J.D. Vance’s Christian Nationalist Ties Are Growing

The Republican vice presidential nominee will attend an event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, on Saturday hosted by The Lance Wallnau Show.

Wallnau is a one of the leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a sect of evangelical Christianity devoted to proselytizing the Seven Mountain Mandate, referring to the seven aspects of society—government, family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, education, and business—that its followers are meant to influence with their faith so that Christians can hold dominion over the world.

Unsurprisingly, he’s adamantly pro–Donald Trump.

Wallnau has been associated with Trump’s campaign since at least January 2024, when he announced his “Courage Tour” in collaboration with the far-right youth organization Turning Point USA, another group hoping to flesh out Trump’s lackluster ground game.

Wallnau said the tour aimed to get “civically enlightened” pastors to turn out their church members for the “America First agenda,” according to Rolling Stone. The Courage Tour urges attendees not only to vote but to sign up as election workers and poll watchers.

In an interview with CBS News, Wallnau called it “spiritual activism,” but it’s actually likely illegal under U.S. tax code. (Kirk had offered resources to pastors seeking to “challenge the IRS,” and Wallnau has pushed for churches to be “courageous.”)

Now Vance and Wallnau will join forces in an essential battleground state for Trump.

It seems like Vance and Wallnau may have a lot to talk about, considering the fact that they’re both raging misogynists. Wallnau has repeatedly referred to Kamala Harris as a “Jezebel,” a racist and misogynist trope with distinctly violent implications. Shortly after Harris’s candidacy for president was announced in July, Wallnau said Trump’s opponent represented “the spirit of Jezebel, and in a way that’ll be even much more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.”

They could also talk about Wallnau’s podcast, where he regularly pushes far-right talking points, like a resented episode in which he fomented the dangers of “hit squads” coming over the “open borders” to assassinate Trump.

Vance’s nomination electrified the Christian nationalist corners of the internet, and recently he’s been doing more outreach to Christian voters. Earlier this week, Vance spoke at the Believers and Ballots event in Charlotte, North Carolina, a key swing state. Vance complained about “crazy transgender bills,” claimed that Christianity is the “most persecuted faith in the world today,” and called Harris “the biggest threat to religious liberty we’ve had in at least a generation.”

It turns out that as recently as 2020, J.D. Vance was critical of Donald Trump.

The Washington Post reported Friday that the Republican vice presidential nominee called out Trump as having “just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy),” in one of multiple direct messages on Twitter (now X) back in February 2020.

Vance has explained his shift from being a “Never Trump” conservative in 2016, promoting his book Hillbilly Elegy, to supporting Trump in 2020 by saying Trump’s presidential term changed his mind. But apparently, that wasn’t really the case.

In another message in June 2020, just months before the election, Vance wrote, “I think Trump will probably lose.” When Trump did lose, Vance claimed the election was stolen by the Democrats. 

The messages were shared with the Post by their recipient anonymously out of fear of retaliation. They were also sent years after Vance was critical of Trump during his 2016 campaign for president, when he called Trump “reprehensible” and “America’s Hitler.”

A Vance spokesperson told the Post the Ohio senator wasn’t actually criticizing Trump but “establishment Republicans who thwarted much of Trump’s populist economic agenda to increase tariffs and boost domestic manufacturing in Congress.”

“Fortunately, Sen. Vance believes that Republicans in Congress are much more aligned with President Trump’s agenda today than they were back then, so he is confident that they won’t run into those same issues within the party,” said William Martin.

But this statement doesn’t take into account that Vance also correctly predicted that Trump would lose the 2020 election, only to deny that after the fact. Vance has never been particularly clear on when he started to support Trump, the Post notes, begging the question of whether it was him actually changing his mind or making a calculated political decision.

In another direct message, Vance even seemed open to government-run universal health care, saying Medicare for All “is a net positive, maybe not (details matter).” But Martin told the Post that Vance now believes “the Democrats[’] top-down Medicare for All plan would make healthcare worse for Americans,” which is backed up by Vance and Trump’s regressive health care proposals.

Whatever the case may be, Vance is fully defending Trump and providing his own defenses for the former president’s proposed policies, nonsensical as they may be. But the Post’s revelations suggest that Vance could just be saying whatever he thinks will satisfy the MAGA faithful. 

Donald Trump appeared to completely forget Thursday that Kamala Harris wasn’t the president for the past four years, during a breathless, lengthy rant on immigration.

After a hearing at a New York City appeals court, Trump delivered a low-energy stump speech, where he attempted to hold his opponent solely responsible for every beat of the Biden administration’s immigration policy.

“Four years ago, Kamala inherited the most secure border in U.S. history, with the lowest illegal immigration on record,” Trump said.

“Those who violated our borders were captured, detained, and quickly sent back home under the Trump administration. But on her first day in office, Kamala Harris terminated every single Trump policy that sealed and secured the border.”

Already, it was startlingly clear that Harris’s name could be replaced at any point with President Joe Biden’s.

Trump then complained that Harris had been the one to order an “immediate stop” to the construction on the border wall when it was “almost complete.” He claimed that Harris had suspended all deportations, instituted catch and release “across the entire southern border,” and “sent Congress a bill demanding amnesty for all illegal aliens, every single illegal alien, even if they’re criminals, even if they’re murderers, even if they’re drug dealers … human traffickers.… She wanted amnesty for everybody.”

Trump also seemed disappointed that Harris had “canceled” his Remain in Mexico policy. There’s only one problem: Harris isn’t solely responsible for any of this stuff because she isn’t president. She didn’t “order” or “terminate” or “cancel” any Trump policy because she didn’t have the authority.

For example, the disastrous Remain in Mexico program, which was used to send nearly 70,000 migrants back into Mexico, was suspended by Biden after there were widespread reports of severe human rights violations and serious logistical issues.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Trump has seemingly forgotten whom exactly he’s running against. When Harris first became the nominee, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Trump was having a hard time adjusting—three months later, and he still doesn’t seem to have gotten a grasp on things.

Later in his speech, Trump took aim at Harris for slamming his efforts to kill a bipartisan border bill earlier this year, which would’ve granted $20 billion in emergency spending at the southern border, in the most restrictive border legislation pushed by a Democratic president in recent memory.

“She keeps talking about this law that they tried to put through Congress, but fortunately Congress was too smart for her,” Trump said “It would’ve been a disaster.

“The damage was done, they’re trying to make it look better now. But the damage was done over the first three years. They’re trying to do anything to make it look better. Because it doesn’t poll very well for them—but it polls very well for me.”

Trump seemingly can’t help but give away the game for his motivation for killing the bill: A weakened border hurts Harris among voters but gives him and his fearmongering, anti-immigrant platform a boost.

A less than coherent Trump claimed that he won in 2016 because “I fix the border,” and whined that in 2020, “I couldn’t talk about the border because I fixed it, it was great.

“But now we can talk about the border because this border, they un-fixed it,” Trump said.

“This border is the worst border. And by the way, 25 times worse and more deadly, than the border in 2016.”

It is unclear where he got that number. According to Customs and Border Protection, the agency had a total of 408,807 encounters along the southwest border in 2016. In 2023, that number was about 2.5 million—only about six times greater.

Donald Trump may soon get a reduced penalty in his civil fraud case, if oral arguments in an appeals court Thursday are any indication.

The intermediate appeals court in Manhattan heard Trump’s appeal against a New York ruling from February where he was not only fined $450 million plus interest but also barred from doing business in New York. Some of the judges on the five-member panel seemed at least receptive to the former president.

“The immense penalty in this case is troubling,” said Justice Peter Moulton. “How do you tether the amount that was assessed by the Supreme Court to the harm that was caused here where the parties left these transactions happy?”

Deputy New York Solicitor General Judith Vale, representing the state, was ready with a response, though.

“Although this is a large number, it’s a large number for a couple reasons. One, because there was a lot of fraud and illegality,” Vale said. “That is an enormous benefit they got from this conduct” of falsifying financial statements to obtain better loan rates, she added, referring to the Trump Organization.

Justice David Friedman argued that the ruling against Trump was undercut by Deutsche Bank saying Trump’s actions did not harm them.

“It hardly seems to justify bringing an action to protect Deutsche Bank against President Trump, which is what you have here,” Friedman said. “You have two really sophisticated players, in which no one lost any money.”

Vale said that state law did not require being harmed, and also noted that the bank actually complained when it heard about false statements and pulled out of its agreement with Trump.

At one point, Trump’s lawyer John Sauer tried to argue that the former president and his businesses were following “generally accepted accounting principles,” only to be rebuked by Justice Peter H. Moulton.

“It’s the factual inaccuracies that are important,” Moulton countered. “You might be following GAAP principles, but if your data is terrible, you’re creating a fallacious statement.”

The former president and convicted felon had to pony up a $175 million bond in April to stop the judgment while he appeals. His fine, thanks to 9 percent interest accruing every year, has now grown to more than $478 million. If he wins, it will be dropped, and Trump has had some success in New York courts as of late.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is so angry at House Speaker Mike Johnson that she said she doesn’t think Republicans deserve to keep the majority in the House.

The House passed a three-month stopgap bill Wednesday to prevent a government shutdown, amid loud opposition from the Georgia Republican and her far-right pals. In getting the spending bill passed, Johnson went against the wishes of Donald Trump and MAGA.

During a call into Steve Bannon’s War Room, Greene railed against Johnson and made a startling remark, according to RawStory.

“Mike Johnson is not our speaker. He is the speaker for the Democrats,” Greene ranted.

Greene blamed Johnson for funding the Biden-Harris administration, the “weaponized” Department of Justice, and the FBI that “raided Mar-a-Lago and has raided a lot of January 6 defendant homes.” It doesn’t seem apparent to Greene that funding the government is not only Johnson’s job but hers as well.

She claimed Johnson had “fully funded the invasion at our border that is, that is killing Americans every single day.”

“He’s been a great speaker of the House for Democrats, and he has absolutely helped the Biden-Harris administration destroy this country,” Greene continued.

“I share the anger and frustration, and I don’t think Republicans deserve to be reelected to hold a majority,” Greene admitted.

“We have to elect President Trump in order to control the federal government,” Greene said. She immediately walked back her remark, insisting that Republicans needed to be reelected because if Democrats got control of the House, they would “rewrite the tax codes.”

She urged voters to “hold your nose and vote for that RINO that you absolutely hate, because we need a good tax code in place.”

Last week, Greene went on a tear against Johnson for his plan to attach the SAVE Act, which is based on faulty election data and seeks to solve the practically nonexistent problem of widespread noncitizen voting, to a six-month continuing resolution to fund the government. The move would have been a nonstarter for Democrats.

This is far from the first time the two have butted heads. In May, Greene tried to have Johnson removed from the speakership, but was quickly shot down.

At the end of the day, Greene and Johnson are both far-right congressional proxies for Trump. It’s just that only one of them seems to actually care about doing their job.