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      Trump to seek federal investigations of Biden if re-elected, report says

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      Donald Trump will seek to mount federal investigations and prosecutions of Joe Biden and his family if Trump wins re-election this year, the news site Axios reported.“Everything you have seen from the Biden Department of Justice you can expect to see from the Trump DoJ,” a source “close to the Trump campaign” was quoted as saying.Another “Trump ally” said current federal charges against Trump were all the precedent Trump would need to prosecute Biden in turn.Trump is virtually certain to be the Republican nominee in November and regularly bests Biden in head-to-head polling. Trump is also performing strongly in key swing states.Trump also faces 44 federal criminal charges: 40 over his retention of classified information and four over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. His other 44 criminal charges are at the state level: 10 over election subversion in Georgia and 34 over hush-money payments in New York.Should Trump be re-elected, he could dismiss the federal charges or pardon himself. He could not rid himself of the state charges.New York, Trump’s home state until he moved to Florida after leaving the White House, is also the source of multimillion-dollar penalties in two civil cases – one over tax fraud and one concerning defamation arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.Despite such unprecedented legal jeopardy – which has generated a trial schedule due to begin next Monday, in the New York hush-money case – Trump strolled to the Republican nomination to face Biden again in November.Biden was investigated for retaining classified information from his time as vice-president to Barack Obama. Unlike Trump, he co-operated with authorities. Unlike Trump, Biden was not charged.As president, Trump was impeached twice: first for blackmailing Ukraine for dirt on opponents including Biden and second for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress.House Republicans have attempted to impeach Biden over alleged corruption involving his son, Hunter Biden, but have seen such efforts descend into farce in a series of chaotic hearings.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNonetheless, Mike Davis, a former legal aide to Chuck Grassley – an Iowa senator among Republicans embarrassed when a key source of allegations against the Bidens was jailed and linked to Russian intelligence – told Axios the Bidens were guilty of “illegal foreign corruption”.“The Biden justice department will not do anything about it, so the Trump 47 justice department should,” Davis said, referring to Trump’s status as the 47th president, as well as the 45th, should he win re-election.Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee who was a manager in Trump’s second impeachment, told Axios: “In saying that they are going to enable Donald Trump’s criminal vengeance campaign, [Republicans] are taking this from a farce to tragedy.” More

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      Trump bemoans lack of immigrants from majority-white countries to the US

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      Donald Trump bemoaned a lack of immigrants to the US from “nice” countries “like Denmark [or] Switzerland”, offering millionaire donors at a Florida fundraiser a reprise of infamous racist Oval Office remarks about people coming to America from “shithole countries”.Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president again, despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil penalties for tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.According to the New York Times, which cited an unnamed attendee at the Saturday event in Palm Beach, Trump told his audience: “These are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster.“And when I said, you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries,’ I’m trying to be nice. Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”The millionaires in the crowd “chuckled”, the Times said.Trump made his “shithole countries” remark in January 2018, in a White House meeting on immigration reform.“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump said, according to the Washington Post, which cited aides briefed on the meeting.Trump then “suggested that the US should instead bring more people from countries such as Norway [and] suggested he would be open to more immigrants from Asian countries because he felt that they help the US economically”.That kicked off a storm over Trump’s racism. Six years later, the remarks about “nice countries” reported by the Times landed in a country well used to the 45th president’s vulgarity, racism and lying.Trump is using so-called chaos at the southern US border as a central campaign issue, to the extent of directing Republicans to block bipartisan reform.On Saturday, the Times said, Trump complained of criticism over his “shithole countries” comment: “And you know, they took that as a very terrible comment, but I felt it was fine.”He also complained that migrants were coming to the US from Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place”, and said migrants from Latin America “make the Hells Angels look like extremely nice people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“They’ve been shipped in, brought in, deposited in our country, and they’re with us tonight. In fact, I don’t think they’re on this island, but I know they’re on that island right there. That’s West Palm. Congratulations over there. But they’ll be here. Eventually, they’ll be here.”Palm Beach, where Trump spoke at the home of a billionaire, is 93.8% white. West Palm Beach, across a waterway, is nearly a third people of color.The Times also reported that Trump claimed Joe Biden had “soiled” the Resolute desk in the Oval Office at the White House.“The attendee who witnessed the moment said that dinner guests laughed and that Mr Trump’s remark was interpreted as the former president saying that Mr Biden had defecated on the desk,” the paper said.
      Biden v Trump: What’s in store for the US and the world?On Thursday 2 May, 8-9.15pm GMT, join Tania Branigan, David Smith, Mehdi Hasan and Tara Setmayer for the inside track on the people, the ideas and the events that might shape the US election campaign. Book tickets here or at theguardian.live More

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      Trump one week, Biden the next: what do presidential polls teach us?

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      In recent months, polling has generally showed President Joe Biden running behind his Republican challenger, Donald Trump, by a small margin, particularly in swing states like Georgia and Arizona. But election polling began to fluctuate after Biden’s State of the Union speech last month.The question is how much meaning observers should ascribe to polls in April, seven months ahead of the election.“We’re pretty well beyond the point where it starts becoming meaningful,” said Dave Wasserman, editor at the election-analysis newsletter the Cook Political Report. “We’re seeing a lot of variation in polls, which is not new.”Most political partisans have long made up their minds about their preferred candidate. But large numbers of voters aren’t really paying attention to the election campaigns yet.“The polling has a lot of noise because of polarization,” said Rachel Bitecofer, a political scientist, campaign strategist and author of Hit ’Em Where It Hurts. “The polling is measuring latent partisanship. … But, you know, at the end of the day, it is going to be a 50-50 race coming into election day. I don’t know why folks are having a hard time accepting that.”The discipline of political polling comes under perennial challenge every election cycle, occasionally metastasizing into cancerous error like “unskewed polls”. Pollsters try to focus on building a demographic model of the electorate that’s accurate, to weight the results of a poll correctly. If a pollster under- or overestimates the proportion of, say, Latino voters or college-educated voters or young voters on election day, a poll will reflect that error.But pollsters also treat their formulae for weighting polls like a trade secret akin to the recipe for Coca-Cola, said Louis Perron, a political strategist and author of Beat the Incumbent: Proven Strategies and Tactics to Win Elections. That lack of transparency contributes to polling error, he said.“Polls have been considerably off for many cycles. Now, after every election cycle, pollsters claim to have learned their lesson, just to be wrong again,” Perron said.“Now, in their defense, primary polling seems to be OK. Let’s wait for the general election. I mean, Trump has been seriously underestimated in many polls, as have Trump voters. So, maybe the simple reason why he’s now ahead is because he’s no longer underestimated. Maybe they have adapted the polling, and that’s why he’s now doing better than ever.”Even the most precise polling leaves room for questions. If the margin of error on a poll is 3%, that means the poll has a 95% chance to be within three points of the population surveyed. The margin of error in a poll varies inversely by the square root of the sample size. A poll of 100 voters may vary by as much as 10% from the views of a group. Polls of 1,000 people have an error rate closer to 3%.Several polls in recent months have suggested Trump is winning as much as 20% of Black voters. Most of those estimates are based on samples within larger polls that are too small to be accurate, said BlackPAC executive director Adrianne Shropshire.“It’s not reflected in our own polling,” she said. Her group polls between 600 and 1,000 Black voters at a time. “There’s nothing close to a historic shift in Black voters’ intentions.”Consider news reports about a New York Times/Siena poll last month showing Trump with 23% support among Black voters: only 119 of the respondents were Black. An Economist/YouGov poll suggested about 12% of Black voters support Trump; there, only 168 respondents were Black. A Marquette University poll cited by the Washington Post showing “at least 20 percent” Black support for Trump surveyed only 92 Black voters.A substantial decline in voters’ responsiveness to the phone calls and internet entreaties of pollsters is adding to polling challenges, Wasserman said. Fewer than 1% of pollsters’ attempts to contact voters for a poll are now successful. Those who do pick up a phone might have stronger political views than those who ignore the call.“It’s a fraction of what it used to be because respondents can screen their calls. They are getting far more spam than they used to,” he said. “Response rates are really, really low, and that creates the bigger possibility for a systemic polling error of the kind that we saw in 2016 or 2020.”But despite the gaps, polls historically trend in the right direction. Polling was fairly accurate in 2018 and 2022 – years without presidential contests, Wasserman noted.“The question is: in ’24, is there a similar hidden Trump vote? Or are polls roughly on the mark? Or is there a hidden Biden vote because Democrats are less enthusiastic about Biden than Republicans are about Trump?”Polls especially have a place in understanding where the electorate is at a point in time.“What the polls tell us is that voters aren’t necessarily enamored with Republicans. But they’re very down about Biden’s management of foreign policy, the economy, immigration – and not by small margins, by very large margins. And that’s contributing to his status as an underdog in this race.”For now, many voters are tuned out of presidential politics, particularly the “double haters” – those who dislike both Biden and Trump. And those are the voters likely to decide the election in close states.“In terms of the general public, they’re both deeply flawed general-election candidates,” Perron said. “Double haters will decide the election. Those who actually have a negative opinion about both candidates will ultimately decide the election by choosing what appears to them to be the lesser evil.” More

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      Republicans want to use an 1873 law to ban abortion. Congress must overturn that law | Moira Donegan

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      They don’t need Congress. The anti-abortion movement is preparing to ban abortion nationwide as soon as a Republican takes the White House, and under a bizarre legal theory, they don’t think they even need congressional approval to do it. That’s because anti-choice radicals have begun to argue that an 1873 anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act, effectively bans the mailing, sale, advertisement or distribution of any drug or implement that can be used to cause an abortion.For a long time, this was a fringe theory, only heard in the corners of the anti-choice movement with the most misogynist zealotry and the flimsiest concerns for reason. After all, the Comstock Act has not been enforced for more than half a century: many of its original provisions, banning contraception, were overturned; other elements, banning pornography and other “obscene” material, have been essentially nullified on free speech grounds.And, for decades, its ban on abortifacients was voided by Roe v Wade. Now that the US supreme court has thrown out the national abortion right, the anti-choice movement is reviving the long-forgotten law, claiming that the Comstock Act – named after a man who hunted down pornographers, threw early feminists in jail and bragged about driving abortion providers to suicide – should still be considered good law.It’s not a solid legal theory, but like a lot of flimsily reasoned, violently sexist and once-fringe arguments, it is now getting a respectful hearing at the supreme court. At last month’s oral arguments in a case regarding the legality of the abortion drug mifepristone, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas both mentioned Comstock, implying that someone – perhaps the FDA, perhaps drug companies – was obliged to suppress abortion medication under the law. Comstock was not at issue in the mifepristone case, but the comments from the justices were not really about the case before them. Rather, they were a signal, a message meant for the conservative legal movement: if you bring us a case that seeks to ban abortion under Comstock, the judges were saying, we will vote for it.So it is a bit puzzling why, in an election year that promises to be dominated by outrage over abortion bans and the erosion of women’s rights, Democrats have not done more to convey the dangers of Comstock to the public. Admittedly, the problem is somewhat complicated and obscure, not quite the kind of thing that can fit on a bumper sticker. But voters have shown that they are willing to pay prolonged attention to the abortion issue: the continued political salience of Dobbs almost two years after the decision has proved this.Democrats have an opportunity, this election year, to corner Republicans on an unpopular issue, to make a case to the voters about the uses of giving them continued electoral power, and to articulate a vision for a modern, pluralist and tolerant society in which women can aspire to a meaningfully equal citizenship and in which ordinary citizens are endowed with the privacy and dignity to control their own sexual lives – without interference from the pantingly prurient Republican party.This election cycle, Democrats must take the obvious stand, and do what is right both in terms of politics and in terms of policy: they must call, en masse, for the repeal of the Comstock Act. Anything less would be political malpractice.It’s not as if Comstock is not being thoroughly embraced by the other side. In addition to its revival by the conservative legal movement and anti-choice activists, Comstock has found enthusiastic backers both in conservative thinktanks and among members of Congress. The rightwing Heritage Foundation cited a maximalist approach to Comstock interpretation and enforcement – and the nationwide total abortion ban that would result – as one of their priorities in their “Project 2025”, a policy plan for a coming Trump administration. Meanwhile, in an amicus brief issued to the supreme court in the mifepristone case, 119 Republican representatives and 26 Republican senators asked the court to ban abortion nationwide using Comstock.These conservatives know that their abortion bans are unpopular; they know that voters do not support the overturning of Roe v Wade, and will never vote for the total abortion bans that they aim for. This is precisely why they are seeking to achieve their ends through the judiciary, the one branch of the federal government that is uniquely immune to democratic accountability. And it is why, rather than attempting to ban abortion through the regular legislative process, they are seeking to do so via the revival of a long-forgotten statute, ignoring that Comstock has been void for decades to exploit the fact that it is technically still on the books.To their credit, a few Democratic lawmakers have begun to vocally campaign to overturn Comstock. The first was Cori Bush, of Missouri, who called for the repeal of what she termed the “zombie statute” in the hours after Comstock was mentioned at the court’s mifepristone oral arguments.She was joined days later by Senator Tina Smith, of Minnesota, who wrote in a New York Times op-ed that she wanted to repeal the law and “take away Comstock as a tool to limit reproductive freedom”. Smith says that she is working to form a coalition of Democratic House and Senate members to “build support and see what legislation to repeal the Comstock Act might look like”. Smith says that she wants to wait to see what, if anything, the supreme court says on the matter in its mifepristone decision, expected by the end of June.There is no need to wait. It is unlikely that any bill to repeal Comstock will get the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate; it is impossible that any such bill would make its way through the Republican-controlled House. But this means that Democrats have nothing to lose in waging a political campaign to draw attention to Comstock, and to force their Republican colleagues to take a stand on it. Voters deserve to know what they’re in for if a Republican captures the White House – and they deserve to know what the Republicans on their ballot think about their own rights to dignity, equality, privacy and sexual self-determination.There might be no item on the current political agenda that more aptly symbolizes the Republican worldview than Comstock. Never really workably enforced and long ignored as out of date, Comstock has come to stand in, in the rightwing imagination, for a virtuous, hierarchically ordered past that can be restored in a sexually repressive and tyrannically misogynistic future.This past never existed, not really, but the fantasy of it now has power in many corners of our law: among the reasons given by Samuel Alito in his majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade was his estimation that the right to an abortion was not “deeply rooted in America’s history and traditions”. This grimly nostalgic Republican aim to allow only those freedoms delineated in “history and tradition” would foreclose an America that adapts with time, that allows new forms of freedom to emerge from history.Comstock is a relic, and a relic is what the Republican right wants to turn America into. Democrats have a chance to make a case for it to be something else – something more like a democracy.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Chef José Andrés says Israel engaging in ‘war against humanity itself’ in Gaza

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      The White House has pushed back on comments by World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés that Israel is engaged in “war against humanity itself” following the Israeli drone strike attack that killed seven of his aid workers on 1 April, but ruled out putting US monitors on the ground in Gaza.“There’s going to have to be some changes to the way Israeli defense forces are prosecuting these operations in Gaza to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” White House national security communications adviser John Kirby told ABC’s This Week said on Sunday.“There have to got to be changes in the deconfliction process, between aid workers on the ground and the IDF headquarters so that this kind of targeting can’t happen again,” Kirby said Sunday, but would not be drawn on claims that Israeli drone operators would have been able see the insignia three WCK vehicles carrying the workers that identified them as part of an aid convoy.In an earlier interview on This Week, Andrés had said that the IDF attack on his workers “is not anymore about the seven men and women of World Central Kitchen that perished on this unfortunate event. This is happening for way too long. It’s been six months of targeting anything that seems – moves,” Andrés said.“This doesn’t seem a war against terror,” Andrés added. “This doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel. This really, at this point, seems it’s a war against humanity itself.”The IDF said Friday that there had been three strikes against the convoy, and confirmed that World Central Kitchen had coordinated their movements correctly with them in advance.It said that Israeli officials had failed to update commanders on the convoy and that they were“ convinced that they were targeting armed Hamas operatives and not WCK employees.” The strikes, the IDF added, had been “a grave mistake”.But Andrés refuted those findings, telling ABC News: “Every time something happens, we cannot just be bringing Hamas into the equation.”Asked if destroying three vehicles was following legitimate rules of engagement, Kirby said that the US knew from its own experience that “the intelligence you get, analyze and process may not always be accurate and you act on that intelligence…”But the White House adviser refused to say what consequences the US would impose if the Israel does not act on commitments to allow more humanitarian aid in and reduce violence against civilians in Gaza.“We have to judge it over time, and see if there’s a sustained and verifiable way so that confidence can be restored,” Kirby said. But against increasing calls for the US to suspend or reduce weapons transfers to Israel, Kirby echoed president Biden’s comments to Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu last week.“We’ve got to see changes in the way they are prosecuting these operations and we’re going to have to think about making changes in our own policy toward Gaza.” But, he said: “We have to remember that Israel has a right to defend itself and its important to remember they live in a tough neighborhood.”Kirby downplayed reports on Sunday that the IDF was withdrawing forces from southern Gaza, saying he would let the Israelis speak to their operations.“It’s hard to know exactly what that tells us,” he said. “This is really just about rest and refit for these troops that have been on the ground for four months – and not indicative, so far as we can tell, or some coming new operation.”“The word we’re getting is that they’re tired and need to be refit,” he added.But Kirby rejected calls for there to be US personnel on the ground in Gaza to monitor Israeli accountability to the rules of law are followed. “What we will do is make sure they have the tools and capabilities they need to defend themselves, and hold Israel accountable for the way they are conducting these operations.”Kirby said that Chef Andrés was not wrong when he said you can be a “good friend of Israel in helping them to defend themselves and at the same time holding them to an appropriate standard of accountability”.Meanwhile, one of the late aid workers’ father told Secretary of State Antony Blinken the killings by Israel in the Hamas-run territory must end, and that the United States needs to use its power and leverage over its closest Mideast ally to make that happen.John Flickinger’s 33-year-old son, Jacob Flickinger, a dual US and Canadian citizen, was among the seven humanitarian workers killed in the 1 April drone strikes.“If the United States threatened to suspend aid to Israel, maybe my son would be alive today,” John Flickinger told the Associated Press in describing his 30-minute conversation Saturday with Blinken. More

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      Journalist removed from Colorado Republican event for ‘unfair’ reporting

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      A politics reporter from the Colorado Sun was removed from the state Republican party assembly this weekend because the state party chair Dave Williams claimed her reporting on the party was “very unfair”.The reporter, Sandra Fish, who has covered politics since 1982, received a text early morning on Saturday from a Republican party organizer saying she was no longer invited to attend the assembly. Fish went anyway, receiving a credentialed pass at the door until she was asked to leave by security about an hour into the event.Video of the removal was captured by other journalists in attendance.The Colorado Republican state party chair, Dave Williams, is currently running for Congress in the state’s fifth congressional district. Fish has reported on the state party sending out a pro-Trump mailer in the district that attacked his primary opponent in the race.Williams was elected party chair in 2023 after supporting conspiracy theories that Trump won the 2020 election, and he introduced a resolution in the state house in 2022 to thank a state representative and others who participated in the January 6 insurrection.He also tried to include the “let’s go Brandon” phrase as part of his name on the 2020 ballot.The Colorado Republican state party held its state assembly in Pueblo, Colorado, this weekend where the party’s delegates met to officially choose its candidates for the November election ballot. Thousands of people reportedly attended the event.Several elected officials, including Republicans, and media outlets criticized the decision to remove the reporter from the assembly.The Republican state senator Barbara Kirkmeyer condemned the decision on social media, stating: “Sandra Fish is a fair, honest and respected reporter. As a Republican I’m embarrassed by the GOP chair.”Former Colorado Republican party chair Kristi Burton Brown also condemned the decision, calling it “dangerous”.The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition posted in response the reporter’s removal: “Booting a credentialed journalist from a political party assembly, especially one who represents a statewide news organization like the @ColoradoSun undermines the vital role of the free press and directly impacts thousands of Coloradans who rely on The Sun for coverage.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWilliams, the Colorado Republican party chair, told the Pueblo-Chieftain that the reporter and the Colorado Sun are “nothing more than an extension of the Democratic party and we don’t need them coming to our convention”. No specific complaints or claims about the reporter or the newspaper’s reporting were cited or mentioned by Williams.Shad Murib, chair of the Colorado Democratic party, poked fun at Williams by openly inviting all press to the Colorado Democratic party assembly on 13 April.“Unlike the CO GOP, we’re not embarrassed by ourselves or afraid of the public,” he wrote. More

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      Biden could be left off general election ballot in Ohio, Republican official warns

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      The Ohio secretary of state has sent a letter to the Ohio Democratic party warning that Joe Biden could be left off the November election ballot in 2024 unless the Democratic National Convention meets earlier or statutory requirements in the state are changed or exempted.According to a letter sent from the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, a Republican, to Ohio Democratic party chair Liz Walters, the Democratic National Convention scheduled for 19 August where the party officially nominates its candidate for president is past the 7 August deadline to certify presidential candidates on the Ohio ballot.“I am left to conclude that the Democratic National Committee must either move up its nominating convention or the Ohio General Assembly must act by May 9, 2024 (90 days prior to a new law’s effective date) to create an exception to this statutory requirement,” the legal counsel for Ohio secretary of state Paul Disantis wrote in the letter, according to ABC News. The Ohio Democratic party has said they received the letter and are currently reviewing it. The Biden campaign expressed confidence that the president would be on the ballot for November in Ohio.The Ohio general assembly could pass an exemption waiver before 9 May, or the convention would have to be moved earlier which is unlikely given logistics and scheduling issues.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn 2020, the Republican and Democratic parties held their conventions after Ohio’s deadline and state lawmakers reduced the requirement of 90 days to 60 days before the election to be named on the ballot. More

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      Christian nationalists embrace Trump as their savior – will they be his?

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      A thrice-married man who refers to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”, was apparently unable to name a single Bible verse and says he has never asked God for forgiveness was always an unlikely hero for the most conservative Christians in the US.But in both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump resoundingly won the vote of white evangelicals. Now, with Trump having almost certainly secured the Republican nomination for 2024 and eyeing a return to the White House, his campaign is doubling down on religious imagery, securing the evangelical base and signaling sympathies with Christian nationalism.Indeed, the former US president’s relationship with the religious right has deepened so much that Trump is now comfortable with comparing himself to their messiah.“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said: ‘I need a caretaker,’” booms a video that Trump shared on his Truth Social account, and that has been played at some of his rallies.“So God gave us Trump.”The video, made by Dilley Meme Team, a group of Trump supporters, continues:“God said: ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay up past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state.’ So God made Trump.”To some, it is a baffling pairing. Evangelicals, who typically adhere to a literal reading of the Bible and, theoretically, follow a strict code that opposes infidelity, immorality and abortion and is critical of same-sex relationships, seem an odd match-up with a man like Trump.But the pairing has had benefits for both parties: Trump got elected in 2016, and evangelicals got a conservative supreme court that has already overturned the Roe v Wade ruling, which enshrined a constitutional right to abortion.Now, Trump is believing the hype he’s received from some on the religious right: that he has been chosen, or anointed, by God himself.He has increasingly begun to lean into the rightwing social conservatism that white evangelicals – who make up 14% of Americans – favor. That was clear in February, when Trump spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters convention (NRBC), a gathering of the kind of conservative Christians who lead mega-churches, host televangelist shows and claim to receive prophecies from God.Trump said in that address that there was an “anti-Christian bias” in the US, and promised that he would create a taskforce to investigate “discrimination, harassment and persecution against Christians in America”.While Trump easily won the white evangelical vote in his previous two presidential elections, Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University whose research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion and politics, said this election cycle sees him leaning even further into this appeal.Du Mez said his speech at the NRBC was “a new level we haven’t often seen”.“He was promising [the evangelical audience] power, but in much more explicit terms,” she said. “And he was really leaning into this language of culture wars, of religious wars: that he was going to protect their interests and protect their power against the enemies – against fellow Americans, against liberals, against the enemies who were trying to persecute Christians, who were persecuting Christians.”The “God made Trump” video is not the only example of Trump seeing himself as a deity. On 25 March, Trump said on his Truth Social account that he had received the following message from a supporter:“It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.”It follows Trump sharing a fake court sketch in late 2023, published during Trump’s fraud trial in New York, which shows him seated beside Jesus Christ.About 85% of white evangelical Protestant voters who frequently attend religious services voted for Trump in 2020, Pew Research found, as did 81% of those who attend less frequently.Securing, and adding to, that vote could be key to a Trump victory. Du Mez pointed to research by the Public Religion Research Institute that shows how crucial the evangelical vote is in swing states. Evangelicals make up about a quarter of residents in Georgia and North Carolina, 16% of the population in Pennsylvania and about 12% of voters in Wisconsin.Biden beat Trump in all but North Carolina in 2020. Given the lack of enthusiasm for both candidates, both men are desperate to win every possible vote in what is expected to be a tight election.It helps Trump that evangelicals feel under attack. Since 2015, he has told his supporters that they are looked down on by liberal elites, and that their rights are threatened. That same message resonates with some religious voters, Du Mez said, who could also resent the mockery of Trump’s imagining himself as Jesus Christ.“It only reinforces the scripts that they’ve been handed, which is that the left is out to get you and they are mocking and they have no respect for your faith,” Du Mez said.While Trump has long enjoyed popularity among evangelicals, and has been courted by leaders including televangelists and pastors at mega-churches, this is the first election cycle in which he has been confident enough to compare himself to Jesus Christ. So, what’s changed?Trump “has been getting this message from these folks for years now”, said Matthew D Taylor, author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, recalling the sight of evangelical leaders praying over Trump during his time in office.The thirst for Trump as a biblical figure can be traced to the unique way he ascended to become an evangelical favorite, Taylor said: when he launched his campaign in June 2015, few in “respectable evangelical circles” wanted anything to do with the brash, twice-divorced, self-proclaimed billionaire.It made sense. This was a man who, during his first presidential campaign, memorably misnamed the body of Christ, and while at church put cash in a plate that is meant to hold the communion. During his early forays into religious outreach, Trump was asked to name his favorite verse in the Bible, and couldn’t name one – asked again three weeks later, he named one that doesn’t exist.He enlisted Paula White as his spiritual adviser, and charged her with bringing the evangelical elites onboard. The problem was that White, herself a thrice-married multimillionaire who preaches the idea that God will bestow wealth on his followers, didn’t move in those circles.Taylor noted that White’s allies were among fellow prosperity gospel preachers and “new apostolic reformation leaders” – a movement that seeks to inject Christianity into politics, the judiciary, the media and business.“These folks were really on the margins not only of American Christianity, but of American evangelicals. They were seen as kind of lowbrow and prosperity gospel types and televangelists. They were seen as kind of a laughable sector of evangelicalism in respectable evangelical circles,” Taylor said.As Trump won primary elections in state after state, the respectable evangelicals were able to overcome their moral objections to him being the Republican candidate.But by this point, Trump’s main advisers were cemented as the type of religious leaders once scoffed at by the religious elites. Trump continued to rely on the Paula Whites of this world, and the more far-out religious leaders won influence – and are set to have even more if he wins in 2024.“Those are the type of people I think Trump would be bringing in to help shape policy, help shape identity,” Taylor said.“These aren’t the kind of people who are policy wonks, but there are Christian nationalists who have very clear agenda items, especially on topics like abortion, on topics like support for Israel, on topics like religious freedom, on topics such as LGBTQ +rights.“Trump has surrounded himself and has brought into his White House advisers echelons some very, very extreme Christian voices. And he seems to be at the very least playing footsie with them, if not overtly endorsing some of their ideas.”This bodes poorly for a Trump second term, when abortion rights, the rights of LGBTQ+ people and even the right to access IVF treatment could come under attack.There are also warning signs, Taylor said, should Trump again refuse to concede the election – and if his supporters once more interpret his rhetoric as a call to attack the home of US democracy.Trump’s religious supporters were among those at the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection. Taylor said he was seeing “more and more of this cross-pollination between far-right and even overtly racist elements and these spiritual warriors”.“When you are mixing white nationalism and neo-Nazi ideas with very heavy religious fervor and processes, that is a very, very dangerous mix,” Taylor said.“Because it’s encouraging more and more people to do extraordinary things, if they feel like their country is slipping away from them.” More