Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Trump is clearly trying to weaponize this horror in a similar way to how the right seized on the assassination of Charlie Kirk to mobilize right-wing religious passions in a highly damaging way. Few are better at explaining this type of thing than Sarah Posner, author of several books on the religious right and the Christian nationalist underpinnings of MAGA. Sarah, great to have you back on.
Sargent: So what we know about Thomas Jacob Sanford so far is that he was an Iraq War veteran. He had a camouflage Trump campaign T-shirt from 2020, seemed to have had a Trump-Pence sign on his backyard fence as late as June, and apparently called Mormons the Antichrist.
Posner: Well, you know, I would just, as a reporter, I like to take a lot of caution in jumping to any conclusions in the immediate aftermath of one of these horrific mass-casualty events that we have too many of in this country. And so I think we have these bits of evidence that investigators have gathered and revealed so far, but I think there’s a lot we do not know about the perpetrator in this Michigan church catastrophe.
The difference between anti-Christian bias and anti-Mormon bias is sort of an interesting one. For the audience that Trump is trying to reach when he claims that something is evidence of anti-Christian bias, that’s largely an evangelical audience. It’s also a right-wing Catholic audience. But many in the evangelical world, including many Trump supporters, don’t really consider the LDS church to be Christian. They don’t consider Mormons to be Christian, mainly because of their views of the role of the prophet Joseph Smith in the founding of their faith, and of the use of the Book of Mormon in addition to the Old and New Testaments, and other what they would consider to be extra-biblical teachings of the LDS faith.
Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): His family is cooperating with the FBI. And so they are currently trying to dig in and get to the bottom of why he committed just this heinous act of violence. It’s unfathomable. And as the president rightfully put, in his Truth Social yesterday, this appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians and the Trump administration is fully committed to not only investigating these crimes, but prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law.
Posner: There’s a lot of problems with the top official in the United States—the president—and his surrogate, Karoline Leavitt, saying these things publicly before we know more about what happened.
I mean, that is exactly what Trump is thinking here. He’s not actually thinking that he’s going to solve anti-religious bias, or anti-religious violence, or hate crimes. He’s thinking about it in terms of how he’s going to get his base to think about how he sees the world, and how he can get his base to think about how they will continue to support him.
Sargent: Yeah, and I want to highlight a certain aspect of what Karoline Leavitt said here. After saying this appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians, she then said the Trump administration is fully committed to not only investigating these crimes, but prosecuting them. I think that’s highly suggestive language. She doesn’t quite come out and say that they’re going to start using law enforcement to go after people who they say are committing anti-Christian crimes but it sure sounds like that’s where it’s headed. What do you think?
And so if they’re going to use law enforcement to combat what they see as anti-Christian bias—and they see that as preventing crimes motivated by anti-Christian bias—I mean, you can’t… you know, somebody saying something that you think is anti-Christian. And remember, they think it’s anti-Christian to, say, disagree with a pastor who’s against same-sex marriage. They think that that’s anti-Christian to say that.
Sargent: Right. Donald Trump basically campaigned on a Christian nationalist platform without saying it quite as explicitly as certain others in MAGA have.
The far-right influencer Jack Posobiec called on followers to put on the armor of God and get ready for spiritual warfare.
Posner: Well, their real aim is to, A, have their followers believe that they are in a cosmic battle between good and evil in which they will save Christian America from evil forces within it that they claim hate America and hate Christianity and hate the idea of America as a Christian nation.
But they—the Trumpers—really want to kind of continually have grist for this mill, right? And so this tragedy that happened in Michigan, it’s so horrific that they would use it to, you know, threaten people, sort of suggest that, you know, we’re going to come looking for anybody who we think is anti-Christian.
It seems to me that we need to not be naive about what we’re seeing—is, I guess, what I’m getting at.
Sargent: By Satan.
Sargent: Right. But Sarah, just to be super clear for our audience, because they’re not really as sort of tapped into this as you are, they actually mean that the deep state and Democrats and election’s officials were the instruments of Satan, right?
Sargent: Well, I think there’s very little doubt that someone like Pete Hegseth actually believes that Democrats and secular liberals and election officials and so forth are enemies of the Christian nation. And whether he believes it’s justified to then turn the troops loose on them, I don’t know—but I don’t think it’s that huge a leap.
It just seems like a problem.
Sargent: Just to tie this up, what’s the worst case scenario here in terms of them weaponizing these types of events to try to drum up a sense among Christian America that they’re under siege from, well, you and me?
But, you know, on the other hand, I don’t want to be too alarmist about it because they also say a lot of things that they don’t carry out, right? And so this might just be them thinking this is a good messaging opportunity for us at this particular moment when Trump has had a lot of, let’s say, PR losses lately. Right.
So, you know, there are a lot of other sort of countervailing things. I don’t want people to, you know, dismiss the possibility of bad things that they could do, but I also don’t want to be too alarmist about it.
Posner: Thanks, Greg.
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