Is Trump's Authoritarianism Apocalyptic? w/ Matt Taylor
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Matt Taylor, an expert on the New Apostolic Reformation and author of 'The Violent Took It By Force,' joins this episode of SWAJ. Speaking at an event in San Diego, Taylor discusses the implications of MAGA—a populist authoritarian movement fueled by Christian nationalism—on America's liberal democracy. The episode emphasizes the need to look beyond American history for comparisons and learn from global instances of populist regimes. Taylor elaborates on the societal divisions and the potential threats MAGA poses to democracy, while Brad encourages strategic resistance and community mobilization in anticipation of new political challenges.
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Maga is a populist authoritarian movement bolstered by a Christian nationalist ethos.
And I would suggest that instead of trying to look backward in American history to try to find analogs for the moment that we are in now, that is always our temptation as Americans to be self-referential and try to say, oh, well, this is like X or this is like this moment.
I think we need to look around the world for comparisons to figure out what happens when populist authoritarian movements take over governments.
And I think we need to let go of the last vestiges of American exceptionalism and say, we're just people and people behave the way that people behave.
And the challenge that we face right now is that populist authoritarian movements, U.S. founders called populist authoritarian demagogues.
These are democracy killers.
Every day we get news about Donald Trump's plans for his cabinet for his first days and months in the White House.
This weekend we learned that he wants to name Kash Patel as the director of the FBI. We also learn that Pete Hegseth, the nominee for defense secretary, his own mother, has called him an abuser of women in writing.
We hear about renewed calls for the prosecution of political enemies and the mass deportation of many people, millions of people from the United States.
What you heard at the top is Matt Taylor speaking at our event in San Diego on November 22nd.
Matt is one of the foremost experts on the New Apostolic Reformation in the United States and around the world.
He's the author of the new book, The Violent Take It by Force, which looks at Christian Trumpism and the January 6th riot.
A regular guest on NPR and cable news, Matt is a trusted commentator.
The ways that Christian nationalisms have played into bringing Trump back to the White House.
And how independent charismatics are driving force of that return.
Today we're going to play for you the full remarks that he gave on that night because he spoke about the current moment.
What he sees as the realities that we face and the ways that our liberal democracy and our human rights, our individual liberties as Americans, are being chiseled away even before Trump takes office.
Matt outlines the ways that democracies die, how they become illiberal in form, even if they are democratic in name.
The picture he paints is not a pretty one, but it's one that I think is helpful for understanding where we're headed and how we can prepare for what's next.
I'm Brad Onishi, and this is Straight White American Jesus.
Straight White American Jesus Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
Hope you've had a chance to get some rest and to recharge at least a little bit.
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For premium subscribers today, I have a little bit of hope.
Some comments that I made in LA on November 21st about why we organize and why we try.
This moment feels deflating.
It feels as if we're not sure what's next or how to fight back.
I tried to provide some inspiration when we closed our event last Thursday, and so I want to share that with all of you who are premium subscribers today.
Without further ado, here's Matt Taylor speaking on 1122 in San Diego about our current political moment and what to expect in the next few months.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
we'll see you on the flip side.
Thank you all for being here.
And since I've been given the privilege of getting to monologue a little bit before we all dialogue, I'm going to try to do my best to describe, as far as I can tell, the moment that we are in right now, the big picture, and what we can anticipate in the coming months as much as we can anticipate anything.
So I'm going to make two overarching, fairly simple points, and if you don't remember anything else that I say tonight, hopefully you hold on to these.
And the first is that MAGA is a populist authoritarian movement bolstered by a Christian nationalist ethos.
And the second is that our society is divided roughly into thirds, and the middle is up for grabs.
Okay, so what just happened in the last couple weeks?
I believe that the 2024 election was the most consequential election in American history, at least since the election of 1860. And unlike what we did in 1860 in choosing Abraham Lincoln, we chose the worst possible path.
And we put Donald Trump and the MAGA movement functionally in control of all three branches of our government.
So this is why I think it's important that we get our categories straight.
So again, MAGA is a populist authoritarian movement bolstered by a Christian nationalist ethos.
And I would suggest that instead of trying to look backward in American history to try to find analogs for the moment that we are in now, that is always our temptation as Americans to be self-referential and try to say, oh, well, this is like X or this is like this moment.
I think we need to look around the world for comparisons to figure out what happens when populist authoritarian movements take over governments.
To make a brief interlude into anthropology, I think we are hardwired as a species to be attracted to populist authoritarians.
We evolved over millennia, all these and really millions of years, living in tribal cultures, following alpha males who claimed power through strength and through domination.
And this is a deep part of the human experience.
We lived under chiefs and under priests and emperors and kings, and the rules didn't apply to them that applied to us.
They could take as many women as they wanted, and as long as they had power, and as long as they guaranteed us safety, we allowed for them to hold those rules.
If anything, the evolution into liberal democracy is the very, very recent development in our history that is not actually that ingrained in the pathways of our brains.
And so when human beings get scared, when things feel unstable, when our core identities feel threatened, then we run back to these kinds of tribal identities and authoritarian leaders because they're promising us protection, even if the bargain means we lose a lot of our freedom. even if the bargain means we lose a lot of And populist authoritarian movements, as we can see when we look around the world, can emerge on either the political left or the political right.
For instance, Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela is a populist authoritarian leader who emerged on the left.
But MAGA is a right-wing authoritarian movement.
And these populist authoritarian movements, especially on the right, often are bolstered by religious nationalist movements.
I'm thinking especially here of Christian nationalism in the case of Viktor Orban's Hungary, Islamic nationalism in the case of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey, and Hindu nationalism in the case of Narendra Modi's India.
And we, I think, are, as Americans, I think, need to take a real posture of humility at this moment.
We've spent a number of decades saying we are going to teach the rest of the world how to do democracy.
And right now, I think we need to be in a learning posture.
People in India did not elect Narendra Modi because they are primitive or less civilized than people in the U.S. They elected Narendra Modi because they are human beings.
And Americans are also human beings.
And I think we need to let go of the last vestiges of American exceptionalism and say, we're just people.
And people behave the way that people behave.
And the challenge that we face right now is that populist authoritarian movements, U.S. founders called populist authoritarian demagogues, these are democracy killers.
That's the role that they play.
They are the Achilles heel of liberal democracies because they climb the ladder of the electoral democracy to get to power, and then they pull up the ladder behind them.
They use the mechanisms and the tools and the protections of democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, the right to participate politically, the right to gather and to spread their messages.
They use all of those in order to come to power, and then they eviscerate those very protections.
And we need to be very precise in coming years and months when we say we are about protecting democracy, because that space is going to be contested.
Donald Trump and his people are going to say they are defending democracy.
The January 6 rioters believed they were protecting our democracy.
And so we need to be very clear what we are speaking about.
And the reality is that democracy is not an on and off switch.
It's a dimmer switch.
It moves in gradations.
And so the side of the dimmer switch we want to be on is what we call liberal democracy.
And liberal not in the sense of liberal versus conservative, but liberal in the sense of having liberties, right?
And so liberal democracy is characterized by fair elections among multiple parties, by separation of powers, by the rule of law and an independent justice system, and by protections for freedom of speech and freedom of expression.
And so populist authoritarians, though, when they come to power, start moving that dimmer switch from liberal democracy towards illiberal democracy.
Most nations in the world still at least pretend they are democratic.
There's a strong norm in international relations that says you need to at least have the pretense of being a democracy.
They still have elections in Russia.
Just don't run against Vladimir Putin or you might end up dead, right?
But they still have the facade of democracy.
I think we need to be very clear about what kind of democracy we want to protect and promote.
And what did Donald Trump promise in this campaign?
He promised retribution.
And please do not think for a minute that he did not mean that, that that was just posturing.
I have studied the man deeply.
I have watched him closely.
He absolutely meant that.
That is his number one priority as he comes to power.
And most of that retribution will probably come in the form of prosecutions through the Department of Justice.
But he also has all kinds of other levers that he can pull through tariffs and administrative measures and IRS audits.
And for those of us who would critique Donald Trump and the MAGA movement in the coming years, we better have our finances in order.
I suspect that many of us will get audited.
Donald Trump promised to be a dictator on day one.
He promised to deport 20 million immigrants.
He promised to end the deep state.
If you look at what that actually cashes out to in a policy proposal, it is putting in Schedule F and declaring the top basically three echelons of government employees in different agencies all subject to political whim, that they can fire those people at any moment for political reasons.
And he also promised to deploy the military domestically to stop protests.
And if he does even a quarter of what he promised in the campaign, it will remake our country into a very, very different world than we currently know.
Now, I think Dan and Brad already spoke to this a little bit.
I think there's a natural objection.
Weren't we here eight years ago?
Don't catastrophize.
Weren't we here eight years ago?
Well, yes, MAGA was an authoritarian movement, a populist authoritarian movement in 2016. Except in 2016 and early 2017, Donald Trump and the MAGA movement had to govern in coalition with establishment Republicans.
And it was actually his own party, the establishment Republicans that he was in coalition with, and his own chaotic incompetence that stymied his authoritarian impulses in the first term.
But now MAGA has pushed the establishment Republicans basically almost out of the picture.
Can you imagine John Thune, the new Republican leader in the Senate, saying a firm no to Donald Trump?
I can't.
And populist authoritarians take advantage of what we call in sociology, vulnerable majorities.
Majorities of the population who feel that their hold-on power is vulnerable.
And they use that to demonize outgroups.
In our case, trans kids and LGBTQ folks in general and immigrants, right?
In 1990, according to the U.S. Census, about 75% of the U.S. population identified as white.
By 2020, it was down to around 58%.
In 1990, 90% of the U.S. population are identified as Christian.
By 2020, it's down to around 63%.
So the population of white people and the population of Christians is declining.
And so those populations feel vulnerable.
And I would say that we need to recognize that those two identities work in tandem, but they operate very differently.
And here we're coming to these race questions.
White supremacy and white nationalism is a silent partner.
in the MAGA movement because there still are norms against overt racism.
And so the appeals to white anxiety get encoded in different ways.
They're less overt.
And this is where this demonization of immigrants is very, very useful for Trump in activating those white anxieties.
But Christian supremacy and Christian nationalism is the outright partner.
That is the more direct appeal.
And this is a huge part of how Donald Trump, I think, managed to get Latino and Asian American and African American votes.
He said, you are Christians and Christianity is under assault.
You need to prioritize that Christian identity.
And I'm just going to throw this out there because I'd love to have some discussion, but I suspect that the growth of non-denominationalism played a very big role in this racial reorientation that we saw in this election.
There's a really interesting scholarship being done by a scholar named Jason Shelton at UT Arlington.
He has a relatively new book called The Contemporary Black Church.
And he makes the case in there, and he's using hard data to make the case, that he's especially looking at the black church.
But I would say this is probably also true by observation in Latino and Asian American churches.
As African Americans have moved into non-denominational spaces, out of the black traditional space, black traditional churches, And moved into these more multi-ethnic communities where Christianity as an identity is prioritized, there's a noticeable decline in solidarity with other African Americans since the 1990s.
And it's not coincidental, I think, that Donald Trump identifies now as non-denominational and that non-denominational Christians have been his most ardent supporters.
Because to be non-denominational is to say, I don't have a tradition.
It's to exist in this kind of traditionalist, ever-present moment.
And so I think that that is an element that has contributed very heavily to this.
A couple last points on this populist authoritarian thing.
Populist authoritarian movements warp reality around the dear leader.
And I know that there's a lot of conventional wisdom out there in the media right now that says that it was about economics and inflation that swung this election.
And I think there's probably some truth to that.
But you also have to recognize that coming into this election, one-third of the U.S. population believed that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Donald Trump does not become the Republican nominee and he does not come back to power except for this reality distortion field that has infected a huge portion of our population.
And the disinformation and misinformation that has flowed out of these 2020 election lies has fueled this growth in conspiracy theories and has utterly polluted the information space on the right.
You cannot consume right-wing media today without seeing the traffic of these lies and these conspiracy theories that are warping the minds of much of our population.
And that you can't have a rational public policy debate if the other side of the debate is not living in reality.
January 6th is an open wound in our body politic, and Donald Trump has managed to rewrite that narrative that he did not inspire a mob.
It was a day of love.
He did not inspire a mob to commit insurrection.
It was just an election fraud intervention, as Lance Wallnau put it.
One-third of the country has still bought into that.
And last point on this populist authoritarianism thing is that populist authoritarianism, and this is a pattern, they come to power through instigating a mixture of apocalyptic fear, right?
Saying, if we don't win this election, American Christianity is over.
But then mixing that with a messianic hope, right?
And this is where Donald Trump told Christians, he literally said, if you vote in this election, you'll never have to vote again.
I'm going to fix it all.
I'll save Christianity.
And many Christians in the U.S. and many otherwise secular followers of Trump have a quasi-messianic attachment to him, but they're not going to give up easily.
You can see it in the art that is being produced about Trump.
You can see in the prophecies that are coming out of it, especially out of charismatic circles about him.
We have never had a moment like this in American history where a national level political figure is surrounded and bolstered by so many religious narratives.
And what makes this especially dangerous is it's mixing political radicalization with religious radicalization.
And so if we look around the world, these are the conditions under which authoritarian leaders claim a divine mandate and are much less willing to brook any sort of compromise.
Alright, so the second point is that our society is divided into thirds and the middle is up for grabs.
I'm sure there are some social scientists here because we're at AAR who will say, actually, this group is more like 30% or 35%.
I'm just offering a very rough heuristic here.
But the first third that we need to take account of is the MAGA third.
And as I was saying, this third of the country has bought in hook, line, and sinker with Trump.
And it's basically the same third of the country that believes that the 2020 election was stolen, who live in this unreality.
And these folks live in a media silo where they only hear messages that reinforce this.
And if you've had encounters with these folks, you'll know there's no arguing them out of their view because they don't have facts.
And some of the media that is sourcing this is right-wing news sources like Fox News and OAN, but a lot of the media that is driving these narratives is Christian media.
It's coming through Christian media channels and filters, and it's amplifying this distortion.
And this third is MAGA. Not everyone who voted for Trump, but his absolute floor of support.
The people who will never abandon him, will never be persuaded to give up their attachment to him.
That is the audience that Trump cares about.
That's who he writes policy for.
That's who he messages to.
And this is a community, this third of Americans, is predominantly ex-urban and rural.
And these folks are very spread out.
Here's a shocking statistic.
Donald Trump won 90% of the counties in the United States.
90%.
Now, the second third is our third, the cosmopolitan third.
But we also have to recognize that we also exist in a bubble.
It's a bubble that is made up of left and center-left people, moderate to progressive in our politics.
We have a bigger spectrum of ideology, everything from never-Trump Republicans all the way to social Democrats, mostly college-educated.
We are the people who consume mainstream news.
We're the people who read the New York Times, who listen to news podcasts.
This is the Straight White American Jesus audience.
And these are the folks, we are the folks, for whom Kamala Harris looked like the unquestionably obvious choice, right?
Why would anyone choose an orange-faced Bulgarian over an incredibly qualified, dynamic, path-breaking woman?
It does not make sense to us, but that is our blind spot.
That is the assumptions that got us into trouble because we also live in an echo chamber, a more diverse echo chamber, but it's still an echo chamber.
This third of the country is mostly urban and suburban.
These are the occupants of the blue dots, the 10% of the counties that Trump didn't win.
And this space is more ideologically diverse, but it has a lot of internal tensions philosophically and policy priorities.
And we care about democracy.
We see the danger to that, and we find it absurd as so many Americans are willing to blow up our democracy.
But in the middle of these two coalitions is the up-for-grabs third.
They are pretty detached from most of our politics and fairly cynical about institutions.
They don't especially trust or favor either political party.
They don't really consume much news at all other than maybe through social media and podcasts.
They follow the influencers.
It's a deeply anti-institutional part of our populace.
This is the crowd of the manosphere.
It's a space where there's a ton of broken families, a ton of social isolation and economic hardship.
And for these folks, they really do care about inflation.
It really does hurt their bottom line.
They've been hard hit by neoliberalism and rapacious capitalism.
They are rural and suburban and urban, and they are frustrated and they are hurt and they want to see change in the social order.
And part of the brilliant move that Trump made at the end of the campaign was to try to appeal to this crowd.
And each of these thirds is actually religiously and racially diverse, and that's something we need to reckon with.
In the aftermath of the 2024 election, the MAGA coalition and the Up for Grabs crowd who went Trump's way, they're not all white people.
So what does this tell us looking forward?
The Up for Grabs middle is more susceptible to MAGA propaganda than they are to the mainstream media.
And that should be very alarming to all of us.
Authoritarianism is not a no-go for these folks.
They're willing to maybe sacrifice a little freedom if it advances their other interests.
And high-minded speeches about democracy will not convince this crowd that Trump is a malign influence.
Calling Trump racist, and to be clear, he is absolutely racist, does not convince these people that he is not someone they should elect.
Calling out hypocrisy on the right, and yes, there is oodles of hypocrisy on the right, doesn't get us very far with this crowd.
So what can we expect in January?
I think we need to prepare our hearts and our minds and our action for the full range of populist authoritarian possibilities.
I imagine it as a sort of a bell curve with some that are more probable and some that are less probable.
No one can predict exactly how this is going to play out because Trump is such a chaos Muppet and it so much depends on who is whispering in his ear and who is enacting his wishes that a lot is going to hinge on what happens in this kind of intermediate stage.
The most hopeful possibility, and we're grading on a very huge curve here, most hopeful possibility is that we get the first Trump administration reborn.
Chaos, malevolence tempered by incompetence, failure to get much done policy-wise, and a lot of provocation.
You'll also have in the mix kleptocracy and an oligarchy with lobbying on all this energy and money flowing into Washington to enrich Trump and his allies.
And you'll have symbolic actions and propaganda at the border, but no really huge policy shifts.
That is basically what we got in the first round.
And let's just hope we don't get another global pandemic.
Now, the furthest end of the spectrum, the other tail end of the bell curve, is the nightmare scenario.
Germany, 1933. I don't think that this is the most likely outcome.
The U.S. is still a global superpower.
We're not recently defeated in a world war the way that Germany was in the interregnum.
We've got a pretty stable economy despite all the propaganda about it.
But I also don't think we can discount that possibility.
John Kelly, who is absolutely not a liberal squish, this is the man who enacted Donald Trump's child separation policy at the border, Trump's longest serving chief of staff, felt obliged to come forward before this election to state on the record that Donald Trump is a textbook fascist.
We should not take that lightly.
I think it's probably take a lot longer than four years to get to that stage, but I think we also need to recognize that these things can move very quickly.
Hitler came to power in January of 1933. The cow concentration camp opened in March 1933. Now the most likely scenarios would be the middle of this distribution curve, probably something more like Viktor Orban's Hungary, where you have media repression, where you have empowered Christian nationalism from the central government, pressuring universities and civil society to conform or shut up, and movement towards consolidating one-party rule.
If it gets a little worse than that, we could be looking at something more akin to Narendra Modi's India.
You might still have elections, but you could also have mob violence in certain localities and pogroms that go unchecked in some localities.
In India today, there's a lot of discourse.
Even though Hindus make up about 72% of the population, there's constant accusations of Hindu phobia that are weaponized to attack Muslim communities.
Again, we have a majority of Christians, and yet there's all this talk of Christian persecution.
In India today, the policy is used to bolster the Hindutva, the Hindu nationalist movement, the base, and disadvantage all minorities.
One of MAGA's greatest weapons is destabilization and demobilization through disinformation.
As Steve Bannon put it, you flood the zone with shit.
We need to be prepared in January for a total hurricane of bullshit that will have the full broadcast force of the U.S. federal government.
And a lot of this disinformation, and we can already see this gearing up, will be about the 2020 election in January 6 and rewriting the narrative of the last few years.
It is part of Trump's goal.
To keep pouring salt on this wound of January 6th in the 2020 election to make our country more and more epistemically polarized and discombobulated.
And pardoning the January 6th prisoners, which he has promised to do, and prosecuting the people who quote-unquote stole the election will be part and parcel of that effort.
So we need to keep our epistemic grounding right now and not merely be reactive.
Get a firm grip on reality before January.
It's going to be hard to hold on to.
Last point.
Future elections for the foreseeable future, I predict, are going to be a lot harder than this one was.
If Trump follows the logical incentive structure, given his lack of principles, he will rig the system against his opponents.
That's just the authoritarian playbook.
That's just what people do like him when they come to power.
So we're going to need to create a supermajority coalition.
And our cosmopolitan third, as much as I love all you guys, is not enough to win an election.
And so we're going to have to prioritize how we reach out to the middle, how we enlist them.
And we have to be honest that we don't know them.
We don't understand them.
We were knocked back on our heels this time.
We need media to investigate.
We need relationships.
We need nonprofits.
We need political operatives to figure out what it is the people in the middle need.
What will speak to them?
What will draw them out?
Is it the visceral thing that Dan was just talking about, the emotional appeal?
How do we draw them into a coalition for democracy and pluralism and rebuilding our institutions and restoring perhaps a better democracy than we had before?
And if we can do that, if we can create a supermajority that enlists this middle that's up for grabs, we might be able to arrest Donald Trump's jackbooted march through our institutions.
And if we can't, we're going to be in the wilderness for a very long time.
Thank you.
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