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Behold: Donald Trump the chosen son — and religious con

ALSO READ: Trump mused about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. This is much worse

Last week, Donald Trump and company shared a messianic video about God sending the former president to save the world. Upon seeing this latest egocentric and propagandistic video about Donald Trump and his “true” believers, there have been at least three kinds of reactions.

As the Peabody Award-winning television producer and founding editor of Mediaite, Colby Hall, has written, his “creepy and messianic bit of messaging” has caused “many to cringe but others to fall to their knees in supplication.”

Many people, however, have also found the video to be comical if not satirical.

Perhaps many more persons have found it to be crazy, irrational or senseless.

ALSO READ: Pat Sajak wants you to help solve the puzzle of 'far-left propaganda'

So why would Trump and company post a “satirical” version of Paul Harvey’s famous “So God Made a Farmer” video in which Trump, whose religious bona fides are dubious at best, is playing the role of God’s son?

It all goes back to 2015 when political pundits, social commentators and just about everybody else, for that matter, were all surprised to learn that the lifelong amoral, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual Democratic campaign contributor had become the beloved favorite of the evangelical community.

This inversion of Trump’s personal biography involved a lot of hard effort and energy on the former president’s part, not to mention his promise to appoint conservative judges to low and high courts alike, and to do his best to fight against abortion, gender, civil and human rights for all.

But, ultimately, it also came down to arguably one of Trump’s greatest con jobs.

It all occurred on the 25th floor of Trump Tower in a meeting arranged by Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer and presently one of Trump’s leading antagonists. Cohen had called in an IOU from Jerry and Becki Falwell. At this meeting, Trump was able to play to the desires and vanities of some of the nation’s celebrity evangelicals, including Jerry Falwell Jr., Pastor Darrell Scott, and the Rev. Robert Jeffress. Trump convinced them that he had experienced a moment of conversion.

As some of those in attendance such as Johnnie Moore — the unofficial leader of Trump’s evangelical advisory board — had been quoted, “I absolutely believe he’s a born-again Christian.” Or, as the Rev. Franklin Graham, faith adviser to Trump’s White House and son of the late Billy Graham, stated, “I think there’s no question that he believes.”

As Cohen writes in his first book on Trump, Disloyal: A Memoir, a few minutes after all of the evangelical leaders had ritualistically laid their hands on Trump’s germophobic body and were descending from Trump Tower, Donald popped into Cohen’s office and had this to say, “Can you believe people believe that bulls—?”

In other words, Trump had learned that even though he never made a pretense to being a religious person before running for office beginning in 2015 that he was still able to establish an ardent support from evangelical voters both in 2016 and 2020. He even enjoyed more support than traditional conservative Republican candidates and presidents such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had, vis-à-vis what we can only refer to as the “conversion” con.

Religious scholars tell us that this has less to do with the qualities of the candidates/presidents themselves and more to do with the changing identities of evangelical voters, per the New York Times.

In the past, being evangelical “suggested regular church attendance, a focus on salvation…Today, it is often used to describe a cultural and political identity” in which “Christians are considered a persecuted minority” and “traditional institutions are viewed skeptically,” including church.

ALSO READ: Birtherism is back. But these top GOPers are tired of Trump’s citizenship conspiracies.

Enter Donald Trump, “the savior” for those new white American voters who had become evangelical Christians during his presidency, according to a 2021 Pew Research Center analysis.

Relatedly: Trump, who understands the polls perhaps as well as most pollsters do, also understands the social construction of “alternative realities.” He’s also a master of the “art of the con,” or the interplay of three characteristics — gullibility, absurdity and believability — that he uses to captivate his cultish followers.

For instance, Trump knows that according to polls from November 2023 that more Republicans believe Trump is a person of faith compared to Joe Biden — a church-going Irish Catholic who has worn religion on his sleeve for most of his 81 years.

Trump also understands that throughout U.S. history the most successful con men have all relied on these three characteristics of their victims They range from Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith II in the mid-19th century to Charles Ponzi in the 1920s to Bernie Madoff and Donald Trump himself more recently.

Ironically, even when the “jig is up” with 91 felony counts pending against the former president across four criminal cases, most of his “marks” (or victims), who have been deceived with the exception of those who may have been financially or emotionally ruined or imprisoned because of their fraudulent experience, will tend to excuse this fraudster-in-chief rationalizing or excusing his behavior one way or the other. Trump will fashion himself a victim of persecution by Biden and the imaginary Deep State, and most of his most ardent supporters will agree.

Meanwhile, there is the sardonic underside of Trump’s messianic messaging playing out in real time. I am referring specifically to the ongoing threats and violent crimes against agents of law enforcement, including the doxxing and swatting of those “enemies” of the savior Donald Trump, such as special counsel Jack Smith and Judge Tanya Chutkan.

All of which underscores that the upcoming criminal trials — whenever they finally occur — will not only be about various “crime scenes” surrounding Trump and his associates’ attempts to steal an election or engage in fraud from the past. They will also be about various “crimes in progress” such as obstructing justice or intimidating witnesses.

The only thing that will break this spell, as Trump fully knows as well from the polls, will be his inevitable criminal convictions by juries of his peers.

Ergo, the Trump legal team’s one and only procedural strategy or legal defense has been to delay, delay and delay these trials from occurring until after the November 2024 presidential election.

But with prosecutors pushing for swift justice and courts seemingly receptive to relatively speedy trials, Trump will need a serious prayer to get his wish.

Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University, co-founder of the Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime, and the author of Criminology on Trump (2022) whose sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We can Do About the Threat to American Democracy will be published April 1.

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'We have rarely faced a more serious moment' than the one now facing Supreme Court: expert

Should the conservative majority Supreme Court hand Donald Trump the freedom to deploy the National Guard whenever and wherever he chooses, the president’s “power grab’ will be complete and nothing will ever stop him again.

That is according to former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, who wrote on her Substack platform, that two cases coming before the court are part of his “drive to make the executive more powerful and to have that power come at the expense of the courts, Congress, and the people.”

As he pointed out, there are two critical cases the court is poised to take up. “The scope of presidential power to federalize and deploy National Guard troops,” and “Whether a president’s decision that such a move is merited is effectively unreviewable by the courts, as Trump alleges.”

Explaining out that giving Trump a license to deploy troops to cities on a whim is a direct assault on democracy, she wrote that the court will be reviewing ”an 1827 case, Martin v. Mott, where the Supreme Court held that ‘the authority to decide whether the exigency has arisen [to call up state militias] belongs exclusively to the president, and that his decision is conclusive upon all other persons.’”

Vance explained that she is pinning her hopes that the court will seriously consider that a pro-Trump ruling will make them superfluous.

“If the Supreme Court is committed to history and tradition, as they have frequently said they are these past few years, and if they want to avoid writing their branch of government out of the equation, then they must stand for the proposition that judicial review of decisions made by the executive branch is sacrosanct and essential to democracy, and the president’s assertion that no one can vet the constitutionality of his decisions is simply wrong,” she wrote.

Reminding readers that Trump has called Democratic cities “the enemy within,” she warned, “We have rarely faced a more serious moment.”

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'Their own voters are pissed': Lawmaker says GOP left with 'no choice' but to attack Trump

A throughline is reportedly developing in the reaction of Republican lawmakers to the controversies piling up around President Donald Trump.

The president and his legal team have reportedly asked the Department of Justice for $230 million to settle damage claims related to his past federal prosecutions, but House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) pleaded ignorance, as usual, and other Republicans agreed he had every right to expect taxpayer restitution, reported NBC News.

“What happened in the last four years with the weaponization of the Justice Department has to not only end, but never, ever happen again,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO). “Never happen again, and for that, there needs to be accountability.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) conceded he had "optics concerns" about Trump's move, while Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) said any potential restitution should be "handled via the courts" – but both of those GOP lawmakers are retiring at the end of their terms, and other Republicans told MSNBC they tended to refrain from criticizing the president unless an issue affected their voters back home.

“I decide based on what I hear from my constituents,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY).

Lummis was among many GOP lawmakers who claims they "never heard about" Trump's demand for $230 million from their constituents, and Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) said he and other Republicans “look through the lenses of our state" – in his case, hurricane recovery in western North Carolina – before criticizing the president.

“I want to make sure that those he’s appointed to his cabinet are actually doing that,” Budd said.

But Democrats told MSNBC that their Republican colleagues are simply afraid of going against Trump.

“Trump’s wrath if they cross him badly, and their own voters who are rightfully pissed off right now over the Argentina bailout,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA). “That’s why they’re mostly silent, and when they do speak out, it’s on something like Argentina where their base is leaving them no choice, and where Trump probably won’t end their careers over just this one thing.”

'A recipe for disaster': ICE scorched over recruitment chaos

Reacting to a NBC News report that the rush to put more masked ICE agents on the streets is resulting in a flood of applicants who have violent histories and possible criminal backgrounds, the panel on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” warned chaos on U.S. cities is about to take a turn for the worse.

As co-host Mike Brzezinski reported, “ICE officials later discovered that some recruits had criminal backgrounds, failed drug tests, or did not meet physical or academic standards. What's more, some recruits had not submitted fingerprints for background checks, which is a violation of ICE hiring policy. In fact, one recruit had prior charges for strong-armed robbery and battery related to domestic violence.”

“Additionally, nearly half of recruits failed the written exam, even with access to notes and textbooks,” she continued. “All of this as ICE has shortened its training program from 13 weeks to six weeks to accelerate the on-boarding process. ICE’s HR office is reportedly overwhelmed by more than 150,000 applicants, spurred by a $50,000 signing bonus."

That led co-host Joe Scarborough to pounce with, “These are the people that are going around again, throwing people to the ground many times without anybody seeing their identity.”

"It is, man, you talk about a recipe for disaster,” he exclaimed. “I mean, we're there.”

“Yeah, I mean, when you have masked agents who haven't really been vetted, who haven't passed the test, who've taken the signing bonus and just been kind of put on the front lines, you're going to get some of these incidents we've seen most recently down on Canal Street, roughing up some of the guys selling fake purses down there,” co-host Willie Geist chipped in.

“But yes, you would like to see this is obviously a part of the president's mass deportation efforts,” he continued. “He needs the bodies. He needs people to be out in the streets, knocking on these doors, kicking down these doors, taking people out of vehicles and all the things that we've been seeing in these videos.”

“But he needs people, he needs bodies, so they don't have to pass the test,” he added. “They have put a lot of money, Joe, into ICE, and they're trying to get the people — well, a lot of money into ICE , but obviously very little focus on training or the proper training.”

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