The Fake & Fraudulent Prophets Around the President
September 4, 2026 |
Daniel Henderson
I just finished reading Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Here is how the book starts in the Introduction:
OURS IS THE AGE OF THE STRONGMAN, of heads of state like Berlusconi and Putin who damage or destroy democracy and use masculinity as a tool of political legitimacy. In America, Turkey, Brazil, and other geopolitically important nations, such rulers have exploited their countries’ resources to satisfy their greed and obstructed efforts to combat climate change. Their dependence on corruption and censorship and their neglect of the public good mean that they handle national crises badly and often bring ruin upon their people. How to combat this authoritarian ascendance is one of the most pressing matters of our time.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (p. 4)
If you are distressed about our current state of affairs and are trying desperately to understand how we got here, I suggest you pick up her book. Putting Trump within the historical context of the “strongmen” reveals that Trump has followed a very well-known playbook. It isn’t new. There are numerous historical precedents for the type of authoritarianism that Trump is advocating. The methods are tried and true.
Most Americans would never have predicted that an authoritarian figure like Trump could come to dominate one of the two parties. But that is a theme that is useful to explore: How did the Republican Party (and the religious zealots who support them) reach the point of total moral collapse and give in to the corruption of Trump?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes the process as one of “moral deregulation.” Trump has worn members of the MAGA cult down to the point where they are divorced from their conscience and have replaced it with culture war issues.
Focusing on culture war issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and transgender people gives his followers a sense of self-righteous anger, which appeases their seared conscience. Trump uses this self-righteous anger and manipulates them into supporting him, no matter what he does.
As a result, they can ignore the real moral issues of corruption, cruelty, lying, discrimination, harming the poor, dehumanizing immigrants, and other harsh, undemocratic practices. They believe they are doing “God’s work,” all the while society and democracy crumble to the ground around them.
Ben-Ghiat has addressed this side of the equation on her Substack, which is called Lucid. I highly recommend it in addition to her book. Lots of great resources are there.
She wrote a column back in March this year titled, We Are Living Through Moral Collapse. How Democrats Can Strike Back. You can and should read the whole article, but I’d like to take some of her comments at length as a jumping-off point to something else that I’ve been thinking and writing about.
The moral collapse of the country has nothing to do with culture wars, which is what Christian Nationalists want you to think. It is the moral collapse of the church in America that parallels the moral collapse and capitulation of the Republican Party to Trumpism. Indeed, because you cannot separate Christian Nationalism from Republicanism, their moral failures are parallel.
It isn’t about same sex marriage, transgender people, or teaching about racism that is leading to moral collapse. To listen to people in many evangelical churches state legislatures, you would think civilization is about to collapse because two men or two women who truly love one another were allowed to marry, or a student in middle school or high school reads a book about a young person dealing with racism in modern America.
Oh my God, the roof is caving in…
I heard the same sermons decades ago decrying the collapse of civilization because prayer and Bible reading were removed from public schools. The sky was falling. But these types of public pronouncements are theater and performative and are designed to anger and motivate voters, not inspire the faithful.
They implore that God is on their side, and demons are infiltrating their opponents while Trump and his cronies raid the coffers of the country, arrest and detain innocent people, and destroy its democratic foundations. It is all a distraction. And sadly, they fell for it.
The real moral collapse has happened within their institutions: the evangelical churches and the Republican Party. Ben-Ghiat describes the drift into authoritarianism as a function of this moral deregulation. It is part of the authoritarian playbook. Here is how she describes it in her article from March 16.
When moral deregulation advances because violence and corruption have been institutionalized, including in the behavior of national leaders, then a society can experience moral collapse. We hear about how authoritarians “hollow out” institutions by removing anyone not loyal to the leader and the party, but they also hollow out people to the point where they will participate in acts of violence, corruption, and sabotage against their compatriots.
We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.
Remember during Trump 1.0, when many people, myself included, wondered how long it would take for rational, reasonable, responsible, and moral Republicans would have enough of Trump? We told ourselves, with every new scandal and horrible statement coming from his mouth, that it was just a matter of time. The Republicans will draw a red line…here it is, it’s coming…. Except there was never a red line. It never came.
Instead of rising to a higher moral standard, Trump was able to drag most of the Republican Party and their base Christian Nationalist followers down to his morally depraved level. That is what authoritarians from history do, and it leads to the moral collapse of society.
Again, from Ben-Ghiat:
Trump has worked hard for a decade now to encourage moral collapse among Americans. In 2016, two months after he boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump raised the issue of changing collective behavior to favor violence and cruelty. “Part of the problem…is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore,” he said when security guards treated protesters at a campaign rally too politely for his tastes.
The strongman’s goal is always to make his collaborators descend to his level, and Trump realized that “giving permission” to Republicans to be their worst selves was key to his domestication of the party. He made Republican elites complicit in his criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and then shocked them into submission on Jan. 6 by targeting them for physical harm.
The Jan. 6 insurrection pushed the party into a full-blown state of moral collapse: Republicans now justified violence as a way of doing politics and submitted to the leader’s needs. Politicians who had called their families to say goodbye on Jan. 6, thinking they might die, now accepted a pact of silence about their traumatic experiences in order to maintain their standing in the party.
I realized even before January 6 that Republicans, and certainly not the evangelicals, were not going to rise to any level of moral conscience. Once they let Trump off the hook in his first impeachment trial, it was clear there was no going back. Their consciences were seared.
But January 6 was the turning point incident. There were a few voices just after that horrible, violent incident who said they’d had enough. I think of Lindsay Graham and Kevin McCarthy, who seemed to indicate they were ready to bolt. They didn’t. They laid their consciences down on the altar of power and kissed the ring of Trumpism.
Then there was Senator Josh Hawley. Ben-Ghiat writes:
The drama of Senator Josh Hawley pumping his fist to encourage the insurrectionists and then running for his life from those same people has a devastating third act: his silence about that near-escape from harm when he re-emerged as a MAGA loyalist. In 2022, the GOP officially declared the Jan. 6 attack to be “legitimate political discourse,” meaning the party accepted the violence that was used against it.
The capitulations continued throughout the re-election campaign. At an August 2023 GOP presidential debate which Trump did not bother to attend, all but two candidates debased themselves by pledging with raised hands that they would support Trump even if he became a “convicted criminal.” “The Republicans are very high class. You’ve got to get a little bit lower class,” Trump had commented a month earlier. On that and many other occasions, the GOP obliged him…
This trajectory of moral collapse explains how GOP elites such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, both of whom called out Trump’s strongman ways in 2016, now collude with his destruction of democracy and alliances with autocrats.
By 2022, the party had completely capitulated and collapsed morally into the lie of the stolen 2020 election. Moral deregulation complete…they had compromised any commitment to truth or ethical behavior. They sacrificed their consciences to the authoritarian playbook. I had hoped a third party would emerge from the chaos and catastrophe of the Republican Party, but so far that hasn’t happened.
So now Trump 2.0 is more extreme, more authoritarian, more corrupt, and has a stronger base of support, and he has completely remade the Republican party and a good portion of the evangelical church into his image. It is full of corruption, lies, self-serving leaders whose only interest is in power; using it, keeping it, and punishing anyone who dares to cross them.
Ben-Ghiat calls it out this way:
Authoritarians try to normalize extreme actions through states of emergency and exception. Yet, as a Chilean victim of state torture during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship told me, “states of exception can be normalized in people too.” Moral collapse begins as an individual process and, when the conditions are right, generates new collective norms of behavior that can support large-scale repression.
Consorting with kleptocrats, dehumanizing immigrants, and banning books that speak of injustice so people don’t feel empathy for the vulnerable are among the ways Trump and his morally collapsed GOP seek to get ordinary Americans to forget their consciences so they will accept whatever abuses the government has planned.
Trump is busy normalizing the dehumanization of immigrants and his opponents. Republicans and Christian Nationalists are now in lock-step with him. It is a short step for individuals to take once their conscience has been numbed by the intoxication of Trumpian normality to either participate in or step aside and allow violence against the “others” to take place. It is how all authoritarian regimes have gained the acquiescence of the populace.
The Republican Party has no moral center, no ethical compass, and neither do churches that preach the MAGA doctrine. They are adrift on the sea of Trumpism, which is nihilistic and self-destructive. They rely on fake culture wars to create a veneer of morality to assuage their consciences. They weaponize patriotism to single out those who don’t fit into the MAGA image.
Authoritarianism is always a rotting system. The excesses of authoritarians always come with an expiration date. Just ask Mussolini, Pinochet, Ghaddafi, and Franco. Those who are most harmed will be the first to speak out. But morality and humanity call us to stand up for each other even when we have privilege…especially when we have privilege. The more Trump tries to take the country into a dystopia, the more people must hang on to each other and their conscience, in solidarity, and speak out.
Do not let your conscience be silenced by the normality of cruelty and hate. That is what Trump is counting on. What Trump is most afraid of is your moral stand against hate and cruelty. Trump is afraid when you love your neighbor…Trump is afraid of the truth-telling…Trump is afraid of people holding fast to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Ultimately, Trump is a coward.
Ben-Ghiat identifies a major opportunity for Democrats to step into the moral vacuum if they are brave enough and become the compass and the center for the nation. She highlights at the end of her post:
This gives Democrats a big opportunity. Pro-democracy movements that claim the mantle of moral authority and show care and solidarity in the face of plunder and violence can have an impact. In fact, even a relatively tiny percentage of the population –often just 3.5%, according to the political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s study of successful civil resistance movements—can make a difference if they mobilize on behalf of democratic values in situations of tyranny.
Creating a big-tent opposition movement that includes progressive faith traditions and organized labor —two sectors of civil society that privilege values-guided action— would be key. Individuals can refuse to betray others, deciding not to stay silent and hide away as rights vanish and abuses are perpetrated. As some people disappear, being visible on behalf of others becomes even more important.
Keep your moral center and uphold values such as love your neighbor, solidarity, justice, compassion, and empathy. You know, those things that Jesus actually taught.
These are values that scare authoritarians and Christian Nationalists. But they are the values that make a society liveable and worth fighting for, and they can bring down authoritarians.
Each time we show solidarity with others, or support those who are protecting the rule of law, helping the targeted, or exposing the lies and the corruption, we are standing up for democratic values of justice, accountability, equality, and more. In doing so, we model the behaviors the authoritarian state wants us to abandon. Joining with others, we transform our individual righteous indignation into a potent moral force for good.
Power must be reconceptualized for it to be truly effective. Power exercised through coercion, pressure, intimidation, and violence will never overcome the power of love, compassion, empathy, and solidarity. History will always prove this to be true.
Power in service of the marginalized, the needy, the weak, and the voiceless will prevail. We have seen it over and over in history. This is another moment when staying true to our consciences and values will, in the long run, overcome.
We shall overcome!
