Trump’s Christian Nationalist Friends Have a Horrifying Plan for a Second Term

Apart from Donald Trump’s objectives, political operatives surrounding the GOP front-runner have their own policy goals. At the top of the list? Infusing Christian nationalism into the heart of his next term.

Behind the hidden agenda is Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who runs the influential conservative think tank the Center for Renewing America. Over the last several years, Vought—who has been rumored to have a good shot at becoming chief of staff should Trump win a second term—has increasingly adopted the ideology that Christian nationalists are under attack.

Documents by CRA staff list several Christian nationalist-oriented goals as a part of the think tank’s top priorities in a second Trump term, reported Politico Tuesday. Other contributions to the list included invoking the Insurrection Act in order to stamp out dissenting protests and creating other ways to expand Trump’s presidential power.

But Vought also serves as an adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has proposed a flurry of other objectives for a potential second term, including repealing policies that help LGBTQ+ people and single mothers, on the basis that these laws threaten “Americans’ fundamental liberties.”

Vought’s simmering extremism has been influenced by a yearslong partnership with Christian nationalist William Wolfe. Vaught has publicly lauded Wolfe’s work on “scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism,” saying he’s “proud” to be a part of it.

But some of Wolfe’s proposals for the next presidency somehow skew even more radical. In a since-deleted December post on X, Wolfe called for an end to surrogacy, sex education in schools, and no-fault divorce—though that might have a hard time gaining muster in an increasingly divorced Congress, and under Trump who is on his third marriage.

Wolfe has claimed that the government should expand its child support laws by forcing men “to provide for their children as soon as it’s determined the child is theirs.”

“Christians should reject a Christ-less ‘conservatism,’” he wrote in another post on X, “and demand the political movement we are most closely associated with make a return to Christ-centered foundations. Because it’s either Christ or chaos, even on the ‘Right.’”

A paltry attempt to dismiss the Politico report by The Washington Examiner boiled the policy issue down to its theological core for so-called social conservatives: “Are there eternal and transcendent principles that must inform lawmaking? Or is sheer political will and power the only measure of what is right policy since man is the ultimate arbiter of good and evil?”

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is complaining that people who oppose homosexuality were being unfairly branded as bigots, despite that being a dictionary definition of bigotry.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a case about whether it is legal to exclude potential jurors based on their religion. The case stemmed from a lawsuit filed by Jean Finney, who is lesbian, against her longtime employer, the Missouri Department of Corrections, for workplace discrimination and retaliation due to her sexuality. During jury selection for the trial, which Finney won, her lawyer asked the judge to remove three jurors who had expressed beliefs that homosexuality is a sin. Finney’s lawyer argued their religious beliefs would bias them against LGBTQ people.

The state of Missouri appealed the decision, arguing that the jury selection process had been discriminatory on religious grounds. An appeals court sided with Finney, ruling the jurors had been eliminated due to their beliefs about homosexuality, not because they were Christians. Missouri appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, which declined Tuesday to hear the case.

In a statement, Alito said he agreed with the decision not to hear the lawsuit, but warned he felt the case was a harbinger of greater danger.

The appeals court ruling “exemplifies the danger that I anticipated in Obergefell v. Hodges,” Alitio wrote, referring to the landmark 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized marriage equality.

“Namely, that Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government,” he said. “The opinion of the Court in that case made it clear that the decision should not be used in that way, but I am afraid this admonition is not being heeded by our society.”

For what it’s worth, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a “bigot” as “a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.” That kind of sounds like someone who believes that gay people will go to hell.

Conservatives have been blatantly trying to chip away at marriage equality in recent years, including the far-right members of the Supreme Court. After overturning Roe v. Wade, Alito’s fellow extreme Justice Clarence Thomas urged the court to “revisit” other rulings, including Obergefell and Griswold v. Connecticut, which struck down bans on contraceptives for married couples.

In the waning hours of Donald Trump’s presidency, his mind wasn’t lingering on the violent insurgency he had helped perpetuate on January 6, his fake elector scheme to overturn the general election results, or the transfer of power to his successor, Joe Biden. Instead, according to former administration officials, Trump’s mind was consumed by one thing: Snoop Dogg.

“Well, fuck him,” Trump moaned, according to administration officials interviewed by Rolling Stone.

Just hours before Biden’s inauguration, old tensions between Trump and Snoop D.O. Double G had resurfaced, nearly eviscerating the “love and respect” that the two had developed over the second half of Trump’s term while working together on executive clemency for federal prisoners, according to the magazine. That included clemency for one of Snoop’s close friends, Death Row Records co-founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris, who had been refused several appeals in his decades-long sentence on cocaine trafficking–related and attempted murder charges.

But certain administration staffers were skeptical of the president’s sudden soft shoulder on criminal reform, and worked instead to compile a report on the mud that Snoop had slung at the president in the first half of his term, including a music video in which Snoop performed a symbolic execution on a Trump clown, and 2018 comments from the rapper that derided the president and his sycophantic followers as “racist.”

In an instant, the report squashed any good will with the temperamental leader of the free world, ushering in a phase that a former White House official simply described as “chaos.” On January 18, 2021, Trump instructed his aides to remove Harry-O’s name from the clemency list and to toss his paperwork as punishment for Snoop’s past burns.

It took the work of activists, Snoop’s team, and some of Trump’s closest aides to quell the tirade via unreleased documentary footage from the free Harry-O campaign showcasing some of Snoop’s recent, more positive comments on the former game show host. It seemed to work.

On January 19, 2021, Harris got word that he’d be a free man.

“That’s great work for the president and his team on the way out,” Snoop Dogg reportedly said during a call, according to a January 20, 2021, article from Rolling Stone.

But all has not been forgotten—or forgiven. The prolific West Coast rapper has not endorsed Trump in his 2024 race for the White House, and “those close to him say they would be stunned if he ever did,” the magazine reports. Still, some cards have been left on the table. In an interview published by London’s Sunday Times, the rapper repeated himself: “I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump.”

E. Jean Carroll’s lawyer has warned that they could sue Donald Trump a third time, because apparently owing $88.3 million isn’t enough for the former president.

Trump owes Carroll the massive amount for sexually abusing her in the mid-1990s and then defaming her twice when denying the assault. Trump is apparently unable to accept his fate, most recently insisting at a rally on Saturday that he doesn’t know who Carroll is.

When asked Monday night about his comments, Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley appeared to hint that a third lawsuit was possible.

“We’re watching, we’re listening,” she told MSNBC. “We had really hoped that, as I think the jury found, that $83 million would maybe be enough to convince him to keep E. Jean Carroll’s name out of his mouth. Apparently, he showed us this weekend that he really cannot control himself and that maybe it wasn’t.”

Carroll revealed in her 2019 memoir that Trump raped her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She subsequently sued him twice: The first lawsuit was for the assault and for posts he made about her on social media in 2022. Last spring, a jury unanimously found Trump liable of sexual abuse and defamation, and ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million in damages.

The second lawsuit, which went to trial in January, was over Trump’s allegations in 2019 that Carroll had made up the rape allegation to promote her book. And then, hours after he was found liable for sexual abuse, he went on CNN and repeated comments about Carroll that had just been deemed defamatory. The jury in that case awarded Carroll a total of $83.3 million in damages.

Trump has said he will appeal the rulings, and his lawyers have launched a desperate and so far unsuccessful bid to have the cases thrown out. But more than anything, Trump appears hell-bent on getting Carroll to sue him a third time for the exact same thing. Just minutes after the most recent verdict was handed down, Trump continued to share negative posts about Carroll on Truth Social.

The widow of Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, on Tuesday was temporarily banned from X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, for reasons still not clear.

On Monday, Yulia Navalnaya shared a powerful, nine-minute video accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of killing her husband and of hiding the body in an effort to wait for the poison to disappear. Navalnaya pledged to continue her husband’s fight.

“They are cowardly and meanly hiding his body, refusing to give it to his mother and lying miserably while waiting for the trace of” poison to disappear, Navalnaya said, according to a translation by SkyNews.

But less than 24 hours later, she was booted off the platform. X did not cite a reason for her dismissal other than “violating the X rules,” though her dismissal came after the company’s private owner, Elon Musk, spent a year aggressively insisting the platform be a bastion of free speech, to the point of allowing white supremacists and antisemites to run freely.

By Tuesday morning, and after pressure from her political allies, Navalnaya was back online.

Navalnaya has long skirted the political spotlight that came with being the family of one of Putin’s greatest dissidents, but her husband’s death four days ago inside the country’s notoriously brutal Arctic Polar Wolf penal colony has suddenly rocked that reality. In a video posted to the platform, Navalnaya urged other Russians to join her and continue to fight back against the Russian government.

“In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart, and half of my soul,” Navalnaya said. “But I have another half left—and it is telling me I have no right to give up.”

“I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny.”

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Putin, called Navalnaya’s accusations “unfounded” and “insolent.”

Gun control advocate David Hogg has found a clever way to capitalize on Donald Trump’s newly launched sneakers.

Trump unveiled the garish kicks, which his fans can find at GetTrumpSneakers.com, on Saturday at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia. If the website name seems a bit awkward, it may be because Hogg quickly snapped up the more obvious choice: ShopTrumpSneakers.com.

Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting and a co-founder of the gun control advocacy group March for Our Lives, announced his purchase on Saturday. The URL leads to a page called The Shotline, which Hogg explained allows people to send an automated call to their member of Congress urging gun law reform.

“The twist is the person who makes the call is a victim of gun violence,” Hogg said. The website uses A.I. technology to recreate the victims’ voices for the automated call.

As of Tuesday, almost 72,000 calls have been sent through The Shotline.

“Thank you to team trump for being dumb enough to not pay the $12 for the website,” Hogg tweeted Monday night, celebrating his website’s success. “I’ll give it to you for a small donation of $1 million to March For Our Lives.”

Trump launched his sneaker line the day after he was hit with a $354 million ruling for committing real estate–related financial fraud in New York state. Before he can appeal the ruling, Trump would first have to pay the entire amount plus interest, which could add as much as an additional $100 million.

Not to mention the fact that Trump owes $88.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for sexual assault and defamation, $400,000 to The New York Times, and thousands of dollars in other legal fees and fines. That’s a lot of sneakers.

Trump has positioned himself as staunchly anti–gun control. Just two weeks ago, he spoke at an event organized by the National Rifle Association. The NRA was a major supporter of Trump during his first term, and the group appears ready for a second act.

The former president swore that if he is elected, he will immediately undo all of the Biden administration’s gun regulations.

“Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day,” Trump told the crowd, promising that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.”

The former head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin has admitted that he was a fake elector for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election—but that he only did so out of fear of retribution by the former president and his sycophantic followers.

Andrew Hitt, an attorney and former chairman of the state Republican Party, was one of several fake electors for Trump out of Wisconsin—one of the only states that hasn’t charged people who participated in the illegal scheme to misrepresent the popular vote. But on Sunday, Hitt claimed he was “tricked” into signing documents claiming Trump had won the state in the general election and that the campaign’s attempt to throw out more than 200,000 absentee ballots—which Hitt described as his preferred method of voting—“wasn’t something that [he] was comfortable with,” according to an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes.

Days before Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state, Hitt says he received a “suspicious” call from the Republican National Committee asking for a “list of the Wisconsin Republican electors.”

“I was already concerned that they were gonna try to say that the Democratic electors were not proper in Wisconsin because of fraud,” Hitt told Anderson Cooper, adding that he was very involved in the election and did not believe there to be any fraud.

The new plan was in: Under the eye of Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro (whom special counsel Jack Smith has dubbed the “architect” of the fake elector scheme), Hitt and other electors from the state were expected to meet at noon at the Wisconsin Capitol on December 14 to sign a document that would insist Trump won—on the basis that the documents would only be used in a contingency in the event that the Trump campaign’s legal case succeeded.

“If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t have done it,” he continued. “It was kept from us that there was this alternate scheme, alternate motive.”

But that same day, the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the Trump campaign suit. So why did Hitt go forward with signing the documents?

“Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin?” Hitt said, pondering his fate if the Supreme Court ultimately chose to throw out the votes.

When Cooper asked if he feared for his safety from other Trump supporters, Hitt responded that it was “not a safe time.”

“If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death,” he said.

The Republican-controlled West Virginia House of Delegates has passed a bill that could see librarians facing jail time.

House Bill 4654 passed the chamber Friday by a vote of 85–12, along party lines. The bill would remove criminal exemptions for schools, public libraries, and museums that distribute or display “obscene matter” to a minor, even if the minor’s parent or guardian is present. Any employees of those institutions found guilty of giving minors obscene matter can face fines of up to $25,000, up to five years in prison, or both.

The incredibly short piece of legislation gives no indication of how the new rules would affect paintings or sculptures that feature nude figures, or books that include descriptions or definitions of sexual conduct. Obscenity laws are incredibly hard to enforce, because definitions of obscenity still largely come down to individual interpretation.

As a result, there will likely be more reports of obscenity, made by people who are either more conservative or just nervous about accidentally breaking the law. And since libraries and public schools often operate on very tight budgets, they are unlikely to have the budget to fight a surge in lawsuits.

“It is going to cost our counties and our librarians when these matters go to the court system,” House Minority Leader Sean Hornbuckle told The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. “Because this is still vague, I’m scared.”

“This is a very dangerous bill.”

House Minority Whip Shawn Fluharty warned that the legislation could inspire many lawsuits over books that staff members don’t even realize are problematic. “The librarians on staff might not know if a book has obscene matter in it or may or may not have shown it to someone, but because it was in the facility and it was sitting on a shelf, it could still be prosecuted,” he said.

The bill has now been sent to the state Senate, which the GOP also controls (along with the governor’s office).

Republicans across the country have increasingly sought to ban books, claiming they are protecting minors from seeing inappropriately sexual content. But most of the books being pulled from shelves tend to discuss race, gender, and sexuality.

Seemingly innocuous texts have also gotten caught up in the fray. School districts in Florida have pulled the dictionary from library shelves for including definitions of sexual conduct and have drawn over children’s picture books.

Nobody likes Representative Matt Gaetz, and he wants everyone to know it!

The Florida Republican took to social media to snag credit for the recent GOP exodus from Congress, bragging about how much his own party hates him.

“I love this @cnn article. The fundamental premise is that I’ve made congress so miserable for so many members that they are leaving. Wonderful!” Gaetz wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, sharing a CNN article that only mentioned him twice.

“We can’t save America with the current Republican team. We have to get tougher and smarter. We need newer, bolder voices in the House,” he continued. “If you want to be a Paul Ryan/Kevin McCarthy Republican—THEY DON’T WORK HERE ANYMORE!”

“The next phase of our plan is to REPLACE the droves of retiring members with America First Patriots,” he added, urging Republican primary voters to “do their part” and send him “more backup.”

So far, 45 representatives in both parties have announced their retirements, with an additional six expected to be replaced before the general election (seven if you include George Santos’s replacement just last week).

That includes several legacy Republican policymakers, including Representatives Kevin McCarthy, Bill Johnson, Ken Buck, and Debbie Lesko, who are hanging up their hats and resigning early in a bid to escape seemingly endless grandstanding, gridlock, and complete dysfunction from House Republicans.

The beef between the Republican establishment and Gaetz hit an apex in October, when the MAGA lawmaker led a coup, dubbed the “Gaetz Eight,” to strip McCarthy of the gavel over a renewed House Ethics Committee probe into Gaetz’s alleged payments to a minor for sex.

“It’s unfortunate because you think of the brain trust you are losing. I blame a lot of the ‘crazy eights’ led by Gaetz. They want to make this place dysfunctional to try to wear people out,” McCarthy told reporters outside the Capitol. “It’s very sad.… It makes it more difficult for getting people to run in the current climate.”

Donald Trump decided to weigh in on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s mysterious death, taking to Truth Social to memorialize … himself?

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday, three days after Navalny’s death was first reported. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

Somehow, in his chaos of word vomit, Trump omitted a key figure at the center of the Russian political dissenter’s curious disappearance: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After Tucker Carlson’s paltry Putin interview, Trump’s comments are yet another example of a startling shift for far-right members of the conservative party, which somehow straddles the razor wire between condemning former leaders of the Soviet Union while kowtowing to the proto-dictatorship that exists under Putin in modern Russia.

Hours later, Trump continued to make the moment about himself, deriding the nearly $355 million judgment he received on Friday for committing real estate–related bank fraud in New York.

“ALL POLITICAL PROSECUTIONS OF YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, ME, MUST STOP IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote. “THIS IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE, AND MUST BE IMMEDIATELY STOPPED. I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO GO THROUGH ANY FAKE PROSECUTIONS BEFORE THE ELECTION. THIS IS COMMUNISM, AND A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. OUR COUNTRY WILL NOT STAND FOR IT. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

In another post, Trump likened the ruling—which he has just 30 days to come up with the money to appeal—to a “Stalinist nightmare.”