Using Bigotry to Hide an Authoritarian, Christian Nationalist Agenda

Earlier this week, as the Trump administration ramped up its Iran war and as a growing number of soldiers complained that their Christian nationalist commanders were essentially describing the fight as a Holy War against non-believers, Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles announced on social media that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Not to be outdone, his colleague Florida Representative Randy Fine, compared Muslims unfavorably to dogs, writing on X, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

Condemning the remarks of Ogles and Fine ought to be low-hanging fruit. It’s not as if you need to hack through a jungle of ambiguity to understand either comment. In a functioning multiethnic, multiracial democracy, the leaders of all major political parties should be able to instantly disavow such flame-throwing without worrying about a backlash from their base. But this is Trump’s authoritarian United States, and in such a landscape, the congressional leaders of the GOP have more than made their peace with evermore extreme racial and religious bigotries.

When challenged by Democratic leaders to condemn Ogles and Fine—and maybe even to censure them—Speaker Mike Johnson put on a master class of evasion. Johnson said that he had spoken to the pair about their “tone,” as if it would have been perfectly acceptable to advocate the expulsion of Muslims had the language just been a little more polite. The real issue, Johnson then announced, is that “the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem.”

Um, no. The risk of Sharia law being imposed on the United States is probably smaller than the risk of a civilization-destroying asteroid crashing into Earth; it’s certainly lower than the risk of AI—pushed, without limits, by Trump and his oligarchic wingmen—running roughshod over US workers and the democratic political system.

Think about it: Nowhere in the United States is subject to Sharia law—though plenty of places are being taken over by Christian nationalists, with their vision of religious rule that is shockingly, depressingly similar to Sharia law. I can’t think of an elected official in the country advocating for the imposition of Sharia law, though there are large numbers who subscribe to end-time visions and Christian nationalist extremism.

Nonetheless, earlier this month, the Texas GOP put to its primary voters a nonbinding resolution on whether to ban Sharia law. It was an obvious stunt to drive the base to the polls this primary season. There’s zero evidence that the Lone Star State, in which more than one in four residents are evangelical Protestants, is about to fall to Taliban-style Islamic fundamentalism. Of course, to no one’s surprise, GOP voters overwhelmingly voted against Sharia law. Surely, Texans are now sleeping much easier this week.

The Texas GOP referendum is the worst kind of bait-and-switch politics. Put slop like this on the ballot, back it up with a few choice Islamophobic statements and lawsuits—witness state Attorney General (and Senate hopeful) Ken Paxton’s claims, supported by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is a terrorist organization, and his demands that the courts shut down its operations in Texas—and, voilà!, you can harness religious and racial grievances in your political campaigns. Why talk about the fact that nearly 4 million Texans have no access to healthcare, that in several southern counties in the state nearly half of residents live below the poverty line, or that the maternal mortality rate, already one of the highest in the country, jumped more than 60 percent over the past decade, when political “leaders” can instead tilt at the windmill of Sharia law?

Back in DC, Speaker Johnson continued to blather incoherently on the issue. “When you seek to come to a country and not assimilate but impose Sharia law, Sharia law is in conflict with the Constitution. It’s not about people as Muslims; it’s about those who seek to impose a different belief system that is in direct conflict with the Constitution.”

Yes, Speaker Johnson, we can all agree that the imposition of extremist religious views signals the death knell of secular, constitutional governance. But Johnson, it turns out, is pretty selective about which religious extremism he rejects. Indeed, in October 2023 Time quoted the Louisianan as saying, “I don’t believe there are any coincidences. I believe that scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority, he raised up each of you, all of us. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed us to be brought here to this specific moment and time.”

Controlled by an increasingly Christian nationalist leadership, the GOP majority in Congress is in thrall to the notion that Trump is a modern-day King Cyrus sent to deliver God’s will; and it has shown itself only too willing to cast aside its constitutionally mandated decision-making role.

Most recently, this has manifested in its shameful refusal to rein in Trump’s military ventures, thus allowing the administration to pursue its catastrophic, bloody military intervention, seemingly launched with no long-term strategy, in the Persian Gulf.

I’m not sure whether this makes Congress a rubber stamp or a damp squib. But I do know that Trump regards the legislature as his personal fiefdom, a place he can bend to his most antidemocratic of whims. This is perhaps why he felt confident enough over the weekend to threaten to withhold his signature from all legislation passed by Congress unless it enacted his grotesque voter suppression legislation, the SAVE America Act. This legislation would mandate onerous proof-of-citizenship requirements when registering to vote—which voters would have to do each election cycle. It would force voters to bring picture IDs to the polls in order to vote, drastically curtail mail-in voting, and mandate that states submit their voter rolls to the federal government. In essence, it seeks to federalize the elections process solely for the purpose of suppressing the vote—to an extent unheard of in post–Jim Crow America—with the goal of making it all but impossible to overturn the GOP majority.

Johnson’s House, in its wisdom, has already passed the SAVE America Act. Thunes’s Senate is now teeing it up for a prolonged debate next week. Trump knows that he can’t get 60 senators to support the legislation, but he’s going all in on pressuring the Senate leadership to change the rules to bypass that 60-vote requirement.

Normally, a president would have no chance at pulling this off. Yet in authoritarian Trumplandia, with a neutered congressional leadership and an extremist GOP, it’s not beyond the bounds of the possible that the White House’s relentless pressure campaign will eventually result in passage of the Voter Suppression Act of 2026. And that would be a calamity for everyone trying to save American democracy from Trump’s authoritarian Putsch.