Trump’s speech at the Faith and Freedom conference last week was a telling address with enormous implications.

The conference is an annual confab of evangelical Christians founded by Ralph Reed. It’s a political gathering organized to rally the GOP faithful. And when talking about the GOP faithful, it’s important to note that today there is almost no daylight between those who consider themselves Christian evangelicals and the mass base of the Republican Party. They are literally one entity. And this has been true for a couple of decades. It’s also important to be aware that Christian nationalism has become the dominant tendency in this cohort, upwards of 65 percent. According to PRRI’s extensive American Values Atlas data, two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalists or sympathizers.

It’s also important to point out that the modern evangelical movement has its roots in opposing school desegregation. It arose in defiance of a Supreme Court decision to deny tax-exempt status to private Christian schools in the South. Those schools were established after Brown v. Board as a way of avoiding integration. Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation, and Jerry Falwell were the primary organizers of this white supremacist movement among Southern Christians. Ralph Reed, you’ll recall, came out of the Moral Majority movement and the Christian Coalition and was one of its most prominent spokespersons until a corruption scandal involving gambling forced him to lower his public profile.

Trump uses anti-communism to rally his base

So that’s who Trump was talking to. And the reason he was talking to them was part of the GOP effort to rally its base for the fall midterms. The important thing here is the subject he chose to address: communism and an alleged threat to the American way of life. And the reason is that in polling, opposition to communism tops the list of perceived concerns on the evangelical right, exceeding domestic economic and foreign policy issues. This belief has been consciously stoked since the time of Rev. Billy Graham, an old-school Cold Warrior, who preached that the only vaccine against communism was to be a born-again Christian.

Consider that since the 1950s and the moral victory of the Civil Rights movement over segregation, the far right has been in search of issues that resonate. Images of Bull Connor, police dogs, and fire hoses used against civil rights activists not only did not have broad appeal in the U.S. body politic but actually hurt the arch-segregationists. It was only after several failed attempts to find an issue that Weyrich and Falwell happened upon abortion. It allowed them to regain their political footing and build a broader movement. Today they hope the issue will be saving white America from “godless” communism.

Marriage of Christian nationalism to the evangelical movement

Why, you might ask, do we use the term “saving white America”? The reason has to do with the far right’s deeply embedded belief that people of color, and in particular people of African descent, are not only inferior but represent a subspecies. They’re afraid of race mixing or, as Trump put it in a phrase borrowed from Hitler, “they’re poisoning our blood.” The point here is that there’s a nearly 75-year direct line from opposition to desegregation to Trump’s attack on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates and its use as a rallying cry against communism.

And here we’ve arrived at an aspect of MAGA that has not been given nearly enough attention: the marriage of Christian nationalism to the evangelical movement and the birth of a U.S.-styled clerical fascism, deeply rooted in white supremacy. Along with it comes the threat of Jim Crow and the revival of old forms of rule adapted to 21st-century conditions. And to anyone who thinks this is overstating the case, here are the words of Mr. Man himself — made at a press gaggle on June 29th: “I think it’s [communism] the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11. It includes the Pearl Harbor attack.”

So the question from their point of view is: How do you deal with a threat like that? What is Trump setting the stage for? And while you’re considering that, allow us to briefly turn to the issue of the growing threat of political repression.

Using prosecutions for oppression

There have been several federal and state prosecutions over the past period. Among them: the FBI raid on the Ohio Organizing Collective for alleged voter fraud; the Texas Prairieland prosecutions of eight defendants in connection with an ICE protest, where the eight were given exorbitant life sentences for firing a weapon and transporting magazines, ranging from 100 to 30 years. Add to the list the June federal indictment of eight University of Michigan students for criminal harassment and “terrorizing” campus officials by placing fake corpses on their lawn and spray-painting their homes, and Chicago’s Broadview 6 indictment of anti-ICE protesters, which collapsed due to prosecutorial misconduct. In Minnesota, there have been attempts at mass indictments of local activists and state officials for obstructing ICE enforcement. There, subpoenas were withdrawn after a rebuke from a federal judge; and let’s not forget the Stop Cop City RICO indictments of 60 activists.

And then there’s the new targeting of philanthropy and nonprofit organizations by the Trump administration. The IRS has been directed to investigate and aggressively strip the tax-exempt status of nonprofits and foundations accused of “fomenting or financing” civil unrest.

Finally, there’s the Cuba angle and the foreign agent charge. In May 2026, the Justice Department and the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control launched a massive inquiry into organizations mobilizing in support of Cuba. Acting under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), federal investigators have compiled a list of roughly 145 nonprofits and political groups, including the Party and solidarity networks like the Venceremos Brigade.

A growing pattern of political repression

This is the growing pattern of political repression that is emerging, coupled with Trump’s anti-communist tirade directed against DSA candidates running in Democratic primaries this year. It’s a dangerous development on both counts. MAGA is panicking, I think, because their support in the coming midterms is extremely tenuous and they face a landslide defeat. Therefore, we must keep our eyes on the prize and keep the pressure on. This means broadening and deepening organizing for the election. The midterms must be the focus for the next four or five months, and that includes supporting and running our own candidates.

Ways to Help:

Support the Prairieland Defendants (DFW Support Committee)

Legal Defense Fund for the Minnesota 15 Anti-ICE Organizers

Support the Spokane 3 (Peace and Justice Action League of Spokane)

If you want to see Joe Sims discussion of this issue, you can find it here:

Image: Donald Trump with bible in front of St. John’s Church Parish House. Facebook. 03195v.jpg by Library of Congress. Public domain.