The Soul of MAGA

Donald Trump stands wrapped in the arms of Secret Service agents—their dark sunglasses and suits blending like a many-armed, many-eyed modern seraphim. Blood streams from his right ear, and his face is contorted with rage, determination, and pain. He thrusts his fist skyward. Behind him, the Star-Spangled Banner yet waves. You couldn’t pose a more iconic image if you tried.

In the months before the assassination attempt, I watched dozens of old Trump speeches and read a stack of his biographies, trying to understand the unique charisma that enabled him to transform right-wing politics in the US and that coalesced in a movement to Make America Great Again—or what we simply call “MAGA.” 

Enough ink has been spilled on this subject to turn the ocean black, and most of it has been decidedly negative, attributing the movement’s success to “white rural rage,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” or various forms of Christian or ethnic nationalism. Some have pointed to the economic turmoil of the past two decades as the force that galvanizes MAGA—the dot-com boom and bust, the gig economy, the economic crises of 2007 and 2008, and the looming specter of AI and automation, which threaten the middle class and the manufacturing economies. But here again, the conclusions tend to be negative: grievance, discontent, and economic anxiety. 

While I see truth in these diagnoses, I’m not convinced they get at the root of what compels MAGA. As Augustine put it, a people is “united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” Which is to say that people’s affections—their loves, desires, and longings—tell us far more about them than their grievances, their discontent, or for that matter their policy positions. 

Any political movement would be expected to rally to their candidate after an assassination attempt. But Trump’s bond with his voters is unique in American culture, and that bond was formed via the larger-than-life images, stories, and portrayals of him in pop culture. The post-assassination-attempt photo—in the context of stories cultivated for decades—propped him as not just a politician but a symbol of the good life. 

And that’s why MAGA loves him. 

Since riding down his gilded escalator in 2015, Trump has held the attention of Americans in a kind of vise grip, making our politics reactive to him, what he said at a rally, on The Sean Hannity Show, or on social media. 

The power Trump wields comes from the status he secured long before he ran for office—not as a politician or a real estate tycoon but as a celebrity. 

Ever since his foray into public life in the 1970s and ’80s, Trump was eager to make headlines. According to his niece Mary Trump, Donald not only craved that attention personally; it was part of what his father, Fred, expected of him—the primary benchmark of his success for the family business. 

By the end of the 1990s, despite multiple bankruptcies and a variety of personal scandals, he firmly established his place as an avatar of the rich and powerful. In 1999, Rage Against the Machine recorded a music video for the song “Sleep Now in the Fire” featuring day traders with signs that read, “Trump for President.” A year later, the same idea was a punch line in an episode of The Simpsons. 

On its own, that kind of fame eclipses what most presidential contenders could achieve in long and illustrious careers of public service. It would pale in comparison to the fame that was to follow the advent of reality television.  

The Apprentice featured Donald Trump on 14 seasons between 2004 and 2015 and was a ratings smash. With Trump starring as a real estate mogul in search of his next protégé, each season featured a dozen contestants competing in games and stunts meant to prove their entrepreneurial savvy, loyalty, and leadership ability. 

The show came at a moment when Trump desperately needed an infusion of good publicity and—for the first time in his life outside of the Trump organization—a steady paycheck. As Maggie Haberman describes in Confidence Man, “The disparity between the world created on the show—a commanding businessman flying from one site of luxury to another—and Trump’s reality was jarring for those who worked on the show.” 

The series concocted a jet-setting lifestyle of luxury and success that starkly contrasted Trump’s reality, a “crumbling empire” of “well-worn carpets” and “chipped furniture.” Producers masked the worn and beaten state of the executive offices they leased from him at Trump Tower and the seedy vibes of his rundown New Jersey casino. And while a string of bankruptcies, bad deals, and financial disputes were a matter of public record, Trump wasn’t running for public office in 2004. What harm could there be in NBC propping him up as a mastermind and mogul? 

It wasn’t the first time a benefactor subsidized Trump’s mythos for self-interested reasons. In 1990, he was drowning in bad investments and debt. Newspapers in June of that year reported that creditors would be providing him with a personal spending allowance of $450,000 a month—a move that both constrained his spending and enabled his lavish personal brand, which they saw as critical to the marketing strategy for their investments in his properties.

Fred Trump himself was a successful and cutthroat developer, with the sense of thrift, scarcity, and urgency typical of first-generation immigrants. His financial success bankrolled many of Donald Trump’s business ventures and floated him when he teetered on the brink of failure. 

But as Mary Trump recalls, “Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him. … Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition.” In Donald, Fred Trump saw someone who could make the Trump name great among Manhattan developers, extending his success into social and political circles he’d never been able to break into.

Many trace Trump’s turn to politics back to 2011, when he became a loud and harsh booster of the “birther” conspiracy theory suggesting Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen. But his foray into presidential politics was more than two decades earlier, in 1987, when he took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” it read. 

The talking points were co-crafted by Roger Stone, a Nixon-loving political consultant who was part of Trump’s 2016 team and was later convicted of obstruction of justice, false statements, and witness tampering during the probe into Russian interference in that election. (Trump pardoned him in December 2020.) 

In 1987, Stone, as Haberman describes him, was already known as a bit of “a schemer,” someone willing to play dirty in politics in order to win. In Trump, Stone saw a charismatic figure with the bravado to say and do anything to generate attention and headlines. 

Stone gave Trump a taste of political life, helping him meet with donors and politicians and give speeches in New Hampshire. Trump ultimately decided not to run in ’88, but he attended the Republican National Convention. Haberman describes the scene: “Trump was mesmerized, enraptured by the display around him. It was like a giant sporting event, except in honor of one man. ‘This is what I want,’ Trump said.” 

The presidential debate of 1960 has long been seen as a turning point in American democracy. It was the first televised debate, and John F. Kennedy appeared young and energetic on screen, with a breezy, calm, and in-command demeanor. Richard Nixon looked tired, unkempt, and uneasy in the studio lights. We know what happened next.  

Half a century later, Trump’s media savvy connected with an electorate who spent a lifetime watching, on average, six hours a day of television. Such consumption isn’t without effect. As David Foster Wallace once said, “Television, from the surface on down, is about desire.” 

The goal of network (and social media) executives isn’t to challenge or confront or even entertain us; it is much more simply to keep us watching. They achieve this by entertaining and even challenging us, but they mostly achieve it, Wallace says, by presenting us with a world of people who are more beautiful than us doing things that are more interesting than we do. Wallace writes:

We gaze at these rare, highly-trained, unwatched-seeming people for six hours daily. And we love these people. In terms of attributing to them true supernatural assets and desiring to emulate them, it’s fair to say we sort of worship them.

This liturgical quality in media is like that of religious iconography in the Orthodox Christian tradition. It’s not so much that the icon is worshiped or prayed to; rather, it is prayed through. The image provides a glimpse of the good life—and the worshipers engage in acts of prayerful imagination, envisioning their lives caught up in this vision of the good. 

Your favorite television shows offer something similar: a vision of life with deep friendships, meaning, and purpose. Reality television invites viewers to imagine themselves finding true love, home sweet home, or an unimaginable windfall of wealth. Trump was part of the iconography of The Apprentice: a successful power broker, beloved by his kids, married to a supermodel, wealthy beyond most people’s imaginations.  

Those who entertain us aren’t merely journalists, personalities, or actors, Wallace says. They’re “imagos, demigods.” For a populace whose spiritual and moral imagination was formed by decades of immersion in television, Trump didn’t descend an escalator when he announced his run for the presidency in 2015; he descended Mount Olympus. To be hit by a bullet and rise again, undeterred, fist in the air, shouting, “Fight, fight, fight” was proof, once again, that he was larger than life. 

Augustine’s great political work, The City of God, was written after the sacking of Rome by a horde of barbarians. The defeat was devastating to the Romans, including many of its great Christian thinkers. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, wondered, “If Rome can perish, what can be safe?” Some began to wonder if the empire’s turn to Christianity a century earlier had been a mistake. Why hadn’t the Christian God protected them in their war? Would they have fared better by staying loyal to Jupiter? 

In response to these concerns, Augustine urged his fellow Christians to reject the paganism that imagines God (or the gods) as orchestrating world events according to their own hierarchy of power or, worse, according to a hierarchy of human righteousness:

For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke … so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them.

What distinguishes the gold from the chaff, Augustine says, is not primarily what people believe but what they love. If their affections were rooted in the greatness of Rome, the city’s fall was cause for despair. But if their affections were elsewhere, if what they loved and longed for was the heavenly city, then suffering ought to refine and concentrate their faith and make their testimony more beautiful. 

“Two loves have made the two cities,” he wrote. “Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.” 

As James K. A. Smith puts it, “There’s no ‘city limit’ sign to the earthly city precisely because the earthly city is less a place and more a way of life, a constellation of loves and longing and beliefs bundled up in communal rhythms, routines, and rituals.” 

In ancient Rome, a robust civic tradition of storytelling, mythology, and philosophy carried these rhythms, routines, and rituals from generation to generation, shaping the affections of the Roman people for Rome itself. Our experience is no different. Smith says you can be assured that when someone asks you to “pledge allegiance” to anything, they’re asking for your heart. 

But the quest for our affection spreads far beyond the overtly political. Throughout our lives, we’re confronted by stories and habits meant to seduce in one form or another—whether they’re seeking our votes, our attention, or our credit card numbers. 

For many, this accounts for the unique affection and bond followers feel for Donald Trump. Their common love isn’t just Trump the televisual demigod who descended from Trump Tower to make America great again; it’s also the world that gave us Trump and shaped his own imagination: the world of television. It’s a world that offers the grandiose and immediate, a world where complexity is flattened, suffering has a clear purpose, and conflicts are resolved by the top of the hour. It’s a dreamworld, a utopia—and utopia is the perfect word to employ, since it actually means “no place.” 

When our moral imaginations have been shaped by what is both idyllic and unreal, it leaves us vulnerable to all manner of demagoguery. We long for a good life and sense that it’s just out of reach; the demagogue gives us someone to blame.

Along with Augustine’s way of understanding the role of affections in politics, The City of God offers another interesting reference point for our moment. Many Christians—myself included—shared a sense that in 2016 the barbarians were at the gates. Christianity was being pressured in the public square in new and alarming ways. Same-sex marriage became the law of the land in a blink, and bakers and florists who conscientiously objected to participating in those weddings went to court to guarantee that. So did nuns who didn’t want to buy birth control. The first bathroom laws and accompanying culture wars were just beginning. 

Donald Trump’s promise to “make America great again” seemed to dangle the possibility of a return to an era with a different moral and spiritual ethos, and an anxious political coalition greeted him as a modern Horatius, the legendary soldier who stood alone on a bridge to defend Rome from the Etruscans in the sixth century BC. 

As Trump amassed delegates in the primaries, and as other candidates dropped from the race, conservatives—and conservative evangelicals in particular—found themselves at a crossroads: They could either join this coalition that had declared war on a common enemy or find themselves politically homeless. Some declared “never” and stuck to this conviction. Others, fearing the progressive barbarians at the gate and further social alienation, allied themselves with Trump. 

When November came and Trump delivered a stunning Electoral College victory, his disruption of the Republican Party became a wholesale realignment. There would be no return to the Republican Party of the past, no 2016 postmortem to consider how the party could have nominated someone like him. Instead, there were judges to nominate, a legislative agenda to pursue, and a new leader in the White House shaping the national discourse in ways that were, at various turns, shocking, funny, confusing, and terrifying. 

From the Trump supporter’s perspective, it was the opposite story of Augustine’s Rome. The faithful had rallied and defended the nation from the pagan hordes. And yet, eight years later, it’s worth questioning if that was the right take. 

Yes, Trump delivered three US Supreme Court justices who delivered a judgment that ended Roe v. Wade and returned abortion rights to the states. But since then, abortion rights at the state level have expanded radically, the actual number of abortions in the country has gone up, and the pro-life cause disappeared from the Republican Party platform.

In the case of progressive sexual and gender ideology, there has been a reactionary turn in recent years, particularly evidenced by the rollback of “gender-affirming care” for minors and new rules against biological men competing against women in nearly all levels of sports. But before one credits that rollback to Trump, it’s worth noting that most of it began after he left office, during the Biden presidency, and that it was more the result of slow, scientific review and of liberals who were “mugged by reality” (to use Irving Kristol’s phrase) when they saw transgender male athletes showering in women’s locker rooms.

Trump’s supporters may counter that he’s better than the alternative, that he’s a check on progressive overreach, or that we ultimately needed someone willing to fight, even if he is rough around the edges. His evangelical supporters simply haven’t yet noticed the devastation around them. 

Seeing through this lens, that iconic image of a bleeding Trump is far more disturbing. In it, I see something other than the courage and resilience of a man who avoided an assassin’s bullet—though I do see that aspect of the photo. I’m grateful he survived, grateful a murderer couldn’t rob Americans of their choices at the ballot box, and grateful the Trump family still has their husband, father, and grandfather. 

But as a milestone in American politics, it breaks my heart. It is not the first act of political violence since Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015—a period when violence has come to our nation’s Capitol, members of Congress, and the Supreme Court. I fear it won’t be the last. 

I lament that rather than offering words of peace or patriotism, Trump expressed the most visceral sentiment of his movement: “Fight, fight, fight.” 

And I lament that such a moment was captured so artfully, so perfectly, so iconically. It’s fuel for the flames of disordered love. I pray for the day when Christian affections will see the picture as tragic rather than triumphant, a cause to weep rather than a catalyst to rage, a call to repentance rather than a vision of the good life. 

Mike Cosper is the senior director of CT Media, host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, cohost of The Bulletin, and author of Land of My Sojourn and the forthcoming The Church in Dark Times.

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