Last Saturday, Donald Trump promised in a Truth Social post, “we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!” The 2024 election, he wrote, “is our final battle.”
Trump’s use of “cast out” will provoke amens from his most loyal constituency: white evangelicals. That sort of term is commonly used by evangelicals, Pentecostals and charismatic Christians to describe the exorcism of demons. That could be in a personal situation, say, to cast out the “demon” of homosexuality from a family member, or on a bigger stage, to cast out demons, in the form of political adversaries, from Washington.
When Trump says “Communists, Marxists, and Fascists,” he doesn’t mean actual communists or fascists. He means Democrats.
Trump knows that these communities remain steeped in the fervent, right-wing anti-communism of the Cold War era, in which communism, socialism, and Marxism were deemed not only anti-American, but anti-Christian. After the fall of communism, leading figures in the movement reshaped their McCarthyist arguments to falsely accuse any liberal or progressive, such as former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of being a communist, socialist and/or Marxist.
So when Trump says “Communists, Marxists, and Fascists,” he doesn’t mean actual communists or fascists. He means Democrats.
Conspiracy theories about Democrats’ supposed secret communist ties abound on the Christian right. David Noebel, a leading figure in developing curricula to teach evangelicals about the supposed clash between the “Christian worldview” and “secular humanism” and “Marxism-Leninism,” wrote in 2010 that “most Americans…
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