When Donald Trump announced Pete Hegseth as his pick for secretary of defense, the initial public reaction was, understandably, something along the lines of, “A Fox News host is going to run the Pentagon?” It was only in the following days that the media fleshed out the public’s understanding of Hegseth and shone a light on one of his most prominent and controversial facets: his deep involvement with the Christian nationalist movement. As I dug into Hegseth, something deeper struck me.
This was just a battle,” Woodland Park-based evangelist Andrew Wommack wrote last week, triumphant in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory. “The war is yet to be won. The left is not going away, because they’re inspired by the devil – and the devil has never quit!”
The chances of Donald Trump being elected President of the United States next week are only slightly worse than a coin flip. The polls are tight, and tighter still in the seven swing states likely to decide the election. Despite his criminal convictions, his disastrous first term in office, and his obvious unfitness for the role, there is a distinct possibility that American voters will return him to power.
Two of the state’s most prominent law enforcement figures have spent the month bickering in the pages of the Phil Anschutz-owned Gazette. What started with a broadside from former and would-be future District Attorney George Brauchler against Denver District Attorney Beth McCann has devolved into a back-and-forth race to the bottom as the prosecutors take turns embodying the worst impulses of the American justice system.
I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered,” the authoritarian aspirant tweeted, following his Friday rally at the Aurora Gaylord. “We will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.” Over the rest of the three-paragraph screed, he promised to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel migrants, a law which was last used to intern 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The third highest-ranking official in the federal government has done little to conceal the extent of his Christian nationalism. House Speaker Mike Johnson has decried American culture as ‘dark and depraved.’ He has compared himself to Moses. He has called the separation of church & state “a misnomer.” And this weekend, he was in Colorado, stumping for Gabe Evans in the seat which Johnson says may decide control of the U.S. House of Representatives in November.
A few months ago, I was cautiously optimistic that the national news media had started paying attention to Christian nationalism – a movement which I and many others view as one of the most pressing threats to American democracy, and which is a major animating force behind Donald Trump’s current presidential campaign, but is rarely discussed as either. After seeing how the national media covered Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s recent appearance at a traveling revival carnival helmed by one of that movement’s leaders, though, I realized my optimism was clearly misplaced. Some in the media are paying attention, but they still aren’t getting it; what they think is a sideshow is actually the main event.
An old adage insists that “all politics is local,” but it’s not true. The rapid advance of the internet age has flipped the adage on its head: these days, all politics is national. With Fox News, CNN, and Facebook blasting their signals into every corner of the once vast and untrammeled wilderness, truly local issues have fallen by the wayside. Now, local races are dominated by the headwinds of national political discourse, and local candidates are incentivized to rhetorically overextend themselves in service of signaling to the tribe. It is a politics of pantomime, with potholes and passing lanes supplanted by abortion and immigration as the issues du jour – in races for offices which will have no jurisdiction over either – and too few candidates speaking to the particulars and prerogatives of the positions they seek.
Politics runs on reputations, and when you hang around the state Capitol enough you get a feel for the reputations which have been cultivated – intentionally or otherwise – by the various state representatives and senators. There are dealmakers and backbenchers, cynics and wise men, work horses and show horses. And, in one way or another, these reputations impact how they interact with each other, and how laws ultimately get made.
I have found myself struggling to watch cable news during this election cycle, unsettled each time I turn on the television by the way pundits discuss the ongoing presidential race. But it’s not the bickering or bothsidesism that bothers me, it’s the business-as-usual tone; one increasingly at odds with the tone taken by the academics and experts I encounter in my professional life tracking and countering extremist movements. While the talking heads on the television are dedicating their time to polls, rallies, and horse race coverage as if nothing were amiss, the national security experts, legal scholars, political scientists, and law enforcement officials are warning of a surge in political violence. Far from business as usual.
