Brooke Gladstone: US Google Map users now see Gulf of America.

Matthew D. Taylor: Several webpages, including those related to HIV and LGBTQ youth, went dark on Friday.

Brooke Gladstone: President Trump is purging government websites, language, and history he doesn't like. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewingers. Meanwhile, agencies that could curb the power of the new administration and its friends are also in line for the "wood chipper".

Jason Stanley: It's characteristic of authoritarianism to represent politically neutral organizations as biased against you because the rule of law is biased against you if you're a criminal.

Brooke Gladstone: Once Christian nationalists saw a partner in Trump, but now he's part of their iconography and their faith.

Matthew D. Taylor: I think in some ways, it started out that Trump was going to be their vehicle, and now they're his vehicle.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. The president doubled down this week on his threats to tax imports of steel, aluminum, and other goods from Canada. Speaking here at the Oval Office last Monday.

President Trump: We have big deficits with Canada like we do with all countries. I look at some of the deals made, I say, "Who the hell made these deals are so bad?"

Micah Loewinger: Good question. Who the hell made that deal?

President Trump: Today we're finally ending the NAFTA nightmare and signing into law the brand new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Very special.

Micah Loewinger: Whether Trump forgot that it was his deal or he thinks we forgot, the effect is the same. This administration seems to believe it can justify its current policies by rewriting the recent past. Sound familiar? Quote, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

President Trump: I pardoned J6 people who were assaulted by our government.

Micah Loewinger: Trump last weekend arguing with a reporter about his pardons for rioters who had attacked police officers as his administration deletes online footage from January 6th.

President Trump: They were assaulted, and what I did was a great thing for humanity.

Micah Loewinger: There you go. The insurrection is now Donald Trump's day of love. For some of the same reasons, Trump is also relitigating South African apartheid, which officially ended 30 years ago, leaving three-quarters of privately owned land in the hands of white Afrikaners who make up just 10% of the population.

Reporter: An executive order he signed on Friday provided for resettlement in the US of "Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination as refugees."

Micah Loewinger: Who put that bug in his ear? On a related note, South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, for all of his talk of waste and government efficiency, would like us to forget that his businesses have raked in some $18 billion in government contracts.

Reporter: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is the latest government agency that may be headed to Elon Musk's wood chipper. Musk tweeted RIP to the agency over the weekend.

Micah Loewinger: The CFPB, which has saved American consumers billions of dollars, would have overseen the payment system Musk plans to roll out on his social media site just one of 11 regulatory agencies that have issued complaints, investigations, or regulations affecting his companies.

Reporter: Mr. Musk, the White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency?

Elon Musk: We actually are trying to be as transparent as possible.

Micah Loewinger: Elon Musk at an Oval Office press conference on Tuesday.

Elon Musk: We post our actions to the DOGE handle on X and to the DOGE website.

Micah Loewinger: He's referring to DOGE.gov, a site that shows you posts from X featuring the information his team has chosen to share with us about its cuts. Trump placed DOGE under the Presidential Records Act, which would shield it from FOIA, the most basic mechanism for journalists and citizens to request information about government action. Denying the basic definition of the word transparency is just one salvo in the war on language.

A DOJ directive orders that undocumented immigrants should now be called aliens. The National Park Service's site honoring Stonewall, an important place for the LGBTQ movement, no longer references trans people. Terms like hate speech, multiculturalism, and oppression have been deleted from a host of federal websites. Then there's the executive order on the "weaponization of government".

Reporter: Donald Trump has used executive orders to lay out the groundwork for his future plans for retribution via opening investigations into his perceived political enemies. One executive order in particular, titled Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government, stands out.

Micah Loewinger: Up is down, Black is white. The Day One executive order restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship apparently did not apply this week when the White House barred an Associated Press reporter from attending an event at the Oval Office.

Reporter: The reason? The naming of the Gulf of Mexico. This is coming after President Trump's order to rename it the Gulf of America. AP executives say--

Micah Loewinger: At time of recording, the AP, with its careful style guide and editorial policies, has not yet capitulated to the President's lexicon. What about Google?

Reporter: Google Map users now see Gulf of America, formerly known here and everywhere as Gulf of Mexico. Google says its policy is to change names when they have been updated by official government sources.

Micah Loewinger: Across the Internet, the administration's crackdown on language has been used as a pretense to take thousands of government web pages offline.

Reporter: Tonight, officials at the USDA have ordered the removal of climate change information from the department's public website. The USDA had included extensive resources on climate science and strategies for farmers.

Reporter: The NSA is about to hit delete on a ton of websites and internal content just because they contain 27 banned words. Words like privilege, bias, inclusion, and even confirmation bias. The NSA uses words like privilege in cybersecurity. Privilege escalation is a hacking term.

Micah Loewinger: Even reliable information on policies that the Trump administration supports is hard to come by. Take the mass deportation effort from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Dara Kerr: One of the big questions I think a lot of reporters have right now is actually how many arrests have there been?

Micah Loewinger: Dara Kerr is a tech reporter at the Guardian. She recently wrote about something very strange happening on Google. When she typed in search terms like Georgia ICE raid or Maryland ICE arrests.

Dara Kerr: The very top Google search results will be an ICE press release talking about some major arrest or raid in that area. I did it for Louisiana and I got a hit saying 123 people arrested in New Orleans. Colorado, there's a press release for 85 people who are arrested. Wisconsin, "ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens" was the headline.

Micah Loewinger: The press release headlines appear to be from 2025. If you actually click on the search results--

Dara Kerr: You'll see that that operation in Colorado, which took place over four days, happened in November 2010. Those 123 people targeted in New Orleans, that was a year ago in February last year. The 83 people arrested in Wisconsin, September 2018. You can do this anywhere, every state, every major city, even small cities. A lot of times, people will see that headline, they may not click through. Even if they do click through, they might not actually look at the original date that it was published because of all these press releases were updated to 2025, that would give them another boost to the top of the algorithm.

Micah Loewinger: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a common technique to make links show up higher in Google results. Dara could not confirm that ICE did this intentionally to trick people since it didn't respond to her request for comment.

Dara Kerr: The Trump administration is getting credit for all of these arrests and raids that Obama's administration had done, and Biden also. It's a flipping rewriting history on its head, grabbing old history and making it new again.

Micah Loewinger: I want to leave you with one more example of the current war on good, timely information. Right-wing attacks on another source that also ranks near the top on Google Search, Wikipedia.

Reporter: The richest person in the world, Elon Musk, has made himself an enemy of Wikipedia, and he claims it's because he's opposed to the woke, the woke mind virus.

Molly White: Much of his early concerns about Wikipedia centered around articles that spoke about him or his companies where he didn't feel he was being portrayed fairly.

Micah Loewinger: Molly White is an independent journalist and author of the Citation Needed newsletter. She's also a Wikipedia editor.

Molly White: Whether it was articles not describing him as a founder of Tesla, but instead as an early investor, or articles describing him as prone to repeating conspiracy theories, he was clearly very angry at how he was being described on the website.

Micah Loewinger: Last month, after Musk's article was updated to include information about how far-right figures were celebrating what they perceived to be his Nazi salute at Trump's inauguration, he posted on X writing, "Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored." Before that, he shared a conspiracy theory video alleging a cover-up of Bill Clinton's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Youtuber: They're deleting Epstein connections off of Wikipedia right now. I was working on something for a little documentary today and went to go and look at Bill Clinton's Wikipedia page to get the number of times he flew on Epstein's plane, and it turns out that Epstein is only mentioned one time on Bill Clinton's Wikipedia page.

Molly White: They have taken an event in which an editor moved a portion of the very long article about Bill Clinton to a related article about Bill Clinton's sexual assault and misconduct allegations, and also to post-presidency of Bill Clinton, both of which are linked from the primary page about Bill Clinton. This is very common on Wikipedia, where extremely long articles are split into sub-articles to try to make them more readable and accessible to readers.

Youtuber: I went to the Wayback Machine and found out when did they delete all of this. There used to be a whole section about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Molly White: Elon Musk has reposted this claim repeatedly, even though far before Elon Musk re-shared this video, the content was actually restored to the primary article.

Micah Loewinger: More recently, the Forward, a Jewish American outlet, reported on leaked PowerPoint slides from the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025, demonstrating its plan to target Wikipedia editors for alleged anti-Semitism.

Molly White: It seems that the Heritage Foundation is attempting to both intimidate Wikipedia editors to be less likely to edit and also to actively go after Wikipedia editors who they would to see facing real-world consequences for their volunteer activities.

Micah Loewinger: What do you think is at stake for the free and open Internet if they succeed in bullying the Wikimedia community into submission?

Molly White: I think a lot is at stake. I think it's very clear that the Trump administration, including Elon Musk, are very keen on rewriting history, on limiting access to information to people that they disagree with, to really controlling the narrative in the media. I think they see Wikipedia as a threat to that effort. I think that as we're seeing the quality of information that was once available from the US Government degrade, and as we're seeing more media organizations bow to pressure and legal threats and other threats from the administration right now, projects like Wikipedia are going to be only more important.

Micah Loewinger: Molly, thank you very much.

Molly White: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Molly White is author of the newsletter Citation Needed and an editor at Wikipedia.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, a look at reality bending for political power in times past.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. In the third week of the Trump administration's ongoing endeavor to revise history, the focus stays fixed on government corruption. This week in the Oval Office, Elon Musk again claimed without evidence that DOGE was finding malfeasance all over the place, that some federal workers were just rolling in dough.

Elon Musk: There seems to be mysteriously, they get wealthier. We don't know why, where does it come from? I think the reality is that they're getting wealthier at taxpayer expense. That's the honest truth of it.

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, Musk's companies are being investigated by the Departments of Defense, Justice, Transportation, Agriculture, the Interior, and a heap of agencies, many of which have gone under his DOGE knife, even as he continues to enrich himself through numerous government contracts. Also this week, the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors to drop the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams without judging the merits of the case. The prosecution could proceed later if, and this has been pretty explicit, Adams isn't tough enough in the pursuit of undocumented immigrants, thus holding him essentially hostage by the White House.

Many lawyers quit, including the top attorney in the case, Trump appointee Danielle Sassoon, and avowed conservative, a member of the Federalist Society, no less, who refused to dismiss the case because it would set a "breathtaking and dangerous precedent". All this while the president, apparently, still sore about all those felonies on his record, continues to reverse laws against corruption like the one that prevents American businessmen from bribing foreign governments and expunge the records of criminals with the scritch, scritch, scritch of the presidential sharpie.

President Trump: Good. It's my honor to do it.

Brooke Gladstone: Notably exonerated this week was former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who'd served 8 years of a 14-year sentence for trying to sell the Senate seat held by Barack Obama prior to his election as president.

President Trump: I've watched him. He was set up by a lot of bad people, some of the same people that I had to deal with. It was a terrible injustice. They just were after him.

Rod Blagojevich: I've got this thing, and it's Golden.

Brooke Gladstone: Blagojevich on the phone bragging about his scheme to sell the Senate seat.

Rod Blagojevich: I'm just not giving it up for nothing. I'm not going to do it. I can always use it, and try to parachute me there. I start to fret about that. There's life after that if I do it.

Brooke Gladstone: Blago, as he was called, was also convicted of shaking down a children's hospital exec for campaign contributions, installing a bill involving the horse racing industry in search of same. In between trials, NBC News reminds us Blagojevich was a contestant on the Celebrity Apprentice.

Reporter: Governor, you have a hell of a lot of guts. I have to tell you that. I have friends where things have happened to him. They crawl into a corner, they die, you're out there punching. I respect that.

Rod Blagojevich: I appreciate that.

Brooke Gladstone: History shows that making the dirty clean and the clean dirty is standard procedure for authoritarians on the rise. Another tactic involves getting rid of inconvenient images. Soon after Trump took office last month, the Pentagon removed portraits of previous Trump appointees. Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Newly appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi removed big portraits of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Merrick Garland from DOJ walls, which she has every right to do. Just wondering. Jason Stanley is a Yale philosophy professor who studied the authoritarian playbook. Jason, does this ring any bells?

Jason Stanley: Famously, Lenin's speech on May 5, 1920, in Moscow to Soviet troops had Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev in the foreground. The photo was later doctored. Trotsky and Kamenev were removed. This altering of history is characteristic of authoritarian regimes. Particularly the removal of photos is an iconic image from the Soviet era.

Brooke Gladstone: Stalin did that constantly. He also put himself in pictures sometimes. I just wonder, what does it mean? Is it just, you're starting year one?

Jason Stanley: An authoritarian regime has to construct a mythical past that glorifies its struggles to gain power, glorifies reversals, and then represents them as ultimately a path to success.

Brooke Gladstone: Last year, you published a book called Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Let's lay aside the F word for now and just talk about the history of rewriting history. I mean, not every incident needs to set your hair on fire, right?

Jason Stanley: No. If you think about what your cartoon vision of an authoritarian society is, it's a certain path through history. It's what we might call a patriotic path, one that venerates the nation as singular and great. In Mein Kampf, Hitler speaks a lot about patriotic education, and he says Germans have forgotten the art of picking the great men from their past and showing that they represent the greatness of the German nation, aiming the education system not at understanding the history of a country, but rather on venerating and worshiping it.

This is authoritarian education. This is how you transform your education system that will lead people to regard critical voices as unpatriotic and threats. Today in Russia, there's actually a film about this called Mr. Nobody. You see the transition to the extreme patriotic education now centered in Russian schools. Vladimir Putin said, and it's shown in this film, "Wars are won by teachers."

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that for wannabe authoritarians, history, the courts, and education are all necessary conquests. Let's talk about how authoritarian regimes, you say, find history profoundly threatening, even when it's not about them. If we look at a Russian organization known as Memorial, they're gathering history together, they're collecting documents, and Putin put a stop to it. It wasn't about Putin.

Jason Stanley: It was about Stalin's crimes. He completely smashed the organization, put its leaders in prison. What Putin wants to do is represent Russia as great. The Soviet Union is part of that narrative of greatness. Under the Soviet Union, Ukraine was a part of the empire. Putin wants to reach back to the previous czars and leaders of the empire who conquered the places he wants to conquer and place them on a pedestal. If you're going around documenting Stalin's crimes, that, by the way, look, to some in many respects, like the crimes Putin is committing and wants to commit, that is threatening to anyone who wants to imitate Stalin.

Brooke Gladstone: You've argued that this impulse to delete inconvenient history isn't exactly a new reflex in the United States.

Jason Stanley: We really need to understand the history of the rewriting of Reconstruction, because we're seeing those same tactics again. Reconstruction was that brief era after the Civil War when Black Americans in the South were allowed to vote and hold political office. For instance, when I went to school in the '70s and '80s, you would always talk about the first Black congressperson from the South since Reconstruction. That was a standard thing to say.

Those of us of my age will remember that Reconstruction ended because they said Black politicians were corrupt and incompetent. The attacks on DEI are extremely evocative of that. They're saying any Black person in power has gotten there because of these programs. This is exactly the narrative that ended the Black vote in the South in the 1870s. It's extremely concerning that we're seeing the exact same tactics again.

Brooke Gladstone: Maybe back up a little, because listeners may have a gut reaction from comparisons of America today to Nazi Germany or even Jim Crow.

Jason Stanley: Still. Brooke, come on. Given that we ourselves had a society in which large swaths of us were not allowed to vote, and that not voting and prevention of Black Americans from holding positions of power was held in place by the erasure of history and making up myths, we don't need to look abroad for these strategies and tactics. They held in place a white racial regime in the South until the mid-1960s, when most other countries had given up those kinds of things, including Germany.

Brooke Gladstone: You've spent a lot of time studying not just authoritarianism, but the descent into it. Where do you think America as it is now stands compared to, say, Putin's Russia or Hungary under Viktor Orban?

Jason Stanley: They're explicitly imitating Viktor Orban. He's venerated by the people now in power. We know to expect a lot of what has happened in Hungary and we're seeing it already. We're seeing the media being threatened, seeing the organs of the state being used against the media. The media is essentially bribing Trump, with the 60 Minutes Harris interview, where Trump claimed that they were harming his election chances and it was a completely spurious lawsuit, but it looks like they're going to settle with him, essentially a bribe.

That kind of thing is very Hungary, using the organs of the state to bring the universities to heel, to target the education system. Patriotic education system is now the rule in Hungary. The elementary schools and high schools have classes that are just basically nonsense. We are now in a situation probably close to where Hungary is, not anywhere near where Putin's Russia is, where they're actually putting people in prison and murdering them just for being in the opposition or just for being critical voices.

Brooke Gladstone: You were warning last year of the effects of a Trump White House on education. On January 29, he signed an executive order on ending radical indoctrination in K through 12 schooling. He demanded that patriotic education be taught to kids.

Jason Stanley: The patriotic education move is a classic authoritarian move. What's meant here is erasing the nation's sins. Look at Alternative für Deutschland, the German far-right party that's gaining ground. Their goal is to, as it were, make Germany great again, to remove the focus on Nazi evil from the schools so people think of what the Nazis did, not in uniformly bad terms, nor as particularly significant in German history. As Musk said when he spoke to the AfD.

Elon Musk: The German people are really an ancient nation, goes back thousands of years. Julius Caesar's first encountering the German tribes in the Gallic campaigns, and he was like, "Wow, very impressive. These are very powerful warriors."

Jason Stanley: Obviously, those German tribes didn't include Jews. That is an explicit hearkening back to a Aryan past. What we have is something similar here. A call to cease teaching about the horrors of chattel slavery, to cease teaching about the end of Reconstruction and Jim Crow America, to cease teaching, certainly, about its downstream effects, the large racial wealth gap that persists, and school segregation and residential segregation that persists from our nation's past.

The idea is to say we are the greatest nation in history. We didn't make terrible mistakes. Any mistakes we made, we quickly solved. Then there are these critical voices, call them the Democrats, who want us to apologize and make up for things we supposedly did in the past. They're, in fact, traitors.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that to resist the slide into cruelty is perhaps the most important educational goal of a people. What forms of education would be appropriate for such an endeavor?

Jason Stanley: We have to learn about each other's perspectives. A democracy is not a system simply where everyone votes. A democracy is a system where we vote informed by the perspectives of our fellow citizens. If a democracy was just everyone voting without an education about our country, then the majority would be a tyranny. They would simply impose their vision of the country again and again on anyone who wasn't in the majority. A democratic education system gives us a window into the past and present of our fellow citizens. That's why if you want to attack democracy, you remove other perspectives, and then you can represent minority groups as threatening rather than understandable.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that political equality, which is what you want in a democracy, requires those bodies of knowledge.

Jason Stanley: Political equality is not just each of us having a vote. Political equality is each of us being a participant in the national conversation. You can see what's central to democracy by what they're targeting. If you go after women, if you diminish women's voices and agency, you're diminishing the voices of half the country. You're halfway there to diminishing voices to just a few. Authoritarianism is all about eliminating equality and freedom. Democracy is the practice of realizing equality and freedom.

What critical race theory does, what gender studies does, what labor history does, is they say, look at all of this inequality in the past and in the present that democratic practice needs to address. If you erase that history, then you remove the impetus for the practice of democracy.

Brooke Gladstone: What is the good of examining all this history on the antithesis of democracy when democracy will still vote it into power?

Jason Stanley: This is the paradox of democracy. Democracy gives the very weapons to destroy it to those who wish its end, as Goebbels pointed out. This is not new. I think what happened in the run-up to the election is there was a lot of scoffing at so-called alarmism. Scoffing came from some of the biggest media organizations, including the New York Times, and it came from unexpected sources like the Left. Now, all that anti-alarmism, that attack on calling it fascism, I think that now looks antiquated.

Brooke Gladstone: Is it true? I mean, now at this time, is it true?

Jason Stanley: Yes, it's almost comically fascist. The reinventing the past, the rewriting of January 6th, the rewriting history, the use of government to just simply enrich the people who support it. Corruption is the rule. The idea is that anyone who's not a follower of the leader, they're the corrupt ones. If you are a follower of the leader, you get whatever you want. That's Putin's Russia, that's Orban's Hungary. That's just how authoritarianism works.

Brooke Gladstone: The firing of the inspectors general.

Jason Stanley: It's characteristic of a number of kinds of authoritarianism to represent politically neutral organizations as biased against you, because the rule of law is biased against you if you're a criminal. What you do is you say, hey, those courts that were holding me accountable for the things that I did, the bad business dealings, the overthrow of the government, whatever you did that was clearly criminal, they're biased against me. We have to get rid of them, because the only rule of law from now on is me.

Brooke Gladstone: Jason, thank you very much.

Jason Stanley: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Jason Stanley is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, the president says Christians are suffering in America. A durable narrative that, lacking evidence, seems to rest entirely on faith.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We end our episode on the rewriting of history with a narrative that has drawn far less attention than it deserves, given its great political heft. That is the story of Christianity under siege, fighting for its very life in these United States.

Reporter: President Donald Trump says he wants to root out, "anti-Christian bias" in the US.

President Trump: The mission of this task force will be to immediately halt all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government, including at the DOJ, which was absolutely terrible, the IRS, the FBI terrible, and other agencies.

Brooke Gladstone: The fact is Christians are persecuted in places like Afghanistan and India, but on these hallowed shores, they are relatively footloose and fancy-free.

Matthew D. Taylor: We've just seen a surge in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crime incidences.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is a scholar at the Institute for Islamic Christian and Jewish Studies in Baltimore.

Matthew D. Taylor: We don't know Trump arguing that we need to have a task force on eradicating antisemitism or Islamophobia. This is a way of enshrining a certain form of Christian privilege and Christian power in the US.

Brooke Gladstone: The story of Christian victimhood is hardly new. Quite the contrary. It's been putting a righteous gloss on less-than-saintly behavior for at least 1,000 years.

Candida Moss: After the Roman Empire has been effectively Christianized, Christians start using the history of persecution to justify their violence against those who are not members of their own religious groups.

Brooke Gladstone: Candida Moss, theology professor at the University of Birmingham, is author of The Myth of Persecution. How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom.

Candida Moss: As an outsider looking at it, one might say, how can one both be the most dominant religious group and also victims? In a way, this is how Christianity flourished from the early church onwards. When Christianity succeeded and converted the Roman emperor, that was a sign that they were protected by God. When Christians were persecuted, which some really were, that was also a sign of their virtue. That's really what's being invoked when someone like President Trump says that he's the greatest president ever, but also that he's a victim.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is familiar with the different kinds of Christians represented in the new administration and what lies behind the president's frequent claim that his faith is under threat.

Matthew D. Taylor: In the US I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that there's any widespread anti-Christian bias. Given that Christians make up two-thirds of the population.

Brooke Gladstone: Do the Christians around Trump really believe that they're under fire?

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes, many Christians believe that Christianity is under fire in the United States. We'll sometimes talk about this as the problem of vulnerable majorities. Up until 1990, 90% or more of Americans were identifying as Christian. That's down to about 66% today. When majorities perceive that their power is slipping away, you can very easily have a backlash. We see this in places like India today, where close to 80% of the population is Hindu. There's all kinds of discourse about Hinduphobia used rhetorically and in propaganda to justify attacks on Muslim minorities that often go unpunished by the government. When you have a religious majority that claims persecution, that's often the setup for them to actually persecute other people.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about the task force. The president seems to have laid the foundation stone of what you call the new Christian nationalist infrastructure.

Matthew D. Taylor: This is something that Trump was promising throughout the campaign, especially when he spoke in front of particularly Christian audiences. He would promise Christians more power. He would promise them vengeance, he would promise them retribution. This is a way of enshrining a certain form of Christian privilege and Christian power. That is the agenda of Christian nationalism, to blend the identity of the United States with Christian identity.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's talk about what's going on inside Trump's wheelhouse. You've pointed to a series of photos he's taken since he first ran for President in 2015, being prayed over by a group of faith leaders. There was just another one earlier this month. Tell me what he's trying to convey.

Matthew D. Taylor: By now, there are dozens of these photos. They often are set in the Cabinet Room or the Oval Office. Almost always, Trump is seated and you have the leaders arrayed around him in a semicircle. It's very clearly posed. It has become part of the iconography of Christian Trumpism, a way of baptizing his agenda.

Brooke Gladstone: These Christians are on Trump's religious advisory board, right?

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. There have been different iterations of these boards. They've all been led by Paula White Cain, and she is what we would call an independent charismatic or non-denominational charismatic megachurch pastor. She's a televangelist. That was actually how she got to know Trump. He saw her preaching on Television in 2002. She has been the ringleader of the spiritual and religious advisors who surround Trump. Almost all of them are Christian. I think there's been one Chabad rabbi who has gotten linked into there over the last 10 years. The lion's share of them do come out of these more Pentecostal charismatic traditions.

Brooke Gladstone: It's also the sect that originated the Cyrus prophecy about Trump, that he is the flawed but chosen leader by God.

Matthew D. Taylor: This was one of the first of these charismatic prophecies that presents him as this figure of destiny who has come to save the United States. I'll just note that within the 2024 campaign, especially, Trump really leaned into that. You heard it in his acceptance speech on election night.

President Trump: Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason.

[applause]

President Trump: That reason was to save our country and to restore--

Brooke Gladstone: This independent charismatic Christian sect makes up one branch of the Christian nationalists who seem to be jockeying for power around Trump. You've named other groups that want influence. One of them is a faction of Christian nationalists that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, belongs to.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes, this is a group of Calvinist theologians and pastors. They're from a very hard-line form of evangelical Protestantism. They're often called the Theobros.

Brooke Gladstone: They're bros because this is a very male-driven movement.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes, extremely male-driven, very patriarchal. In fact, they're almost all young, in their 30s, 40s, 50s. They almost all have big beards. Some of these pastors have come out arguing that the 19th Amendment needs to be repealed and that women should no longer have the right to vote. They often have more of an enclave sensibility where they want to incubate their vision of a Christian society in particular localities.

One of the major ones today is in Moscow, Idaho, under one of the real figureheads of this movement today, a guy named Doug Wilson, who actually helps co-lead the church that Pete Hegseth belongs to. Pete Hegseth getting elevated to the position that he's in, I think was a surprising opportunity for them. They have access to Trump in many ways for the first time. I think they are trying to exploit that as much as they possibly can.

Brooke Gladstone: You've called them the antithesis of the separation of church and state.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. They would even venture to probably say that the state should be subordinate to the church, or at least that they should be equal powers in coordination in Christianizing society. They often will talk about the idea of the Christian magistrate or the Christian prince, where there's one strong ruler who implements this Christian vision from the top.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me a little bit about what JD Vance is up to. He's a Catholic convert, a trad Catholic. What does that mean?

Matthew D. Taylor: There was a massive change that occurred in the life of the Roman Catholic church in the 1960s. It was called the Second Vatican Council, often called Vatican II. The radical traditionalist Catholics are a diverse group, but they're united in their broad-sweep rejection of the reforms of Vatican II. They also tend to really rely heavily on the theology and philosophy of this medieval theologian named Thomas Aquinas.

Brooke Gladstone: It's a powerful movement, even though much more under the radar, you have Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society who's been carefully placing judges and officials in state governments. You have Peter Thiel, a billionaire tech bro, I guess, who's one of Vance's strong supporters.

Matthew D. Taylor: They don't have much role in the circle of his religious advisors. Their real entry point into the administration right now is especially through JD Vance. If you've noticed, within the last few weeks, JD Vance has gotten into some theological arguments publicly. He has seemingly embraced the role of court theologian for MAGA.

Brooke Gladstone: He just got into a public spat with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, not exactly known for being a left-wing bunch. Tell me what happened.

Matthew D. Taylor: The US Conference of Catholic Bishops, who, yes, tend to be fairly conservative in their cultural and theological outlook, but who are also informed by the broad Catholic tradition and Catholic social teaching and concern for the poor, they started, I would say, mildly pushing back on the Trump administration, arguing that we need to show compassion to migrants, that the broad sweeping cuts through USAID are taking money out of many of these NGOs and charitable organizations around the world that are serving the poor. JD Vance clapped back at them.

JD Vance: I think that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns or are they actually worried about their bottom line.

Matthew D. Taylor: Which is a remarkably cynical thing for a Catholic to say about the entire American hierarchy.

Brooke Gladstone: The bishops followed up with a statement saying that faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving refugees. Then the Pope got involved.

Reporter: Francis is so upset about the Trump administration's immigration policies that he wrote a letter to American bishops criticizing Vice President JD Vance for using Catholic philosophy to defend their actions.

Brooke Gladstone: Christopher White at the National Catholic Reporter said that the pope's letter in directly addressing policy was the first of its kind by a pope for about a century. Pope Francis said what is built on the basis of force and not on the basis of truth about the equal dignity of every human being begins badly and will end badly.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. I'm not Catholic, but for most of my friends who are Catholic, I think they would perceive a direct theological rebuke from the Pope as at least a moment to pause for reconsideration. I think that JD Vance, given the circles he travels in, might well wear that as a badge of honor.

Brooke Gladstone: With regard to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, they were much more powerful in the era of George W. Bush, which was a Christian right, but not like the one we have now.

Matthew D. Taylor: I think if during the George W. Bush administration, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had publicly pushed back on something that was going on, the inclination, I imagine, would have been to bring them in and figure out what their concerns were, because they would have been seen as part of the coalition. Similarly, I think when Trump comes along and says that the US is just going to take over Gaza, I think that the Christian right of old would have balked at that.

Brooke Gladstone: I was struck by how quickly Trump did away with the PEPFAR program that was created by George W. Bush, universally celebrated for saving countless lives in Africa. This is a program against AIDS.

Matthew D. Taylor: Say what you will about George W. Bush, PEPFAR was an incredible act of humanitarian aid and concern, and their Christian advisors don't seem to call them out or challenge them at all on that.

Brooke Gladstone: We know that there are many Christians who oppose these actions. 27 religious groups, mostly Christian, have filed a federal lawsuit over the overturning of a policy that broadly restricted ICE from making arrests at churches. Even conservative Christians like the ones we've mentioned are bristling evangelical groups that have lost funding for their aid organizations. To what extent do these Christian supremacist factions around Trump represent American Christians more broadly?

Matthew D. Taylor: The Christian supremacists still represent a pretty narrow band of American Christians. If you went and pulled 100 Christians off the street, I would argue that many of the Christians who surround Donald Trump would be in the 98th or 99th percentile in terms of how hardline, aggressive, and extreme their theology is.

Brooke Gladstone: There is a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute that found that Christian nationalism supporters are 3 in 10 Americans. That strikes me as a big number.

Matthew D. Taylor: It is. Again, when we talk about Christian nationalism, there's a spectrum there. There are people who will affirm certain points of Christian nationalism. "Oh, yes. The United States should be a Christian nation." When you ask them, follow-up questions. "Okay, so you're saying that Congress should legislate biblical morality?" "Oh, no, no, no. We just want Christian values." You're like, "Okay, which Christian values?" "Love and justice and service." I don't have a real problem with love and justice being part of our government. I think there are people who would even affirm versions of Christian nationalism who would look at some of the way that Trump is implementing these things and say, "Wow, that is going too far."

Brooke Gladstone: Encouraging ICE to make arrests at churches?

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes. I am in touch with very conservative Christian leaders, many of whom know some of Trump's religious advisors, and they are messaging me and saying, "How do we back channel, try to get this to be more moderate and not to be targeting churches? Our people are afraid." I respond to them and say, "You have far more of a back channel than anyone I know." They say, "We tried. No one will listen."

Brooke Gladstone: What about the potential conflicts between the independent charismatic evangelicals praying over Trump versus the Theobros, the Hegseth Christians keeping women in the kitchen, and Vance's trad Catholicism, which derives its power through lots of money and putting Christians in power? Is there any hint of conflict within Trump's Christian ranks?

Matthew D. Taylor: All indications are that Trump's core Christian supporters are jubilant right now. They're all against abortion, they're all against LGBTQ rights, they're all against pornography. They all want more Christianity taught in public schools. Where the rubber is going to meet the road is once they get over the hurdle of Christianizing America, whose Christianity are they going to use? Underneath their unity around the things that they hate, they have very different theological frameworks, they have very different agendas.

Brooke Gladstone: I know that you've said that they once saw Trump as a vehicle to enact their agenda, and today Trump is the agenda.

Matthew D. Taylor: Yes, there's been a shift over the course of the last decade. The real low point for them came about a week after Donald Trump entered the presidential race when the Supreme Court handed down the Obergefell same-sex marriage decision. They felt they needed somebody who would be a bare-knuckle brawler, somebody who would fight on their behalf. They saw Trump as a convenient vehicle. He was God's instrument of wrath. What has changed, though, over the last decade, and I think these prophecies about Trump have played a very important role in that, is they have come to see Trump not merely as a vehicle, but as an avatar.

They've come to see him in quasi-messianic terms. As they have attached more and more of their spirituality to Trump, their religiosity has become very synchronized with the MAGA agenda. In the first Trump administration, some of his religious advisors, especially some of the Latino ones, started privately pushing back on Trump and saying, "You're using all this anti-immigrant rhetoric. These are human beings. Can we have some compassion here?" Some of those same advisors don't say a pip, even as Trump's rhetoric now has become far, far more aggressive and harsh. I think it started out that Trump was going to be their vehicle and now they're his vehicle.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you so much, Matt.

Matthew D. Taylor: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: Matthew D. Taylor is a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. He's also the author of the book The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's Show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wong, and Katarina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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