bending for political power in times past. This is On The Media. Next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour, are we on the brink of a constitutional crisis? I think we could very well be there. We're at the Rubicon.
Whether we've crossed it is yet to be determined. If the Trump administration decides to openly defy a judicial order, then I think we're there. The head of the ACLU, Anthony Romero, on fighting Donald Trump in the courts. Next time. on the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. In the third week of the Trump administration's ongoing endeavor to revise history, the focus stays fixed on government corruption.
This week in the Oval Office, Elon Musk again claimed, without evidence, that Doge was finding malfeasance all over the place. Some federal workers were just rolling in dough. But just there seems to be mysteriously they get wealthier. We don't know why. Where does it come from? And I think the reality is that they're getting wealthy at taxpayer expense. That's the honest truth of it.
Meanwhile, Musk's companies are being investigated by the departments of defense, justice, transportation, agriculture, the interior, and a heap of agencies, many of which have gone under his doge knife. Even as he continues... to enrich himself through numerous government contracts. Also this week, the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams without judging the merits of the case. So the prosecution could proceed later.
If, and this has been pretty explicit, Adams isn't tough enough in the pursuit of undocumented immigrants, thus holding him essentially hostage by the White House. Many lawyers quit, including the top attorney. In the case, Trump appointee Danielle Sassoon, an avowed conservative, a member of the Federalist Society, no less, who refused to dismiss the case because it would set a, quote, breathtaking and dangerous precedent.
All this, while the president, apparently still sore about all those felonies on his record, continues to reverse laws against corruption, like the one that prevents American businessmen from bribing foreign governments. and expunge the records of criminals with the scritch, scritch, scritch of the presidential Sharpie.
Good. It's my honor to do it. Notably exonerated this week was former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who had served eight years of a 14-year sentence for trying to sell the Senate seat held by Barack Obama. prior to his election as president. I've watched him. He was set up by a lot of bad people, some of the same people that I had to deal with. It was a sort of a terrible injustice. They just were after him. I mean, I've got this thing and it's
Blagojevich on the phone bragging about his scheme to sell the Senate seat. And I'm just not giving it up for f***ing nothing. I'm not going to do it. And I can always parachute use it if I could parachute me there. I thought I'd have read about that. You know, there's life after that if I do it. Blago, as he was called, was also convicted of shaking down a children's hospital exec for campaign contributions, installing a bill involving the horse racing industry in search of same.
In between trials, NBC News reminds us, Blagojevich was a contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice. So, Governor, you have a hell of a lot of guts, I have to tell you that. I have friends where things have happened to them. They crawl into a corner, they die, you're out there punching. So I respect that. I appreciate that. History shows that making the dirty clean and the clean dirty is standard procedure for authoritarians on the rise. Another tactic involves getting rid of inconvenient images.
Soon after Trump took office last month, the Pentagon removed portraits of previous Trump appointees, Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, newly appointed Attorney General. Pam Bondi removed big portraits of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Merrick Garland from DOJ walls, which he has every right to do. But just wondering...
Jason Stanley is a Yale philosophy professor who studied the authoritarian playbook. Jason, does this ring any bells? Well, famously, Lennon's speech on May 5th, 1920. in Moscow to Soviet troops had Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenov in the foreground. The photo was later doctored. Trotsky and Kamenov were removed. So this altering... of history is characteristic of authoritarian regimes, and particularly the removal of photos is an iconic image from the Soviet era.
Stalin did that constantly. He also put himself in pictures sometimes. I just wonder, what does it mean? Is it just you're starting year one? An authoritarian regime has to construct a mythical past. that glorifies its struggles to gain power, glorifies reversals, and then represents them as ultimately a path to success.
Last year, you published a book called Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Let's lay aside the F word for now and just talk about the history of rewriting history. Not every incident needs to set your hair on fire, right? No, but if you think about what your sort of cartoon vision of an authoritarian society is, it's a certain... path through history. It's what we might call a patriotic path, one that venerates the nation.
as singular and great. In Mein Kampf, Hitler speaks a lot about patriotic education. And he says, Germans have forgotten the art of picking the great men from their past and showing that they represent the greatness of the German nation, aiming the education system not at understanding the history of a country, but rather on venerating and worshiping it.
This is authoritarian education. This is how you transform your education system that will lead people to regard critical voices as unpatriotic and threats. Today. In Russia, there's actually a film about this called Mr. Nobody. You see the transition to the extreme patriotic education now centered in Russian schools. Vladimir Putin said, and it's shown in this film,
Wars are won by teachers. You wrote that for wannabe authoritarians, history, the courts, and education are all necessary conquests. So let's talk about... how authoritarian regimes, you say, find history profoundly threatening, even when it's not about them. Because if we look at a Russian organization known as Memorial, they're gathering history together, they're collecting documents, and Putin put a stop to it.
But it wasn't about Putin. It was about Stalin's crimes. And he completely smashed the organization, put its leaders in prison. What Putin wants to do is represent Russia as great. And the Soviet Union is part of that narrative of greatness. Under the Soviet Union, Ukraine was a part of the empire. And so Putin wants to reach back. to the previous czars and leaders of the empire who conquered the places he wants to conquer and placed them on a pedestal.
So if you're going around documenting Stalin's crimes that, by the way, look to some in many respects like the crimes Putin is committing and wants to commit. That is threatening to anyone who wants to imitate Stalin. And you've argued that this impulse to delete inconvenient history isn't exactly a new reflex in the United States. We really need to understand.
the history of the rewriting of Reconstruction, because we're seeing those same tactics again. So Reconstruction was that brief era after the Civil War when Black Americans in the South were... allowed to vote and hold political office. So for instance, when I went to school in the 70s and 80s, you would always talk about
the first black congressperson from the South since Reconstruction. That was a standard thing to say. Those of us of my age will remember that. Reconstruction ended because they said black politicians were corrupt. and incompetent. The attacks on DEI are extremely evocative of that. They're saying any Black person in power has gotten there because of these programs. This is exactly the narrative that ended
the Black vote in the South in the 1870s. And it's extremely concerning that we're seeing the exact same tactics again. Maybe back up a little because listeners may have a gut reaction from comparisons of America today to Nazi Germany or even Jim Crow. Come on. Given that we ourselves had a society in which large swaths of us were not allowed to vote, and that not voting and prevention of Black Americans from holding positions of power.
was held in place by the erasure of history and making up myths. We don't need to look abroad for these strategies and tactics. They held in place a white racial regime in the South until the... mid-1960s, when most other countries had given up those kinds of things, including Germany. You've spent a lot of time studying not just authoritarianism, but the descent into it. Where do you think...
America as it is now stands compared to, say, Putin's Russia or Hungary under Viktor Orban. They're explicitly imitating Viktor Orban. He's venerated by the people now in power. So we know to expect a lot of what has happened in Hungary, and we're seeing it already. We're seeing the media being threatened, seeing the... ... ... ... ... ... It was a completely spurious lawsuit, but it looks like they're going to settle with him, essentially a bribe.
That kind of thing is very Hungary. Using the organs of the state to bring the universities to heal, to target the education system. Patriotic education system is now the rule in Hungary. The elementary schools and high schools.
schools have classes that are just basically nonsense. So we are now in a situation, probably close to where Hungary is, not anywhere near where Putin's Russia is, where they're actually putting people in prison and murdering them just for being in the opposition or just for being critical voices. You were warning last year of the effects of a Trump White House on education. On January 29th, he signed an executive order on ending radical indoctrination and K-12 schooling.
And he demanded that patriotic education be taught to kids. The patriotic education move is a classic authoritarian move. What's meant here is erasing the nation's sins. Look at Alternative für Deutschland, the German far-right party that's gaining ground. Their goal is to, as it were, make Germany great again, to remove... the focus on Nazi evil from the schools so people think of what the Nazis did, not...
in uniformly bad terms, nor as particularly significant in German history. As Musk said when he spoke to the off day, The German people are really an ancient nation, goes back thousands of years. Julius Caesar's first encountering the German tribes in the Gallic campaigns, and he was like, wow, it's very impressive. These are very powerful. Obviously, those German tribes didn't include Jews. So that is an explicit hearkening back to a kind of Aryan...
past. And what we have is something similar here, a call to cease teaching about the horrors of chattel slavery, to cease teaching about the end of Reconstruction and Jim Crow America, to cease teaching certainly about its downstream effects like the large racial wealth gap that persists and school segregation and residential segregation that persists from our nation's past. The idea is to say we are
the greatest nation in history. We didn't make terrible mistakes. Any mistakes we made, we quickly solved. And then there are these critical voices. Call them the Democrats. who want us to sort of apologize and make up for things we supposedly did in the past, they're in fact traitors. You wrote that to resist the slide into cruelty is perhaps the most important educational goal of a people. What forms of education would be appropriate for such an endeavor?
We have to learn about each other's perspectives. A democracy is not a system simply where everyone votes. A democracy is a system where we vote informed by the perspectives of our fellow citizens. If a democracy was just everyone voting without an education about our country, then the majority would be a tyranny. They would simply impose their vision of the country again and again on anyone who wasn't in the majority. So a democratic education...
education system gives us a window into the past and present of our fellow citizens. That's why if you want to attack democracy, you remove other perspectives. And then you can represent minority groups as threatening rather than understandable. You said that political equality, which is what you want in a democracy, requires those bodies of knowledge. Political equality is not just each of us having a vote. Political equality is each of us being a participant in the national conversation.
You can see what's central to democracy by what they're targeting. If you go after women, if you diminish women's voices in agency, you're diminishing the voices of half the country. You're halfway there. to diminishing voices to just a few. Authoritarianism is all about... eliminating equality and freedom. Democracy is the practice of realizing equality and freedom. And what critical race theory does, what gender studies does, what labor history does, is they say, look at all of this.
inequality in the past and in the present that democratic practice needs to address. If you erase that history, then you remove the impetus for the practice of democracy. What is the good of examining all this history on the antithesis of democracy when democracy will still vote it into power? This is the paradox of democracy. Democracy gives the very weapons to destroy it to those who wish its end, as Goebbels pointed out. So this is not new.
happened in the run-up to the election is there was a lot of scoffing. at so-called alarmism. Scoffing came from some of the biggest media organizations, including the New York Times, and it came from unexpected sources like the left. Now, all that anti-alarmism, that... attack on calling it fascism, I think that now looks antiquated. But is it true? I mean, now, at this time?
Is it true? Yes. It's almost comically fact. I mean, the reinventing the past, the rewriting of January 6th, the rewriting history, the use of government to just simply... Enrich the people who support it. Corruption is the rule. The idea is that anyone who's not a follower of the leader, they're the corrupt ones. And if you are a follower of the leader, you get whatever you want. That's Putin's Russia.
That's Orban's Hungary. That's just how authoritarianism works. And the firing of the inspectors general. It's characteristic of a number of kinds of authoritarianism to represent. politically neutral organizations as biased against you because the rule of law is biased against you if you're a criminal. So what you do is you say, hey,
Those courts that were holding me accountable for the things that I did, the bad business dealings, the overthrow of the government, whatever you did that was clearly criminal, they're biased against me. And so we have to get rid of them. Because the only rule of law from now on is me. Jason, thank you very much. Thank you, Brooke. Jason Stanley is the author of Erasing History, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future.
Coming up, the president says Christians are suffering in America, a durable narrative that, lacking evidence, seems to rest entirely on faith. This is On The Media. This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We end our episode on the rewriting of history with a narrative that has drawn far less attention than it deserves, given its great political heft. And that is the story. of Christianity under siege, fighting for its very life in these United States.
President Donald Trump says he wants to root out, quote, anti-Christian bias in the US. The mission of this task force will be to immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government. including at the DOJ, which was absolutely terrible, the IRS, the FBI, terrible, and other agencies. The fact is, Christians are persecuted in places like Afghanistan and India, but on these hallowed shores, they are relatively footloose and fancy-free.
We've just seen a surge in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crime incidences. Matthew D. Taylor is a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. And we don't know Trump. arguing that we need to have a task force on eradicating anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. So this is a way of enshrining a certain form of Christian privilege and Christian power in the U.S.
But the story of Christian victimhood is hardly new. Quite the contrary. It's been putting a righteous gloss on less-than-saintly behavior for at least a thousand years. After the Roman Empire has been effectively Christian... Christians start using the history of persecution to justify their violence against those who are not members of their own religious groups.
Candida Moss, theology professor at the University of Birmingham, is author of The Myth of Persecution, How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. As an outsider looking at it, one might say, how can one... both be the most dominant religious group and also victims. But in a way, this is how Christianity flourished.
From the early church onwards, when Christianity succeeded and converted the Roman emperor, that was a sign that they were protected by God. But when Christians were persecuted, which some really were, that was also... And that's really what's being invoked when someone like President Trump says that he's the greatest president ever, but also that he's a victim.
Matthew D. Taylor is familiar with the different kinds of Christians represented in the new administration and what lies behind the president's frequent claim that his faith is under threat. In the U.S., I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that there's any sort of widespread anti-Christian bias given that Christians make up two-thirds of the population. Do the Christians around Trump really believe that they're under fire?
Yes, many Christians believe that Christianity is under fire in the United States. We'll sometimes talk about this as the problem of vulnerable majorities. And up until 1990, 90% or more of Americans were identifying as Christian. That's down to about 66% today. So when majorities perceive that their power is slipping away, you can very easily have a backlash. And we see this in places like India.
today, where close to 80% of the population is Hindu, but— There's all kinds of discourse about Hindu phobia used rhetorically and in propaganda to justify attacks on Muslim minorities. often go unpunished by the government. And so when you have a religious majority that claims persecution, that's often the setup for them to actually persecute other people. Let's talk about the task force.
The president seems to have laid the foundation stone of what you call the new Christian nationalist infrastructure.
This is something that Trump was promising throughout the campaign, especially when he spoke in front of particularly Christian audiences. He would promise Christians more power. He would promise them vengeance. He would promise them retribution. So this is... a way of enshrining a certain form of Christian privilege and Christian power, and that is the agenda of Christian nationalism, to blend the identity of the United States with Christian identity.
So let's talk about what's going on inside Trump's wheelhouse. You've pointed to a series of photos he's taken since he first ran for president in 2015 being prayed over by a group of faith leaders. There was just... another one earlier this month. Tell me what he's trying to convey. By now, there are dozens of these photos. They often are set in the cabinet room or the Oval Office. Almost always Trump is seated.
And you have the leaders arrayed around him in a sort of semicircle. It's very clearly posed, right? And it has become part of the iconography of Christian Trumpism, a way of baptizing his agenda. And these Christians are on Trump's religious advisory board, right?
Yeah, there have been different iterations of these boards. They've all been led by Paula White Cain, and she is what we would call an independent charismatic or non-denominational charismatic megachurch pastor. She's a televangelist. That was actually how she got to know Trump. He saw her preaching on. television in 2002. And she has been the ringleader of the spiritual and religious advisors who surround Trump, almost all of them.
are Christian. I think there's been one Chabad rabbi who has gotten linked into there over the last 10 years, and the lion's share of them do come out of these more Pentecostal charismatic traditions. And it's also the sect that... originated the Cyrus prophecy about Trump, that he is the flawed but chosen leader by God. This was one of the first of these charismatic prophecies that...
presents him as this figure of destiny who has come to save the United States. And I'll just note that within the 2024 campaign, especially Trump really leaned into that. You heard it in his acceptance speech on election night. Many people have told... So this independent, charismatic Christian sect makes up...
One branch of the Christian nationalists who seem to be jockeying for power around Trump, but you've named other groups that want influence. One of them is a faction of Christian nationalists that the Secretary of Defense fence Pete Hegseth belongs to. Yeah, this is a group of Calvinist theologians and pastors. They're from a very kind of hard-line form of evangelical Protestantism. They're often called the Theobros. They're bros because this is a very male. I don't know.
Yes, extremely male-driven, very patriarchal. In fact, they're almost all young in their 30s, 40s, 50s. They almost all have big beards. And some of these pastors have come out arguing that the 19th Amendment needs to be repealed and that women should... no longer have the right to vote. They often have more of an enclave.
sensibility where they want to incubate their vision of a Christian society in particular localities. One of the major ones today is in Moscow, Idaho, under one of the real figureheads of this movement today, a guy named Doug Wilson, who actually helps co-lead the church. that Pete Hegseth belongs to. And Pete Hegseth getting elevated to the position that he's in, I think, was a surprising opportunity for them. They have access to Trump.
in many ways for the first time. And I think they are trying to exploit that as much as they possibly can. You've called them the antithesis of the separation of church and state. Yeah, they would even venture to probably say that the state should be subordinate to the church, or at least that they should be equal powers in coordination.
in Christianizing society, and they often will talk about the idea of the Christian magistrate or the Christian prince, where there's one strong ruler who implements this Christian vision from the top. So tell me a little bit about what J.D. Vance is up to. He's a Catholic convert, a trad Catholic. What does that mean?
There was a massive change that occurred in the life of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s. It was called the Second Vatican Council, often called Vatican II. And the radical traditionalist Catholics are a diverse group, but they're united in their... broad sweep rejection of the reforms of Vatican II. They also tend to really rely heavily on the theology and philosophy of this medieval theologian named Thomas Aquinas. It's a powerful movement.
even though much more under the radar. You have Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who's been... carefully placing judges and officials in state governments. You have Peter Thiel, a billionaire tech bro, I guess, who is one of Vance's strong supporters. They don't have much role in the circle of his religious advisors.
Their real entry point into the administration right now is especially through J.D. Vance. And if you've noticed, within the last few weeks, J.D. Vance has gotten into some theological arguments publicly. He has seemingly embraced the role of court theologian. Yeah. He just got into a public spat with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, not exactly known for being a left-wing bunch. Tell me what happened. So, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops who, yes, tend to be fairly conservative.
in their cultural and theological outlook, but who are also informed by the broad Catholic tradition and Catholic social teaching and concern for the poor. They started, I would say, mildly pushing back. on the Trump administration, arguing that we need to show compassion to migrants, that the broad sweeping cuts through USAID are taking money out of many of these NGOs and charitable organizations around the world that are... serving the poor, and JD Vance clapped back at them.
I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns or are they actually... worried about their bottom line. Which is a remarkably cynical thing for a Catholic to say about the entire American hierarchy. And the bishops.
followed up with a statement saying that faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving. refugees. And then the Pope got involved. Francis is so upset about the Trump administration's immigration policies that he wrote a letter to American bishops criticizing Vice President J.D. Vance for using Catholic philosophy to defend their actions.
Christopher White at the National Catholic Reporter said that the Pope's letter in directly addressing policy was the first of its kind by a Pope. For about a century, Pope Francis said, what is built on the basis of force and not on the basis of truth about the equal dignity of every human being begins badly and will end badly. Yeah, I'm not Catholic, but for most of my friends who are Catholic, I think they would...
perceive a direct theological rebuke from the Pope as at least a moment to pause for reconsideration. I think that J.D. Vance, given the circles he travels in, might well wear that as a badge of honor. And with regard to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, they were much more powerful in the era of George W. Bush, which was a Christian right, but not like the one we have now.
I think if during the George W. Bush administration, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had publicly pushed back on something that was going on, the inclination, I imagine, would have been to bring them in and figure out what their concerns were.
they would have been seen as part of the coalition. Similarly, I think when Trump comes along and says that the US is just going to take over Gaza, I think that the Christian right of old would have balked at that. Yeah, I was struck by how quickly Trump did away with the PEPFAR program that was created by George W. Bush, universally celebrated for saving countless lives in Africa. This is a program against AIDS.
Yeah, say what you will about George W. Bush. PEPFAR was an incredible act of humanitarian aid and concern, and their Christian advisors don't seem to call them out or challenge them at all on that. We know that there are many Christians who oppose these actions. 27 religious groups, mostly Christian, have filed a federal lawsuit over the overturning of a policy that broadly restricted ICE.
for making arrests at churches. Even conservative Christians like the ones we've mentioned are bristling, you know, evangelical groups that have lost funding for their aid organizations. To what extent... Do these Christian supremacist factions around Trump represent American Christians more broadly? The Christian supremacists still represent a pretty narrow band.
of American Christians. If you went and pulled 100 Christians off the street, I would argue that many of the Christians who surround Donald Trump would be in the 98th or 99th percentile in terms of how hardline, aggressive, and extreme their theology is. There is a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute that found that Christian nationalism supporters are three in ten Americans. That strikes me as a big number.
It is. But again, when we talk about Christian nationalism, there's a spectrum there. There are people who will affirm certain points of Christian nationalism. Oh, yes, the United States should be a Christian nation. And when you ask them follow-up questions, okay, so you're saying that Congress should legislate biblical...
morality? Oh, no, no, no. We just want Christian values. And you're like, okay, well, which Christian values? You know, love and justice and service. Okay, I don't have a real problem with love and justice being part of our government. I think there are people who would even affirm versions of Christian nationalism who would look at some of the way that Trump is implementing these things and say, wow, that is going too far. Like encouraging ICE to make arrests at churches?
Yes, I mean, I am in touch with very conservative Christian leaders, many of whom know some of Trump's religious advisors, and they are messaging me and saying, how do we back channel, try to get this to be more moderate and not to be. targeting churches. Our people are afraid. And I respond to them and say, you have far more of a back channel than anyone I know. And they say, we tried. No one will listen. What about the potential conflicts between the independent?
Charismatic evangelicals praying over Trump versus the Theobros, the Hegseth Christians keeping women in the kitchen. And Vance's trad Catholicism, which derives its power. through lots of money and putting Christians in power. Is there any hint of conflict within Trump's Christian ranks? All indications are that Trump's core Christian supporters are jubilant.
right now. They're all against abortion. They're all against LGBTQ rights. They're all against pornography. They all want more Christianity taught in public schools. Where the rubber is going to meet the road is once they get over the hurdle of Christianizing America. Whose Christianity are they going to use? Right? Because underneath their unity around the things that they hate, they have very different theological frameworks. They have very different agendas.
I know that you've said that they once saw Trump as a vehicle to enact their agenda. And today, Trump is the agenda. Yeah, there's been a shift over the course of the last decade. The real low point for them came about a week after Donald Trump entered the presidential race when the Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell same-sex marriage decision.
They felt like they needed somebody who would be kind of a bare knuckle brawler, somebody who would fight on their behalf. And they saw Trump as a convenient vehicle. He was God's instrument of wrath. What has changed though over the last decade, and I think these prophecies about Trump have played a very important role in that, is they have come to see Trump not merely as a vehicle, but as an avatar. They've come to see him in
quasi-messianic terms. And as they have attached more and more of their spirituality to Trump, their religiosity has become very synchronized with the MAGA agenda. In the first Trump administration, some of his religious advisors, especially some of the Latino ones, started privately pushing back on Trump and saying, you're using all this anti-immigrant rhetoric. These are human beings. Can we have some compassion here? Some of those same advisors.
Don't say a peep, even as Trump's rhetoric now has become far, far more aggressive and harsh. And I think it started out that Trump was going to be their vehicle, and now they're his vehicle. Thank you so much, Matt. Thank you, Brooke. Matthew D. Taylor is a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. He's also the author of the book, The Violent Take It by Force, The Christian Movement That is Threatening Our Democracy.
That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, Candice Wong, and Katerina Barton. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ohinger.