How Religion Fuels Trumpland’s Litany of Lies

Obama wasn’t born in America, and is therefore ineligible to be president… and he’s a Muslim, which also, for any real American, makes him ineligible to be president.

Global warming is a hoax.

The theory of evolution is a Marxist, atheistic plot.

The Big Bang theory is blasphemous fraud.

Donald Trump is a business mastermind, the shrewdest of all negotiators, a stable genius who knows more about everything than anyone.

Trump would have won the 2016 popular vote if not for those three million illegal votes.

Trump had the largest inauguration crowd in American history.

A big, beautiful wall, from coast to coast, will stop illegals coming in from Mexico.

All mainstream media is “fake news.”

Trade wars are easy to win.

Trump will bring back Big Coal and Manufacturing.

The Trump economy is the best in world history.

The press is the enemy of the people.

Trump achieved more in his first year as president than any president ever did in their complete tenure.

Trump did more for African Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln.

No president has been more mistreated than Trump.

Joe Biden is a socialist commie.

Conservatives are the “real” Americans.

The covid-19 pandemic is a hoax.

Trump won the 2020 election. The Democrats stole it.

Jesus, the Son of God, was born of a virgin, performed many miracles, was crucified and died for our sins, then was resurrected to life, ascended to heaven, and now is the one and only way for anyone to, themselves, ascend to heaven to reunite with their departed loved ones forever… and escape eternal torment in hell.

See any commonality in these statements?

They are all statements of “fact” that millions of people take “on faith” to be absolute, and the most profound, truth… because… someone (perhaps a single person) claimed them to be true… and it feels like it should be true… and everyone else they know and trust has accepted it as true. In utter “faith,” no proof is necessary. Or even desirable… it wouldn’t be “faith” if it didn’t require a suspension of all reason and evidence and a leap into the improbable… or impossible. No matter that it violates the known laws of nature… there must be unknown laws that make it so. “God works in mysterious ways,” pretty much shuts down any doubters and covers all further objections. It’s an amazing phenomenon that probably dates back to the infancy of human civilization… those hunter-gatherer clans who came before more likely to have stuck to rational facts that would not get them poisoned by a newly discovered mushroom or eaten by a saber-tooth cat.

Faith is the “logic” of the true believer, whether Protestant or Catholic or Mormon or Muslim or Jew or Hindu or Buddhist or Scientologist… or Trumper. No claim is too outlandish for their not-so-careful consideration. There is but one guiding requisite: does it serve their self-interest? If so, if it feels good in their gut in any of a million strange and disturbing ways, it’s a go! That’s what conservatives conserve: their own advantage, privilege and power. No whopper is too farfetched or distasteful for conservatives to swallow down if it serves this primal impulse.

So you believe Democrats are the seed of Satan and determined to turn the world into a One Government hellhole? Then the notion that they are child-molesting predators operating in the basement of a pizza shop becomes appealingly plausible. Why would it not be true? Democrats are demons. God only allows them to exist to tempt and test good conservatives (God being ever eager to set traps for the slacking believer). Let one or two or three media channels of like mind (seedy and truth-challenged as they may be) echo that claim… and it quickly becomes viral, Rush Limbaugh and/or the primetime Fox News wankers (even as the Fox news team debunks) putting the final seal of approval on its viability.

If you have accomplished the breathtaking “leap of faith” to accept the wildest and craziest religious myths as the core beliefs of your personhood, accepting the veracity of Pizzagate is an easy hop. If God deemed it necessary to smite all of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, there’s hardly any unbelievable scenario among myriad wicked ways of the secular world and its primary enablers: liberals.

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, which was the exact reverse of the 2016 electoral college result which Trump and his minions claimed to be a “landslide,” Democrats are shaking their heads at the illogic, intransigence, bad-faith and near-treason (OK, it’s pretty much plain treason) of Republicans refusing to accept the outcome of the election count. This, of course, flying in the face of the context that the popular vote in both elections solidly favored the Democrats… actually nearly doubling from 2016 to 2020, to over five million.

How in the holy hell can conservatives make such an outrageous claim? Faith, baby, faith.

Their new messiah, Donald Trump, has long primed them for this outrage. Didn’t he claim, in 2016, that the only way he could lose was if the Democrats cheated? Yes, he did. Hasn’t he doted upon those three million “illegal votes” since that first election? Yes, he has. Hasn’t he kept up a running commentary that the system is rigged, the media is corrupt, Democrats are awful, the “Deep State” is thwarting him, forces known and unknown are opposing him? Yes, he has. Didn’t he warn that all those mail-in ballots were fraudulent? Yes, he did. Didn’t he proclaim, once again, during the 2020 election cycle that the only way he could lose was if the Democrats cheated? Yes, he did.

And when Trump lost, fair and square, by a lot bigger margin than he won four years earlier, the “truth” of the matter was plain for all true believers to see. It could not be true! Trump did not hesitate to remind them: I won! Fraud! Corrupt! Stolen! The cultists immediately answered his clarion call to rise up and demand that their truth, their “facts,” be held supreme, over all other facts and figures, rationality and you, know, belief in our American system … in the attempt to actually overthrow an American election! Welcome to the conservatism-greased slide of America into Banana Republicanism.

This should not surprise anyone. The conservative mob always demands that their “truth” trump any and all other evidence. Their myth (not science) based worldview renders them entitled, advantaged, empowered to do so. They are the “real” and “true” patriots, and no one has the “right” to proscribe their supremacy. “How dare those people imagine themselves as a majority of We the People? America properly belongs to us!”

Just look at that great red swath of the electoral map, county after county awash in scarlet, as opposed to those little blue splotches, how could they lose? Doesn’t that vast acreage count for anything? Well, yes it does… it gives them an unfair advantage in the Senate (but that’s another essay). But no, in the electoral college, you need a critical mass of full states, not square miles, to win. The three huge states of Texas and Montana and Alaska look impressive on the map, but California, by itself, blows them away in the EC.

Telltale signs that they are wrong… in fact and faith… are contained in that same geography. The old “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin reassembled itself. It wasn’t exactly a “miracle” of Humpty Dumpty lives! proportion. The once reliably red states of Arizona and Georgia, with voter rolls influxed with swarms of yuppies and angry minorities, turned blue. This development is hardly unimaginable, especially when you insult the memory of a beloved, deceased, favorite son war hero. Actual election officials (not partisan hacks) of both parties claim that there was zero fraud, zero corruption, no illegal votes, no stolen election. The numbers don’t lie. Yes, Biden’s margin in many of the closest battlegrounds was slim, but his vote total in those states was double that of Trump’s 2016 margin in similar states. Trump’s approval rating for years has been down in the dumper, around 42 percent, far lower than would suggest a sure-fire re-election. Then there is the seven in eight reality… that’s the number of the most recent past elections in which the Democrats won the popular vote! All of this data points to a Biden victory, indeed, a Trump victory would have been far more surprising… just as most polls anticipated.

Other pertinent questions remain which are problematic for Republican brains. How did those nefarious, cheating Democrats correctly assume that there would be 10 million more Trump voters in 2020 than in 2016, and thus be ready to stuff 13 million more votes into the counting pile than Hillary accrued? Why is it so seemingly easy for Democrats to pull illegal votes out of magic hats whenever they want, while Republicans are forced to cheat the hard way: by stopping legal voters from voting? If Democrats rigged the election, how come they failed to build on their House of Representatives margin and win the Senate? How come Republicans, other than Trump, did so well? If Trump won the “rigged” 2016 election, how come he couldn’t do the same in 2020 with nearly nine million additional voters? Why are so many Republicans claiming the election was legitimate, no cheating, no fraud, no illegal votes… and is over?

Alas, numbers and data are highly suspicious and a perennial thorn to conservatives, many of whom believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old… even as there are human artifacts 500 times that old (not to mention zircons that are measured at over four billion years old). Just so… conservatives can, without blinking, convince themselves that there is no possible way in heaven that Democrats could have won this election without cheating.

Lurking behind all other questions and considerations regarding the 2020 election is the deepest election mystery of all : how could Democrats possibly have legally won when conservatives have so long practiced the art of stealing elections themselves, through lies, taunts, slander, gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter intimidation, even sabotaging the Post Office? You can certainly see how suspicions could arise. Yet, inconveniently for them, conservatives are muted in bringing up this best argument to support their position because, well, it sort of undermines their longstanding (but false) claim to the moral high ground. They aren’t that stupid.

When will these intractable conservatives concede? For many of them… never! Just like their messiah, the fat one, who can be counted on to never concede to his dying day. Or if he does, for temporary official reasons only, he will renege on it the next day. For the truly faithful, there is no mountain of evidence that will dissuade their dogmatic certainty. You see, to do so would be to introduce uncertainty into their worldview. If they were wrong about this, or that, then what else might they be wrong about? If their Dear Leader, Trump, lied to them about one thing, what else did he lie about? Their entire house of cards philosophy could come tumbling down. Better to shut out any and all negativity… and brand it “fake news” if not nefarious blasphemy… continue to hold tight to the faith itself… and faith in one’s own loyalty to it… in order to continue as the same person. The alternative is unthinkable.

But wait! There are plenty of Christians and other religionists who don’t buy into these Trumpland lies. They may even have voted for those devils Obama, Hillary and Biden. Ha! You call those believers? They have lost the faith. They have given up on the Bible’s literal inerrancy. They consort and compromise with the enemy. They are the gullible and the mistaken. They are slowly but surely backing away from the harsh judgment of the Lord. Either they, or their children or grand-children will finally sever the cord and become secular heathens, believing instead in that “We the People” and democracy tripe. Democrats know how to woo this audience with their “justice for all” treachery, thus, in effect, buying the votes of illiterate blacks and browns and gays and women and workers too selfish to properly subordinate themselves. The true believer understands America is the new Canaan, ripe for the manifest destiny of the Chosen People… the conservative people conserving their own, natural, rights of superiority over all others. You know, just as Jesus commanded.

It is the Chosen People who are the most august citizens of Trumpland. These folks will go to their graves believing this election was stolen from their rightful champion. They will cling to utter faith in the lewd, crude, crass, arrogant, belligerent, mean, vain, ugly, ignorant, lying, cheating, self-absorbed, immoral, unspiritual total opposite of that old messiah, the skinny one, they claim to love. And forever attempt to tamp their wonder why God forsake Donald Trump.

Copyright 2020, Rusty Reid