Weekly Roundup: Trump's Bizarre Town Hall Mental Breakdown
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In this episode of the weekly roundup, Brad and Dan analyze Donald Trump's unconventional town hall in Pennsylvania and his ties to the New Apostolic Reformation. They explore the emotional and nostalgic appeal of Christian Trumpism, including Trump's influence on reproductive rights issues within the GOP. The discussion includes Kamala Harris's media strategy, the public's reaction to Trump's behavior, and the complexities of emotional manipulation in political and religious contexts. Key topics also cover the Million Woman March, Trump's self-proclamation as the 'father of IVF,' and recent judicial decisions on voting regulations.
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Axis Mundi During a Monday town hall in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump stopped taking questions and began to dance.
He played his favorite playlist of songs and stood on stage for a confusing 25 or 30 minutes.
Those behind him tried to play up the antics as normal and expected and even celebratory.
Those in the audience were mixed.
Some were confused and left.
Others played alone.
Just a few days before Trump's Pennsylvania breakdown, there was what was touted as a million-woman march on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. This was a New Apostolic Reformation event attended by the luminaries of the N.A.R., Chae An, Lou Engel, Lance Wallnau, and many others.
It was a day when Christian Trumpists prayed for Trump to return to the White House, calling for a nation to be saved from her apocalypse if he doesn't.
The crescendo was Che On's apostolic decree, casting Trump as Jehu and Kamala Harris as Jezebel.
And I want all the apostles and prophets to stand behind me because I want to make a decree.
And I'm decreeing this by faith.
I believe when Jonathan Cahn says that Trump is a type of Jehu and Kamala Harris is a type of Jezebel.
And as you know, Jehu cast out Jezebel.
I took one of the stones and I went over the edge and I threw that stone into the trash can because it was a prophetic act for me because I'm ready to make this decree.
So I decree in Jesus' mighty name and I decree it by faith that Trump will win on November the 5th.
He will be our 47th president and Kamas Harris will be cast out and she will lose in Jesus' might name.
Now give a shout offering of faith.
Come on, let's declare this.
But you gotta vote.
You gotta be activists as well.
How can it be possible?
For so many religious people, or any person, to think of Trump who had a clear mental breakdown on stage to be the chosen instrument of God, the supreme leader, the one who will restore the nation to its greatness.
Today we break down these seemingly incoherent threads and try to make sense what appears on its face to be senseless.
In addition, we look at comments by Trump and others in the GOP about IVF.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is the Straight White American Jesus Weekly Roundup.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Friday, as we inch closer to the election, here with Dan Miller.
Dan Miller, how are you?
Who are you?
Where do you work?
What's going on?
I'm alright.
We talk about inching toward the election, and I'm getting, I'll be honest, I'm getting to that point where, like, I felt safer when it was further away, because we're getting close to, like, you know, the actual moment.
But anyway, that's my name, and that's how I'm doing, feeling anxiety and stuff.
I am a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and It is getting close.
People are voting.
Georgia is breaking voting records for almost on a daily basis here.
People are voting in other states.
I want to just say I am also getting anxious.
It hit me today that we have about, you know, whatever it is, two and a half weeks, and it's all coming.
So a moment of levity before we go there.
You are a noted metalhead, and everyone in the Discord is giving you all kinds of great encouragement on that.
I am not, but I want you to know that as you spend the first two and a half hours of my day making kids lunches, feeding a baby oatmeal, preparing diaper bags, I just got to ask real quick, is it feeding the baby oatmeal or attempting to feed the baby oatmeal?
Because those things are often related.
It's a mix of both.
And as I was driving home in my minivan from daycare today, like after what already felt like a full day of doing things, I wanted to get pumped up for this and other things.
So I did listen to Enter Sandman by Metallica.
And was definitely that 43-year-old man in a minivan where you pull up to the stoplight and you look over and he's just blasting inter-Sandman, trying to relive some sense of being out on the range and really pursuing life with all of its fearlessness and viciousness.
So there you go, Dan.
You're an inspiration to me as a parent and as a person.
Well, good.
Yeah.
Glad I could be there for you.
So, yeah.
Do you want any other recommendations?
We don't.
Nope.
Nope.
We're done.
All right.
You're like, nope.
Inner Sandman's it.
We're done.
Just kidding.
All right.
We're going to get to Trump and his bizarre town hall breakdown.
Going to link that to the Million Woman March that happened this week and the Apostolic Decree by Che Aung and the NAR as an emblem of Christian Trumpism.
Then we'll go to some comments that I think actually, Dan, have largely gone under the radar due to other news and other things because there's no way to keep an eye on everything.
And that is Trump's comments about being the father of IVF and what that sort of says about this whole rambling, strange approach to reproductive rights that the GOP has taken since the fall of Roe.
So let's talk about what happened on Monday.
Monday.
Trump has a town hall style kind of event, and he's supposed to take questions.
However, he spent about 40 minutes swaying to his favorite songs.
They played his hit list, Dan.
And look, I just mentioned Enter Sandman.
We all have our list.
I have another playlist on my library, Dan, that just says Feels.
And sometimes I get in there on my feelings, and I play these songs.
I might have an 80s power balance playlist.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, you know, you've got them.
Look, we all have, look, that's fine, okay?
It's like the guilty pleasure playlist.
It's the one that, like, you don't make public because, you know, you kind of don't want people to know.
Yeah.
It's fair.
Nobody's in the car.
Yep.
Kids are in bed.
Am I listening to Billie Eilish from the Barbie-like soundtrack?
Maybe.
Don't worry about it.
It's not a big deal, okay?
Yeah.
Coldplay?
Every rose has its thorn, Brad.
Coldplay from 25 years ago?
I don't know.
Don't ask me about it.
Okay, so he listens to his favorite songs, and he just says, who wants to take questions?
Let's listen to music.
Let's make it into a music.
Who the hell wants to hear questions?
That's what he said.
A nine-song playlist ensued that include James Brown, It's a Man's Man's Man's World, The Village People's YMCA. A lot of irony there.
Don't even need to comment.
Nothing Compares to You by Sinead O'Connor.
Irony everywhere with Sinead O'Connor.
Luciano Pavarotti's- Sinead O'Connor, big fan of the Catholic Church, Sinead O'Connor, yeah.
But Dan, this is how you know it's like someone's personal playlist that they should have in public, because it goes from James Brown to Pavarotti's rendition of Ave Maria.
This is a total mashup here, okay?
So- Everybody noticed that this was a clear mental breakdown.
That if this had been any other person in the world, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi.
Doesn't matter.
That there would have been calls immediately to say their health, their mental acuity is not such that they can be in this race any longer.
Now, this coincided, Dan, with a number of events that showed Kamala Harris on the offensive.
She went and spoke to Brett Baer at Fox News and Baer...
Really fumbled the bag, and we can talk about that if you want, but it was not a good look by Bear, constantly interrupting her.
Nonetheless, she handled it.
She continues to go places that people don't expect, to sit down for interviews.
There's talks that she's going to be on Joe Rogan here pretty soon.
I have a kind of analysis piece to Trump breaking down that comes from our friend Matthew Remsky.
But let me get your initial thoughts on this before we get analytical.
Well, one is, so the defenders of Trump are going to say, you know, there was like a pause because there was a medical emergency, somebody needed medical care in the crowd or, you know, whatever.
Okay.
Yeah.
I think probably you.
I know I have.
Probably everybody has been in some sort of public event where they're like, whoa, hold on a second.
Like, something's going on.
Or, you know, the person on the stage is like, can we clear a little space?
You know, I don't know.
Somebody gets overheated.
Somebody, like, whatever.
You pause for a few minutes.
You act like a human with empathy and stuff and say, you know, wow, I hope they're okay.
Something.
Something.
You don't, like, burst into song and do your, like, I'm in the shower alone dance for 40 minutes.
Like, so the point is, even if there's some instigating factor of, like, you know, that disrupted the flow of this, okay, but the response is weird.
The response is off the...
The affect is, like, all of that is, I think, the piece that you're getting at.
So, like, I just don't need people to come at me, oh, you're ignoring the context.
Cool.
Speakers, musicians, entertainers, everybody all the time has had things where, like, something is going on and they've got to pause for a minute.
You let the people do what they're going to do and you don't be like, I guess we're done.
No more questions.
Let's dance.
Like, you know, that's the part that's weird.
And here's the other one.
I know that the people on the right keep trying—I don't know if you've run into this, I've run into this—where somehow or another, because Joe Biden had all the issues that he had with mental acuity and so forth, Trump is now supposed to be off-limits for critics of Trump.
You get that thing of like, well, you didn't like it when we picked on Biden, so you shouldn't say stuff about Trump.
You're like— We got our dude off the ticket.
Collectively, that is what people who were behind Biden or oppose Trump did.
They said, this isn't going to work.
We need to go a different direction.
And they did that.
So don't give me the nonsense about there's some weird double standard here.
We dealt with that.
People who supported Biden dealt with that.
His allies dealt with that.
The Democratic Party dealt with that.
So those are the pieces of it, I think, that stand out to me.
Because I think everything you're giving is like, that would be the transparent, obvious reading if it was anybody but Donald Trump.
And so on the right, what I run into are those two basic lines of like, you're ignoring the context or like, oh, look at you.
You didn't like it when we made fun of Biden.
Now you're whatever.
No, we switched that guy.
Like, all of that's irrelevant.
So I think that's the piece of it for me is just clearing the ground and be like, let's just look at this with clear eyes.
It's a weird response.
It's a response that doesn't fit, you know, to...
Sorry, I'm really wrapped up in this.
The whole, like, medical emergency...
Let's say that there is.
Who dances during that?
Who is like, here's the response.
Let's listen to a bunch of my favorite songs and dance around while there's somebody potentially needing medical care or whatever, you know?
Yeah, lots of things like that, but I'm with you.
I think if it was anybody but Trump...
It would be getting a lot of attention.
I mean, imagine if this is Biden.
Imagine if Biden had done this before he stepped out.
The entire world of the right would have been on fire about it.
So Trump is a man who has to be reminded often that someone died during the attempted assassination on his life in Pennsylvania.
He often forgets that.
And there's been several times people have had to bring that up to him in public.
You do know that here's the family right here of the gentleman who died.
So don't tell me that there was a medical emergency and he turned into Mr.
Empath and was just super, super concerned.
I want to turn to Matthew Remski of the Conspirituality Podcast, who I really respect as an analyst and a journalist, and in fact, will be at an event that we're having online next week with Susanna Crockford about conspiracies and misinformation in the elections.
It's free.
Welcome to my show!
And so they think that their core memories of pleasure, the dancing, the music, will make their power and soul transparent and accessible to their followers.
Matthew says, yes, it's weird.
And the Trump campaign has not really explained itself because the logic is a sealed system.
And this is where I think it gets really interesting.
The logic is a sealed system.
Believers lose themselves in the choruses.
Handlers know there's nothing they can do but keep him propped up.
Christy Noem, the governor of South Dakota who was part of this event and on stage with Trump as it happened, knows her inner circle status depends on staying bright-eyed.
The leader of the group I was in, Matthew says, for three years maintained a Trump campaign-like schedule of daily two-hour sermons.
Over the years, he increasingly relied on his DJ to fill the room with emotional overwhelm whenever he gapped out.
He was 78 too.
So, there's a bunch here from Matthew, but I think one of the things that's really interesting is that you have somebody who, in Trump, is trying to go to these core memories and feelings.
And I want to just stay on this word feeling.
That he may not have much to say.
He may not have the mental fortitude or strength or reserves to say much that day.
He may have not wanted to take questions because it's hard to answer questions.
And if you've ever been on stage and somebody asks you questions about your work or what you've argued, it's not easy.
It's a lot of pressure.
So the music is a way for comfort and it's a way to emanate who he is and the power that he is supposed to represent to everyone involved.
Matthew goes on to say this.
It may be helpful to keep in mind for Trump followers, the default to pure emotionality can be effective right up until the end.
That Trump, Dan, has never been about what he really is.
It's about how he makes you feel.
It's about what he represents.
You've commented many times about the Trump shirts that have him with the Rambo body or the Arnold Schwarzenegger body.
And, you know, or Trump in the armed services, even though he never served.
And Matthew's explaining that.
He's saying, look, it's about pure emotionality.
He made you feel like he was the barbarian fighting for you, the king who would chop off the heads of those infidels at the gates.
He made you feel certain something.
This is where DeSantis never lived up to the game.
This is where J.D. Vance is just falling flat.
This is why Cruz, Huckabee, and Rubio have never really been able to dislodge Trump.
The pure emotionality is the point.
And so if you're in this sealed system of Trump following, even if he's just dancing aimlessly on stage, he still represents this power, this promise, this idea of victory, this idea of safety, this idea of a resolution to you and all of your problems.
And so as Matthew says, there are some in the crowd who get uncomfortable and they leave early.
But for those who are really caught up in Trumpism, The 30 minutes of music and reverie might feel like the most direct and intimate contact they've ever had with him.
I want to come back to this because this is going to allow me, Dan, to make a Schleiermacher reference, which I have been waiting for all morning.
But before the Schleiermacher reference...
Because who doesn't wake up being like, God, I wish I could make a Schleiermacher.
Sometimes, Dan, I think, was eight years of grad school worth it?
And then I think every three years or so, I get to make a comment in a conversation where I say, you know, that strikes me as something reminiscent of Schleiermacher.
How does that hit you?
Because to me, it's Schleiermacherian.
Do you agree?
And just being able to say those sentences reminds me I've done something with my life.
What do you think about Matthew's take on all of this?
I think there's a lot to it.
And all I'm going to say is, that's what the entire MAGA movement is.
Make America great what?
Again.
And we've talked about this for years.
It resonates...
Why does it resonate not only, I wish it was only, but primarily with older white men?
That's the core demographic of the GOP and Trump at present.
It's because the entire appeal to Make America Again appeals to emotion.
It appeals to nostalgia.
It appeals to this kind of imagined time when America was simpler.
Every time Uncle Ron or your grandma remembers, well, growing up when I was there, no, there weren't any transgender people.
No, there were.
You just didn't know.
But yes, things felt simpler.
All the gay people were closeted.
And the trans people safely went around playing really burly sports so they could try to mask the fact that they weren't comfortable with who they are.
And all the black people in your town stayed on the right side of town and didn't mix too much.
And we can imagine this We're good to go.
Or he's right, maybe I should say, in this analysis about the role of this and what that plays.
I think another piece of this that touched on there at the end is that feeling of closeness or intimacy with Trump.
Trump's followers have always had that, too.
You remember the whole thing when, like, you know, in the first his term, when in those first years when they would complain about, like, you know, he didn't have a press secretary and he didn't do, you know, and I think that role of
emotion and emotionality...
Is core to the MAGA movement and always has been.
And so, yeah, I think that's why those of us who are not part of that, who don't experience those emotions when we encounter Trump, see this and are like, this is really weird and strange.
Why don't they see that?
I think it's a real piece of the puzzle here.
It brings me back to—and this is where I think you and I can comment on this as former insiders—it brings me back to my evangelical days.
And the reason I was making that Schleiermacher reference earlier was because Schleiermacher—and folks, don't look this up.
If you don't know about Schleiermacher, don't look it up.
It's fine.
But he had this theology in the 19th century of pure feeling, that what was important about Christianity was an unmediated feeling of relationship to God or the divine.
And evangelicals since then have hated this.
They've said this is the worst of liberal, mucky-muck Christianity.
It's about belief.
It's about strength.
It's about living by very strict rules.
Like, we don't just feel.
Right, Dan?
We live it out.
I mean, do you remember this in your evangelical days?
But on the other hand, evangelicalism is so much about feeling.
I mean, Dan, every time you go...
At least I did as a teenager, as a young man, to like a Thursday night Bible study with 20 people in a room and candles and a guitar, and we would sing and pray songs for two, three hours.
Being in that room felt like I was in a cocoon of divine safety, and it felt like pure emotionality, as Matthew said.
I'll go just slightly further and say that, you know, that feeling—you know, for those of us of a certain generation, a certain age, whatever, it was the praise and worship time or whatever.
I remember events like at the Baptist College that I was at, and we would have these things.
If you didn't have a certain kind of emotional response— You were not spiritually attuned.
It was a cause for concern.
You were supposed to feel a certain way.
You were supposed to get goosebumps.
You were supposed to get into that thing where you got your eyes kind of closed and you're swaying and you're consciously being not conscious of everybody around you.
There was a whole emotionality and a very physical response.
And if you didn't feel that, it meant you weren't open to the spirit or...
You were not focused on the right thing.
So the emotionality, the decrying of emotionality among the kind of, let's call it the sort of intellectuals within evangelicalism always fell flat when it came to the actual practice and the actual expectations of that kind of context.
So yeah, exactly the phenomenon you're describing, but just to press it further, that was a normative part of what it meant to be a good Christian, is that you would feel the right things in the right context.
Feeling was central.
But this plays right into what I want to talk about next after the break, which is the Million Women March that happens at D.C., which is a New Apostolic Reformation event.
And it really represents, Dan, what Matthew Taylor calls the charismaticization of American Christianity, that if you're going to introduce emotionality at that scale, You're going to get charismatic, Pentecostal forms of worship, of prayer, of theology that make their way into the mainstream.
And I think that's what you and I experienced in the late 90s, the early aughts, was the vineyard music, the charismatic music, the swaying in the pews, the holding your hands up, the ways you did things with your body.
Those were all coming from that charismatic universe of Christianity and making their way into the kind of buttoned up parishes and churches of evangelical Christianity.
Well, what we now have 25 years later is that charismatic Christianity is in many ways the kind of mainstream of what we might call American Christian religiosity.
And the Christian Trumpists who are leading the The charge here, if you listen to Leah Payne on this show on Thursdays, if you listen to Matt Taylor, are Pentecostals and independent charismatics, a la the NAR. So I want to talk about that after the break because that pure emotionality fits right into why Trump remains such a stalwart and is neck and neck with Kamala Harris,
despite the fact that if you watched what happened Monday, You listen to his town halls with Univision or his events other places.
This is not somebody who appears to be well or flourishing.
And yet there's no diminishment of the image of Trump as the strong man who will save America.
How do you tie those threads together?
Well, we'll try our best here after the break.
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That's BetterHelp.com All right, before we do that, Dan, before we jump back in, here's what we got to say.
November 21st, we are in Los Angeles at St.
John's Episcopal Cathedral right next to the USC campus.
7 p.m.
Doors are going to open at 6 p.m.
We're going to sign books with Andrew Seidel and Rachel Lazar and me and others.
Dan and I and Rachel and Andrew and Kyate Joshi and Arlene Sanchez-Walsh will be there talking about what happened in our elections two weeks after and what's going to be next.
We'd love to see you there.
We'd love to hang out, talk, field questions.
You can get tickets right now online.
And check it all in the show notes.
If you can't attend, it will be live-streamed, and you can get an online ticket.
The very next night, we'll be in San Diego with Matt Taylor and Leah Payne and Lloyd Barber, and we'll be talking about Christian extremism at the San Diego Convention Center.
So if you can make it to San Diego, come on down the 22nd at 7 p.m.
Both events will be filmed by Good Faith Media, so that'll be something to look forward to, and there'll be chances at both events to go out after.
In my case, have a Diet Coke or Boba.
In Dan's case, a beer and metal music.
And talk, hang out, and all that.
So if you can make it to the event, we're definitely going to be seeing you after as well.
All right.
Now, Dan, here's what happened on Saturday.
There was what was called a Million Woman March.
It was a kind of who's who of New Apostolic Reformation event.
I want to thank Tiffany Wicks for help with research on this.
Lou Engel is the one who really envisioned this.
He says he has a dream to call on a million women to march on Washington in order to restore God's dominion over the nation.
And so he gathered people from all over, and people did come from all over.
Estimates are hard to come by.
It looks like there were probably a couple hundred thousand or at least a hundred thousand folks in attendance, short of a million, but certainly a sizable group.
Here's Mike Hixenbaugh at NBC News.
Thousands of women came wearing pink shirts and blazoned with, don't mess with our kids, on the front.
Susan Marsh, who drove from Maryland, said she attended because she fears if Democrats maintain power, her 10-month-old grandson will grow up in a nation where he's pressured to identify as a girl.
As she sang and prayed, Marsh waved a large Appeal to Heaven flag.
So many people are hopeless right now, she said.
Choking up as she spoke to a reporter, our children are going through surgeries that are unnecessary, and their hearts are broken.
Maren Freitag was part of a group of 50 people who traveled from Minnesota.
She said she came to stand with the man who God has elected Or excuse me, selected as the president.
Trump 2024 was the hat she was wearing.
Sandy Woeski, another one from Minnesota, said, what happens if Trump doesn't win?
Quote, think Armageddon.
Other folks came from California, from across the country.
Latrice Curry, a black mother who said she voted for Barack Obama in 2008, came from Ohio with her four children.
She said her support for Trump has led to division and arguments with her black friends and family members, but she doesn't care because she thinks this is a last stand for our country.
So, Dan, I'm trying to draw out a juxtaposition here that I think is worth hovering on.
Dance is on stage for 40 minutes, looking like a lost old man.
And yet people are driving to the National Mall in the thousands because he's the only one they think can save the country.
Like, how does that work?
How can you get into that kind of mindset?
There's a lot to say here.
I mean, I'll throw it to you.
Any thoughts about this?
There were a couple hundred thousand people here.
Estimates are that it was maybe 60 to 65% women, 30 to 35% men.
These are not new.
I think you have a history and you know that there's been a lot of marches on the National Mall in this genre.
So any initial thoughts about people gathering by the hundreds of thousands in D.C., 36 hours before Trump basically spaced out for 30 minutes on stage?
Yeah, a few.
I mean, these are things that I talk about a lot.
But one is, I think it's easy for people to forget that there are lots of women who support Trump.
And, you know, I know you've had to do this in the classroom when you explain to, say, students the difference between, you know, patriarchy is not something that only men support, feminism is not something that only women support, and so forth.
And, you know, but we hear so much about the gender gap in this election.
I think a lot of us know about the broad demographics of African-Americans and how they tend to vote, which party and so forth.
But I think it's a vivid reminder that it doesn't mean that just because there's a gender gap that there aren't millions and millions and millions of women who also like that MAGA vision, who also support patriarchy, that the vision of femininity and family that this that the vision of femininity and family that this presents, the vision of gender that is all in MAGA is something that strongly appeals to them for lots of reasons.
But I think that that's that's one thing to just be aware of.
We could also talk.
We'll get to it.
But Trump's town hall on Fox, right, in a room full, you know, speaking to women, it turns out it was it was almost entirely like Trump supporters that were there.
So I think it's easy for people to lose sight of that, especially if the people in their circle are lots of women or people of color or others who oppose Trump to forget that it's a sizable minority of those demographics who support him.
I think another one, it comes back to the emotion thing.
I stated this before you read the responses that these people have.
These things are not true.
There are not kids having gender-affirming surgery.
We've talked about this over and over.
The people who provide trans care, like gender-affirming surgery, any kind of surgical intervention for a trans minor under the age of 18 is incredibly rare.
Under the age of 16, I will go out and say it's virtually non-existent.
I don't know where you would sort of find that.
The notion that people are forcing their kids to identify as genders that are different from...
All of that.
It's all false.
It's easily debunked.
Once again, though, the facts aren't the issue.
Resonates with people emotionally.
And one of the dynamics that I've talked about, and I guess I'll keep talking about...
Is there are people who feel lots of anxiety about all kinds of reasons, and they have grown up in these traditions that have, since the 60s, told them that America is falling apart and it's under threat and it's apocalyptic cataclysm and so forth.
And what happens is you start targeting these groups and it gives you a concrete reality to try to hang that fear on.
And that fear becomes its own validation.
The fact that I now fear trans kids, or I now fear, you know, black people who are marching in the street, or I now, like, that becomes the validation that what I fear is real and that I need to go in the opposite direction.
Again, it's...
Trump and the MAGA movement have trafficked in fear from the beginning.
Trump has always tapped into fears, white majority fears, conservative fears, right-wing Christian fears that have percolated for decades.
And I think we see that in this kind of march when the rationale that people give is so much based in emotion.
I mean, your description was perfect.
Choking up, as she states these falsehoods, it's the choking up piece that matters.
That's what's motivating me.
Well, and again, this is an Apostolic Reformation event.
So the kinds of religious behavior here is one of people laying on the ground when they're singing, people rolling around, people speaking in tongues, people blowing shofars.
This is an emotional superdome.
And so it just plays on everything we talked about that...
It's not about the reality of Trump, the confused old man.
It's about the symbol of Trump and staying in that cocoon of belief, that closed system that Matthew Remsky called it, and believing that it will deliver you from all of the evil, all of the vulnerability, all of the stuff.
Let me read a little bit from Matthew Taylor, who attended, and then give one important, I think, component of this whole event.
So Matthew says, in NAR terminology, this was an identificational repentance and spiritual warfare event.
They purposely staged it on Yom Kippur to make it about atoning for America's sins.
Those sins, antisemitism, LGBTQ rights, everything trans, abortion, and feminism.
The apex of the spectacle was Jonathan Cahn.
Some of you will be familiar with Jonathan Cahn as what is known as a kind of messianic rabbi, smashing a reconstructed altar to Ashtra, an ancient Canaanite goddess they claimed was a demonic principality, dominating modern America.
This was also functionally a pro-Israel rally with constant references to blessing Israel, supporting Israel.
Now, the entire day, Dan, and this is where I want to go, was framed around the Esther story with all the women being called Esthers and all the men Mordecais.
Now, there's something to say about that.
Before we do, Matthew says this is one of the most multi-ethnic Christian crowds I've ever seen, and I think that's really important.
That if you're looking for Latino and Asian and Black Christians joining up in Christian Trumpism, you should really look to the charismatic spaces.
And Matthew confirms that.
There's pictures and so on.
He talked to Rebecca, a Chinese American naturalized immigrant.
He talked to Louis from Boston.
All people who were very interested in everything being talked about.
Now, I want to go to what happened, though, at the end.
It was Che On who gave an apostolic decree.
So, in New Apostolic Reformation language, that means that he's an apostle and he is decreeing something that God has directly told him.
So, Dan, this is not like a prayer.
This is not like a hope, a desire.
This is like, God said this and I'm the mouthpiece to deliver it to you kind of stuff, okay?
Now I played that clip at the top and he gives this decree that Trump will win on the November 5th.
He will be our 47th president and Kamala Harris will be cast down.
She will lose in Jesus mighty name.
One of the things that I think is lost here is the violence of the Jehu and Jezebel story.
So I just want to recount that.
Like, Dan, I talk about this at length, about the Jericho marches.
Do you remember the story of Jericho from the Bible, Dan?
We used to teach that in Sunday school.
And I was like, hey, if you trust God, walls will fall down.
The world will think you're crazy, but you just got to believe.
Did you ever teach that in Sunday school?
I probably taught that a hundred times.
And you know the part you never tell the kids who are listening?
It's like, yeah.
And at the end, the walls came down.
They got in there and killed everyone.
It was awesome.
You just kind of leave that out.
So let's talk about Jezebel and Esther and all this.
Here's Fred Clarkson writing about it.
In addition to the story of Jezebel, you can hear it in the story of Esther, who was a thematic biblical figure for the event, and was endorsed as a role model for Christian women.
While various Christian and Jewish traditions draw different meanings from the story of Esther, usually celebrating her role in saving her people, NAR leaders highlight the part that's typically left out.
Esther, the Jewish wife of a Persian king, and her cousin Mordecai, persuade the king to retract his order, made at the behest of his chief minister, Haman, to exterminate all Jews in the kingdom.
Instead, the king hangs Haman on the gallows he had built for Mordecai and grants the Jews permission to annihilate their enemies.
The story goes on to detail that Haman's 10 sons and 500 other men are killed on the first day and 300 more.
The next, eventually 75,000 people are killed.
So everyone at the Million Woman March is in Esther and all the men are Mordecai's.
It's another biblical story where like 75,000 people are killed.
In addition, like Cheyenne gives this decree about Trump as Jehu and Kamala Harris as Jezebel.
Here's what Matthew Taylor says about that story.
This is amongst the most violent, vindictive stories in the Hebrew Bible.
Jehu is an instrument of divine wrath who commands Jezebel be executed by her own servants, throwing her out of a tower.
Jehu then tramples her with his horse and dogs eat her body.
The message of the story is that Jezebel is so profane that her body must be reduced to dog dung.
Importantly, this was prophesied by Elijah.
So here, Jay-An is prophesying that story and that imagery to cast the 2024 election as Jehu, Trump, casting down Jezebel, Harris.
Dan...
These are the roles people are given to play at the Million Woman March.
This is the way the stories end in, like, mass death or a woman's body being reduced to, like, dog food.
This is the same thing that happened pre-January 6th with the Jericho marches.
The same exact thing.
So, the Million Woman March, you can tell me, oh, well, what's wrong with Christian women marching?
Come on, you guys had a women's march in 2017.
And I'm going to say, yeah, I was there.
I don't remember anyone, whether it was like Alicia Garza or Scarlett Johansson, saying, hey, you're all people in a story where like 75,000 people get killed or a woman's body gets annihilated by canines.
So, anyway...
I don't think that's necessarily very positive.
I'll throw to you final thoughts on this before we go to IVF. Yeah, so we get the question all the time.
I'm talking about what does it mean to be quote-unquote biblical or being an errantist or all these views about the Bible, and I know you've had these conversations too.
Where they'll talk about, you know, Christianity is a religion of love.
I'm like, Christianity, maybe.
It can be articulated that way.
But you cannot be a biblical inerrantist and affirm a loving God.
Sorry.
Like, you can't.
And they're like, why?
What do you mean?
It's like stories like this.
There are so many stories in the Hebrew Bible.
And I can give you all—you can do this, all the cultural and historical background of why those stories are and situating within ancient Near Eastern culture and so on and so forth.
But if you're going to say, this is what God is and always has been and always will be, and this is the God we currently worship, then don't give me the love stuff.
That's one piece.
The other one is, I remember as a pastor being disturbed by stories like this, and I would be disturbed when somebody would appeal to this kind of biblical folk hero, and I'd be like, eh, is that what we want?
And I remember talking to people, I'd be like, well, so like, just as you did, remember how that story ends?
Or like, do you remember this part?
And people were like, no, it doesn't say that.
I'd be like, no, it does.
It really does.
Like, here's where in the Bible it actually says that.
Why do I say that?
I say that because a lot of these people who will be like, we're just good Christian people.
We just want a biblical country, biblical, biblical, biblical, biblical.
They don't actually know what the Bible says.
They know what people tell them it says.
Bart Ehrman, well-known New Testament scholar, makes a statement, something like the Bible being much revered but little read within American society.
And I think that this is another piece of it, because I imagine that if you went and circulated through that crowd and said, so are you really saying that this is what should happen to Kamala?
There'll be some people who say, yes, we know that.
There'll be the really dark.
I think there'll be other people who'll be shocked and appalled and say that you're saying false things about the Bible and whatever.
And again, why does it work that way?
Why do people appeal to this authority if they don't know what it actually says?
It's because of the emotion.
It's because of the way that that's tapped into.
It's the way that saying these things, playing these roles makes us feel really, really good.
It makes us feel chosen by God.
And those good feelings mean that whatever you, Brad, do by raining on the parade and sharing all this violence, that can't really be what it's about.
And I think that that's really pernicious and dangerous because I think for a lot of people it is.
And it wrangles all those other people who might be well-intentioned otherwise into that same camp and creates a very dangerous dynamic.
Two final points on this, and that is, A, if we stay on this pure emotionality, that Trump is a leader who connects you to him by emotion and affect, this unmediated feeling of Trump as the leader who will restore, the strong man that will save you, that will be the salvation of your nation, that kind of stuff.
It makes sense, then, that even when he's on stage looking like a confused old man, nobody loses faith, or at least the true believers don't.
It also makes sense that it is this brand of Christianity that has really been adapted to the Trump era as the most forceful and potent, because the emotion is rife and it's always present in these kinds of Christian spaces.
But emotion is also a vehicle for doing things you wouldn't normally do.
I'm going to make a really weird example, and it could be embarrassing, so let's just go for it.
Dan's like...
I'm always like, all right, what's coming?
Yeah, I know.
Dan knows me.
We've done enough of these episodes.
So, Dan, I remember when I got to Oxford, and I've talked about this period in my life, where I left church.
I'd never...
Okay, hear me out.
Just hear me out, Dan.
I'm like 24 years old.
I've never had a youth.
I've been a minister since I'm 18.
And all of a sudden, I met...
This college with other people are like 23, 24, 25, and others are like 20, 21, 22.
Okay.
And we had these nights at Regent Spark College at Oxford called bops.
And if you're in the UK, you know what a bop is.
It's basically like a party, right?
And I remember this particular bop, I don't know, and it's been like 16 years now, where at the end of the night, it's like 2 a.m., everyone's had a bunch to drink.
And we're all in a circle in the Junior Common Room, which is like the place where folks gather for these things.
It's a big room.
It's like a lounge kind of thing.
Yeah, like with a bar and a back room.
And it's kind of the central meeting place for social stuff at the college.
And there's probably like a circle of like 35 people all joining arms and moving in and out of the circle while we sing Journey, the Journey song.
Okay?
I'm just going to throw out that there's more than Diet Coke involved here.
There was.
That's all I'm saying.
These were the days where I did drink more than Diet Coke, okay?
I drank way more than...
No.
And here's my point, Dan, is like, I remember...
I don't know why I remember this so clearly, but in the moment, I remember feeling so good because I'd never done anything like this as a young man.
And here I am like drunk on a Friday night with like people my age and we're just like in a circle.
And in the morning, when you wake up from that, and I'm not even talking about super embarrassing morning after story.
I'm just saying, like, in the morning, you're like, yeah.
Hope there's no video of that.
Because it's just like, you know, we're like drunk journeys playing.
We're all singing.
People are wearing like their ties on their heads and stuff.
Why am I bringing that up?
Because emotion does that.
Emotion gets you in a place where you feel like this is a good idea.
And it may be as benign as like singing a cheesy song with like, you know, 30 other people in a circle.
But it also might just be, I don't know, January 6th.
It might just be we're all together.
We're all feeling it.
We're telling the Jericho story about walls falling down.
And it's now time for us to get in and live out that story like Jehu, like Esther, like the Israelites in Jericho.
And I think that's really just important to notice.
Number two is all of this goes back to January 6th.
Because if you let that kind of violent attack on democracy fester, it will grow.
I've said it a million times in this show.
I'm going to say it again.
Did you know, Dan, there was a ban in the Trump campaign on people related to January 6th?
Do you know what the ban is?
It is not a ban on those who were participating in January 6th.
You can be somebody who was there and be part of the Trump campaign in some kind of role.
You cannot be part of the Trump campaign If you resigned because of January 6th or called on people to resign as a result of January 6th.
So when you have a million women march, like three weeks before the election, and it's based on seriously violent biblical stories about degrading a woman's body to the point of being eaten by dogs or 75,000 people dying, we're just right back where we started, aren't we?
That's exactly where we are.
And that's why this election is what it is.
There's so much at stake and there's so much on the line.
Let's take a break.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, I just shared with you an embarrassing story about Journey and me dancing in a circle.
So I hope that that gave us at least a bit of whimsy so that we might then transition to our final topic for today, which is, spoiler alert, Trump proclaiming himself the father of IVF. I don't even know what to say.
Take it away.
Yeah, so Trump had another town hall-style event.
This was hosted by Fox and talked about this.
I think CNN reported that the women-only crowd, and this was really pitched by the Trump campaign, and the idea of trying to close that gender gap and so forth, and I think Trump trying to show he could communicate to women.
The piece that's been reported is that basically it was an audience of Trump supporters already.
There were a number of conservative political organizations, women's organizations there in Georgia where this was hosted that had posted on Facebook about helping organize it and things like that.
And it turns out there was a lot of editing of people saying really positive things about Trump that was then edited out by Fox so it looked a little bit more give and take and whatever.
But However that is, questions came up, and he got some hard questions or questions about the government being too involved in women's decisions and so forth.
And in some ways, Trump did what he has done.
So he boasted about stacking the Supreme Court and overcoming Roe v.
Wade and getting it back in the States where everybody wanted it.
We know this line.
He has it all the time that this is what everybody wanted.
It's not what everybody wanted.
But then also the thing about IVF comes up, and he did what the GOP has been trying to do of saying that they oppose abortion, that they think it should be a state's right, but we're going to protect IVF. So that's going to mean overriding the states in some places.
I would argue that if one believes what the hardcore abortion opponents believe about life and conception and so forth, IVF would be immoral if that's what you believe, and so I think it's an inconsistent position.
All of that.
We've been over all of that, but Trump's doing his standard thing And in a weird moment, on one hand, it's just super Trumpy because he can never be like an advocate of something.
He has to be the biggest advocate of something.
It can never be that he did something.
It's that he did it better than anybody in history.
We remember him saying that it's not just that he's done great things for the African-American community.
He's done more for African-Americans than anybody but maybe Abraham Lincoln.
You know, that kind of overstatement.
But this is what he said.
He said he declared himself the father of IVF. And I think everybody's like, that's okay, that's weird.
He went on to say this.
He said, we really are the party for IVF. We want fertilization, and it is all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we're out there on IVF even more than them.
We're totally in favor of it.
So...
We want fertilization.
We want fertilization.
Yeah, say it together.
So, pieces of this that stand out.
One is, you want to see, again, like a clear expression of what the GOP is.
It's the old white man taking credit for something that allows female-identified people, people who can have babies, Allows them to get pregnant.
Cis, white guy, he's going to take credit for it.
The patriarchal language, the father of IVF, not I'm a huge supporter or nobody wants IVF more than me or supports it.
No, I'm the father of, like, the father language to me is weird here.
Super patriarchal, super gendered, super all of that, which is the paternalism and the patriarchy of The right at present, right?
That men really are the ones who are supposed to be making these statements.
And if people who can have babies have access to IVF, it should be because it's at the behest of powerful white men who allow this to happen.
But then the weird, I mean, that's bad.
The weird part is the we want fertilization and it is all the way.
Again, best spin on this.
We want it all the way.
We don't want to go to second base or third base.
We want fertilization all the way.
All right.
Yeah.
So, you know, I like to do these decoding things.
I like to play the—like, best-case scenario, it's like, you know, the older person's like, yeah, I got the cancer, you know, or whatever.
And, you know, it's like you kind of—it's clear you're not really used to talking about these things.
So, number one, Trump, don't tell me that you're a super supporter of IVF if you can't even talk about it in some way that makes it sound like before your handlers told you what IVF was, you knew what it was.
Okay?
Okay.
Number two, you want to fit this.
This is what J.D. Vance has been saying in more eloquent ways for months.
This is what the GOP has said for months.
We want fertilization.
It's not about health care for women.
It's not about bodily autonomy.
It's not about any of that.
It's literally about women are there to have babies.
Women are there to produce families.
That's why you exist.
If you don't do that, you don't care about America.
You don't have a stake in the country.
You're not doing what God wants you to do.
All the stuff we've been talking about, it's right there when Trump makes this super cringy, creepy statement.
We want fertilization and it is all the way.
I just feel like it's this window into the mind of a creep, but it's the mind that says out loud what the GOP thinks, right?
The value of IVF, it's not because we just want votes, and it's not because we give a shit about it.
You know, people trying to get pregnant.
It's about fertilization and building a Christian country and making sure that people who can have babies know that that's what they're there for.
So he managed to take, in my mind, this issue of autonomy, freedom, you know, freedom over one's body, freedom over one's health care, all of this, and yes, the ability to have children if somebody wants to do that, managed to take all of that out of the hands of the people that We claim that and put it back into the hands of, again, the cis white men who sit on top of the patriarchy and the vision of society and saying, it's our call.
Yeah, we want fertilization, so we'll support IVF. We'll do that.
Just want to couple this with what J.D. Vance says about having children.
J.D. Vance says if you ask him about children, he says, well, and if you can have children and you don't, you're a psychopath.
He won't listen to any argument or any engagement on...
Having children as a choice that may or may not make sense for someone or for a couple, a family, whatever.
Because in his mind, if you don't want to have children, you're akin to a psychopath.
And he's like, we're not psychopaths, so we want children.
And I think that's really something that hasn't been brought up a lot, which is he says that consistently, but it goes along with what you're saying about fertilization.
And why you exist.
If you are somebody who can get pregnant and you don't and you choose not to, then you're a psychopath who's not doing what those in charge think you should be doing.
You have no other social value.
Your social value is you're a breeder.
That's the GOP vision of femininity.
You're a breeder.
And if you're not breeding, there's really not much to you.
And I remember this language when I was in the church context.
It was, you were selfish if you didn't have kids.
Notice the elevation and intensification of this.
You're not selfish.
You're a psychopath.
You're dangerous.
You're delusional.
You're a threat.
I mean, the intensification of that.
You're there to be a breeder, and if you're not, you're a threat.
And what do we do to threats?
We throw them down, and we bring down the walls of Jericho on them, and we do all those other things that we're busy celebrating in this Million Woman March.
You might be a Jezebel.
Yep.
Yeah, I agree with those things.
And I think the intensification there is right on point.
I think other folks will...
Well, let me just...
Yeah, there's a bunch I could say about...
This is not attack on motherhood or maternity.
This is not...
Like, I'm married to someone who is a mother and is also like, you know, many things.
And the reason for ones...
You know, I think what we're getting at here is like the vision of those who can become pregnant As existing for becoming pregnant is the reduction and the denigration of that person's life, their autonomy, their choice, their personhood, and so on.
What I want to add to this is that this is why reproductive rights, I think, is such a potent issue for those who are not on board with Trump and Vance and everyone else.
And as it stands now, it looks like white women will vote for Kamala Harris in the largest numbers for a Democratic nominee in a long, long time, if not in history.
Now, we don't know.
We don't have the numbers.
We haven't seen it.
We all know what happened in 2016.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
But I do think some of that is, look, you might be a woman Who is 20, who is 40, who is 60, who is 75.
And no matter who you are, you understand what it means to have existence reduced to your breeder.
And so the choice, the autonomy, the potential for not dying on a table because you have an ectopic pregnancy or going to jail because you lost a child unexpectedly, or you lost a pregnancy, I should say, in the second trimester, whatever the situation is, You can see why this is a direct vote for one candidate kind of issue.
And I think we're going to see that play out in this election.
Now, I don't know what's going to happen, and I am nervous just like you, Dan, just like everybody.
But I do think there has been no answer since the fall of Roe, and I'll just go back to what I said three months ago.
The principal players and issues of this election are on the table and abortion and reproductive rights are one of them.
And it continues to play out as we get to like three weeks from the election.
Any final thoughts?
And then what is your reason for hope?
Just the last point, you say no answer on Roe and its fallout.
It's because the best answer you can give falls back into this creepy patriarchy stuff.
It's so far into the misogyny and the patriarchy that I think even when they try to step out of that, it's like, no, you're like 50 yards from crossing the line on not being a patriarchal, misogynistic kind of creep.
And I think that it shows that, because I think this is the best that they can do.
Is the J.D. Vance line, the Trump line, and I think that that's part of why they can't step out.
Reasons for hope, they're all election-related, a series of linked things.
In Georgia, a judge blocked the voting rules changes that were put through.
In Alabama, a judge overturned the voter purge that took place.
The GOP is also suing to try to stop overseas ballots from being used.
And I think there was a preliminary hearing about that, and the judge pretty clearly indicated, it was like, you're going to disenfranchise lots and lots of registered voters if you do this.
Pretty clear indication that that's not going to go.
I took hope about that.
Related to all of this, I forget which state it was, maybe multiple states.
The Supreme Courts have said that, you know, courts need to be prepared to move quickly on cases after the election and stuff.
You've talked about all of this gumming it up and so forth.
I think we're seeing the judicial system that's kind of ready to manage this, that sees it coming, and that does not want to just play games.
And so I took a lot of hope from those events this week.
You definitely took my first one, which was Georgia, the hand count is blocked, which is a really important thing.
Second, the voter turnout in Georgia has been astronomical, and people are really there voting in large numbers.
It's cool to see.
So I'll go to another one, which is today as we speak, actually, another docket of evidence from Jack Smith is being unsealed, and it is available to the public.
It came out like...
Half hour before we started recording, I did peruse through some of the docs.
Much of it is sealed, but I think over the course of the day, we're going to have even more evidence that we didn't before of what happened in the run-up and during January 6th on the part of Trump.
Will that move the needle?
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
But if that is the only October surprise we have from now until Election Day, I think that is a reason for hope and a good thing.
I'll remind everybody that this time, eight years ago, we were getting embroiled in the Hillary Clinton FBI, her email scandal that came out and James Comey.
The reopening of the case and all of that.
So it's not like these things don't matter.
And whether it pushes the needle any which way, I'm not sure.
But it is good that this is coming to light despite the Supreme Court's best efforts to make sure And just real quickly, despite Trump's efforts, he's still petitioning to the court that none of this should be made public until after the election.
So I think that that's significant as well.
Join us, friends.
November 21st in LA, November 22nd, San Diego.
You can watch online, but we'd love to hang out with you in person.
We've talked about a lot today, but it does feel good to be in person.
It feels good to hang out.
It feels good to ask questions, to talk, to get a chance to share a drink and discuss.
So if you're anywhere near LA, come on down.
We'll be at St.
John's Cathedral, November 21st.
There's parking on site.
There's parking across the street.
It's free parking.
If you're an LA person, you know that's important.
San Diego Convention Center.
If you're an AAR or SVL person, come hang out.
And if you're anywhere near San Diego, we'd love to see you.
And so many great scholars and folks will be there, including Matt Taylor and Leah Payne, including Andrew Seidel and Rachel Lazar.
So come and join us.
Other than that, we'll be back next week with the Weekly Roundup, with It's in the Code, with Spirit and Power, and a great interview.
Dan and I will actually be in Utah next week together.
