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Liberal Americans struggling to account for Donald Trump’s enduring political appeal seem to be settling on an explanation. Authoritarianism is ascendant across the globe, the argument goes, and Trump is a part of this pattern. Trump would seem to offer plenty of evidence supporting this argument, what with his patently anti-democratic threats and his persistent fawning over strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
But this explanation suggests that the best benchmark for understanding Trump and Trumpism lies somewhere outside the American political tradition. It implies that Trump is, at root, “un-American” or “unprecedented” — and so, too, the MAGA movement of which he is both leader and avatar.
But I see Donald Trump as a very American character, and I see him following in the well-worn footsteps of a long and very American parade. If they refresh their memories, the oldest voters in this year’s election will be able to conjure the likes of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, David Duke, and Sarah Palin. In the Trump era, the parade has gained new strength, placing politicians like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson in positions of prominence. Seen in this light, Trump is not an outlier, but rather represents a particularly effervescent flowering of a brand of politics that has always played a powerful role in American public life.
I first came to this view as I worked toward my Ph.D. in American History. My studies spanned Trump’s first campaign for President, years I spent immersed in the digital archive of sermons, songs, catechisms, and narratives produced by early American preachers. I completed the degree in the spring of 2017, just a few months after Trump took office. To this day, when I listen to Donald Trump, I hear a Puritan jeremiad.
English Puritans were the true radicals of the English branch of the Protestant Reformation. They believed the establishment of “pure” Christian communities required that they separate themselves entirely from the Church and Crown of England. Puritans considered these twin institutions hopelessly corrupt, and always susceptible to the pernicious influence of the Roman Catholic Church, whose prelate, the Pope, they believed to be in league with the devil.
In the early seventeenth century, groups of English Puritans began to establish colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America. From the very beginning, the Puritan enterprise in what they called New England was “isolationist.” Only by cutting themselves off from the outside world, these Puritans believed, could they hope to fulfill their divine “election.”
But within a few short generations the New England Puritans found themselves hopelessly entangled with the forces of evil yet again. As neighboring native peoples resisted their naive efforts at evangelization, they concluded that the “wilderness” beyond the perimeters of their colonies was teeming with “savages.” Even worse, these savages were in league with the hated Catholic French. The devil, it turned out, had crossed the Atlantic, too.
The way the New England Puritans conceived of it, the diabolical conspiracy of “the French and the Indians” presented peril at every turn. Most palpably, native practices of raid-making and captive-taking filled Puritan hearts with fear that their young – especially their young women – might be taken captive. Almost equally terrifying was the fear that members of their own communities might be seduced by dark spiritual forces from within. In some Puritan communities, they labeled their rebellious women — often women who failed to conform to gender norms — as “witches.”
Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Puritan preachers in New England embraced this sermonic form of the jeremiad in response to their predicament. A jeremiad is a type of sermon named after the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, who pronounced God’s judgment on the people of Judah, the first of the twelve tribes of Israel to occupy the promised land. According to the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah often channeled the voice of God directly, as in this passage: “Thus saith the Lord … I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.” (Jeremiah 2:2,7, KJV)
In the style of Jeremiah, new generations of Puritan preachers in New England began to admonish their flocks. God had ordained their colonial enterprise— they saw New England as a direct analog to the biblical promised land —and yet the promises inherent in this calling were not being fulfilled. At root this failure could be traced, the preachers told their listeners and readers, to their own lack of faith and fidelity. Their failures threatened both their own eternal salvation and the larger New England experiment.
While these early Puritan sermons are most notorious for their harsh and scolding rhetoric, they were in fact both simultaneously backward and forward looking. They contrasted the present not with an ancient past, but with a past that had not yet quite slipped from memory, allowing for the possibility that it could yet be reclaimed, reconjured, rekindled, and restored. The Puritans did not yet identify as “Americans”—that moniker did not begin to spread until the mid-eighteenth century. But if they had, they would have said what was needed was to make America great again.
Many commentators have connected this early American religious tradition to Donald Trump’s rise to power, often calling it “white Christian nationalism.” But white Christians are just the easiest-to-identify cohort of Americans attracted by Trump’s message. Tens of millions of white Americans who no longer go to church – and millions more who are not white – are shaped by this cultural inheritance in ways that are deeply subconscious, almost primal.
Even as he becomes more and more erratic – and his “weave” more and more disjointed – Trump speaks very effectively to this shadow side of the American soul. Trump doffs his cap now and then to the promise of salvation — if only the people will return to their senses, all will be well in America once more. But as the election draws near, he is doubling down on the darker message of the Puritan jeremiad.
It’s all right there, and Trump needs no teleprompter to hit the high notes. The isolationism, the conspiratorial thinking that would suspect every institution of malevolent corruption, the demonization of those beyond our borders, the fear that dark spiritual forces are capturing or corrupting our young, the fears of an enemy from within, the nostalgia for an imagined golden age that is supposedly slipping away, the global assessment that things are going to hell in a hand-basket and that if we don’t do something about it, our very purpose as a body politic will be eradicated. In short, the fear that if we stay the course, “we won’t have a country anymore.”
We will soon know whether Americans in 2024 will succumb to the sinister side of this very American spirit.
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