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The Outsider and the White House Read chapter Read first chapter

2022 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

7. Trump Won. Deal with It

Author : Chiara M. Migliori

Published in: Religious Rhetoric in US Right-Wing Politics

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

If the Religious Right is bound in an unofficially sanctioned relationship of mutual support and benefit with the Republican Party, it is in the support granted to Donald Trump by prominent actors and organizations of the movement that it is possible to appreciate the nature of the cooperation between Christian religion and conservative politics in the twenty-first-century United Sates. In an unapologetically shallow and sloganized exploitation of Christian symbols, Trump crafted his peculiar religious discourse, built on a rhetoric of revengeful status reaffirmation, identity politics, ethno-nationalism, and authoritarianism. To grant him the spot of the god-fearing Republican candidate and justify the controversial decision of backing a man characterized by an arguable public moral stature, the supporting discursive apparatus created by the Religious Right is revealing of the outright secular political aims of the movement. Trump compensated the movement by welcoming their attention and invitations at crucial events and basking in the adoration of spiritual and lay leaders.

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previous chapter A Rhetorical Weapon
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Footnotes
1
Nondenominational Evangelical church, Youngstown, OH, October 2017.
 
2
An informative piece on the issue is Chris Moody’s 2017 article for CNN titled “The survival of a southern Baptist who dared to oppose Trump.”
 
3
Surprisingly enough, none of the members of 501(c)(3) organizations who have explicitly supported or criticized Trump during his campaign have seen their group being stripped of the tax-exempt status. This is an evidence of the fact that the Religious Right’s discourse is built around the exaggeration of risks to people of Christian faith.
 
4
Donald Trump at the 2015 edition of the Values Voter Summit, Washington, DC.
 
5
In a 2017 study, Lamont and his coauthors underline how Trump’s speeches were built upon “speech acts that bolstered and helped consolidate workers’ sense of their legitimate positioning in relation to other groups (Blumer 1958)” (Lamont et al., 2017, 161). Through the analysis of 73 speeches held by Trump during his campaign, the authors assessed how his discourse aimed at affirming the moral status of white working-class Americans through rhetorical strategies that presented the group as the backbone of the economic system and highlighting the differences between them and immigrants.
 
6
https://​factba.​se/​transcript/​donald-trump-speech-urbandale-ia-january-15-2016. The website Factbase collects Donald Trump oral and written material dating back to a letter he sent to the NY Times editor dating June 16, 1976. I retrieved all the speech transcriptions of the rallies he held between June 16, 2015, the day he announced the candidacy in New York City, and November 8, 2016, the day he won the election. As the transcripts are made by a software, they may contain mistakes, but every paragraph is linked to the video of the speech fragment, which makes it possible to double check. Within the transcripts, I performed a text research of the three words “Bible,” “Christian, Christmas,” and “Religion.”
 
7
Examples of these rallies are: Mobile, AL, August 21, 2015, Nashville, TN, August 29, 2015, Lynchburg, VA, January 18, 2016, and Virginia Beach, February 24, 2016. The last two occasions consist of speeches held respectively at Liberty University and Regent University, conservative Christian colleges.
 
8
Occurrences of the “wishing ‘Merry Christmas’” topic are found in the following rallies: New York, NY, September 25, 2015 (Values Voter Summit), Burlington, IA, October 21, 2015, Urbandale, IA, January 15, 2016, Manchester, NH, February 8, 2016, Kansas City, MO, March 12, 2016, Hickory, NC, March 14, 2016 (Lenoir Rhyne University), Phoenix, AZ, March 19, 2016, and New York, NY, May 3, 2016.
 
9
See for example the following rallies: Waterloo, IA, February 1, 2016, Cleveland, OH, March 12, 2016, Rome, NY, April 12, 2016, Harrisburg, PA, April 21, 2016, Washington, DC, June 10, 2016, Cleveland, OH, June 21, 2016, Portland, ME, August 4, 2016, Washington, DC, September 9, 2016 (Values Voter Summit), and others.
 
10
Few examples of the many times in which Trump mentioned ISIS and the persecution of Christians are: Washington, DC, April 27, 2016, Manchester, NH, June 13, 2016, Westfield, IN, July 12, 2016, Portland, ME, August 4, 2016, Green Bay, WI, August 5, 2016, Eerie, PA, August 12, 2016, Detroit, MI, September 3, 2016, High Point, NC, September 20, 2016.
 
12
To this date, Trump has participated in the Summit three times, two of which as president, and one as candidate. The VVS is not the only conservative Christian gathering attended by Trump. Summer 2019, for example, marked his sixth participation as a speaker in the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority event, organized by the group presided by Ralph Reed. The Road to Majority annual conference presents very similar traits to the Values Voter Summit. Besides being also held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in DC, the conference gathers a couple thousands activists and its aim is to equip them with the right tools to effectively “mobilize voters of faith” (from: https://​www.​ffcoalition.​com/​about/​road-to-majority/​. Last accessed on August 21, 2019).
 
13
John 1:5, New English Version.
 
15
Id. min 10:30.
 
16
Id. min 15:34.
 
17
Id. min 18:14.
 
18
Id. min 18:58.
 
19
Id. min 19:51.
 
20
Id. min 24:04.
 
21
Id. min 10:30.
 
22
It is important to notice how a feature of Religious Right’s activists that distinguish them from the population of displaced and resentful ordinary citizens appealed by moral and status politics is that, since the beginning of the movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the former did not usually belong to the cluster defined as “low-income, rural, working class, and poorly educated” (Berlet & Lyons, 2000, 229). Activists, as a matter of fact, came from rather prosperous areas.
 
23
The names of the two activists interviewed have been substituted with fictional ones.
 
24
Thomas, activist, personal interview, October 2017.
 
25
Jack, activist, personal interview, October 2017.
 
27
Peter Sprigg, personal interview, October 2017.
 
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Metadata
Title
Trump Won. Deal with It
Author
Chiara M. Migliori
Copyright Year
2022
Book
Religious Rhetoric in US Right-Wing Politics

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-96549-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-96550-1

Copyright Year: 2022

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96550-1_7