Donald Trump contains multitudes.
Are you a Black voter enraged by criminal justice inequalities? He feels your pain. He knows your pain. In a Manhattan courtroom recently, he confronted what you confront: same stacked deck, same disrespect. Or at least that’s a perspective that Trump’s allies have promoted since a jury said “guilty” 34 times.
Do East Coast elites look down their upturned noses at you, and does the big bad federal government try to quash any actions you take or words you utter in defiance of it? Him, too! When federal agents came for those classified documents scattered like pocket change around Mar-a-Lago, they were really coming for you. They used Trump to teach you a lesson and flexed their contempt for you through their indictment of him. He has made that claim repeatedly.
In a fund-raising email sent by his campaign last week, Trump said, “If we fail to have a MASSIVE outpouring of patriotic support — right here, right now — they’ll TAKE ME OUT and move on to their real target: YOU!!”
And all the Jesus Christ allusions of late by Trump and his disciples? No ambiguity there. No subtlety. He is dying — well, going through a tough time with titanic legal bills — for your sins. But you can always make things better by buying a $59.99 Trump-branded Bible.
“The transformation of Trump from a person to a symbol is the key to understanding the power of the MAGA movement,” wrote Robert P. Jones, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, in a Substack post this month. “Trump the Totem” was the headline.
While Jones rightly registered an intensification of that transformation since Trump’s felony convictions on May 30, the audacious, laughable and shockingly successful project of turning Trump — a playboy plutocrat and singular specimen — into Everyman has been central and crucial to his political ascent from the start.
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