The right's messiah is now just a mess

Donald Trump is melting down, right before our eyes. While his most ardent followers might still believe he's a mystical savior of a divinely ordained Christian nation, just as they did in 2016 and 2020, his obviously weakened state makes it increasingly difficult for people outside that bubble to see him as a powerful strongman revitalizing America.

For eight years, the Christian nationalist narrative in the face of Trump's shortcomings was that God has a plan for him. He may not be a Christian, but God chose him for a prophetic purpose. He may have character flaws, but that divine purpose transcends those imperfections. He is robust and vibrant, unafraid to stand up to supposed leftist tyrants. He is taking the bullets, now literally, for us, the long-suffering Christian victims of the godless left.

It is becoming increasingly difficult, though, to deny what is evident for everyone to see: Trump is old, Trump is incoherent, Trump is in a bunker, Trump is making shit up, Trump is freaking out. And the freakout is coming at the hand of the right's greatest terrors: "gender ideology" and "critical race theory." They are finding out that the rest of America hasn't been wallowing in weird conspiracy theories about sex, gender, and race. They are seeing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz speak to enthusiastic crowds, with "we are not going back" and "mind your own damn business" reverberating at higher decibels than "make America great again."

"Gender ideology" has for years been a catchall phrase on the right, echoing previous bogeymen like "the homosexual agenda." Two words capture a festering rightwing paranoia that the left seeks to indoctrinate children, especially, with a radical agenda, robbing them of their innocence and the gender roles supposedly assigned in the Bible, or by the "natural" order of the world. As Project 2025 puts it, "gender ideology," along with critical race theory, are "noxious tenets" that "poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women."

Republicans, then, want to portray Harris and Walz as offensive and disgusting, embodiments of literal poisons that have contaminated Christian America by allowing people who deny "the givenness of our nature" to rise to power. Flailing for meaningful rejoinders to Harris's astonishingly rapid ascent, Trump lied that she has lied about her race to her advantage, because of course a woman cannot be successful without some sort of subterfuge. After saying she is less intelligent than Joe Biden at his Mar-a-Lago press conference last week, Trump added, “Well ... uh, she’s a woman. She represents certain groups of people." Harris, being a woman of color who supports reproductive and LGBTQ rights, is, to them, the incarnation of both of these "noxious tenets" together.

But Harris is not their only target. They have latched onto the meme about "Tampon Tim," because despite claiming to protect a supposedly authentic femininity from the ravages of the secular left, they are still like middle school boys who think menstruation is gross, that men shouldn't have to think about it, and that no real man would defile the boys' room by making tampons available there. Real Christian men don't support trans people.

Republicans have no answer to the remarkable and historic excitement for the Harris-Walz ticket other than to provoke the base's terror about these supposed "poisons." That's why Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, wrote a brazenly racist post on X, defending JD Vance's very weird tarmac stalking of Air Force 2 as Harris makes campaign stops in battleground states. I won't link to it, but Cheung wrote, "Make sure AF2 is deep cleaned because Lord only knows what @KamalaHarrisband her team have done on there. The smell alone on that plane must be crazy."

Just a few weeks ago, the right was awash in memes about Trump wearing the "armor of God" that shielded him from an assassin's bullet. But now, he is flopping around, making up tales about helicopter rides as a means of saying that other people—other Black people, specifically—have said unflattering things about Harris. He was given as assist, of course, from the reporter who asked him at Mar-a-Lago if Harris's past relationship with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown was factor in her political rise, itself a misogynist classic. Trump claimed to know Brown well, and told the now-notorious helicopter fable, quickly confirmed to have been Trump's mix-up of two different Black men. Trump's reaction was to angrily threaten to sue the New York Times for covering his own fiasco.

When asked about whether Trump was correctly remembering his companion on the scary helicopter ride, Cheung told NBC News, "Slick Willie has told some interesting stories about Kamala Harris." The Trump campaign is out of material. Their savior has turned out to be all the things he said Biden is—old, nattering, incompetent. The only weapons left in his campaign's arsenal are racist, misogynist innuendo and lies.