Analysts have noted that the memorial service for slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk indicated the MAGA movement is preparing for a world without the aging and term-limited President Donald Trump — but more than that, argued David Rothkopf for The Daily Beast, they're already showing the direction their movement will take with him out of the picture.
Specifically, he said, they will go the way Kirk himself did — toward a far-right Christian nationalist ideology, that holds America and its laws as subservient to religious edicts.
"Quite apart from the looming presence of Kirk himself, the most important voices at the event were his widow, Erika Kirk, and Vice President J.D. Vance," wrote Rothkopf. "Erika Kirk’s speech was the most emotionally resonant. Her public forgiveness of her husband’s murderer was clearly the signature moment." However, Vance's remarks "were the strongest of the senior Trump Administration officials who appeared on stage. That is true both because he seemed to be the person most genuinely close to Kirk, and also because he was the most in tune with Erika."
Both of them, he wrote, spoke "like televangelists" and were there to promote "the politics of a religious revival" — because that's exactly what their goal is.
In theory, this would seem to be an improvement, he noted: "Clearly, such a move would be a big step up, a transition from one of the worst of men, a living catalogue of vices who has been supported his entire life by the wages of sin, to a deity, the epitome of virtue. What is more, it is a natural evolution for the American right, which in recent years has had an increasingly religious bent to its structure and focus."
The problem, he wrote, is that this sort of hardcore Dominionism, which rejects the separation of church and state, both excludes large portions of the public who do not subscribe to those beliefs, and also "the degree to which so many televangelists in America have themselves become corrupted by money and power. Nothing illustrates this fact so well as their embrace of as corrupt a person as Trump as an agent of a Higher Power, a quasi-religious figure himself."
"We seem to be on the verge of replacing one type of hypocritical con with another," Rothkopf concluded. "While the names of the players and some of their rhetoric may change, the essence of the MAGA movement will not. Nor will appropriating the language of Jesus or the Bible will not make those with hate or greed in their heart holy."