How Trump Really is Apocalyptic, but so was Obama
During the waning days of the presidential election of 2016, many recognized that the GOP nominee was trafficking in a certain apocalyptic rhetoric. Slate was keeping tabs in their Trump Apocalypse Watch, Peter Wehner observed after the first debate the remarkable shift of the Republican party from Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” to Trump’s “America-is-a-dumpster-fire.” In Obama’s preemptory address on Buzzfeed the day of the election he reassured the anxious American public that no matter what happens “the sun will rise in the morning” and that “America is still the greatest nation on earth.”
The dueling visions of America — the shining city that is the greatest nation on earth versus the declining into catastrophe — have been part of the American religious and cultural discourse for more than a century, but never has the contrast between those visions of America’s role in the world been so stark. The reaction of many who see American progress in cultural inclusivity and racial equality as the epitome of the “greatness” of America was to announce that America’s light has finally dimmed or to declare “so much for the shining city on a hill.”
Obama’s belief in American progress as a beacon for global positive change is not often viewed as “apocalyptic,” yet the optimistic insistence that American is bringing good to its citizens and to the world inherits the vision of the earliest European settlers on the continent who devised from the biblical book of Revelations that this new people were like the young woman fleeing the vicious Dragon in the wilderness (Revelations chapter 12), an understanding of American most efficiently explained by Puritan minister Samuel Danforth in his “Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand in the Wilderness” from 1670. The Puritans developed the idea that God had chosen them to bring their message out of the darkness of Europe and gave them the pristine land to flourish and start a government that would become the beacon of goodness and purity to the world of evil and darkness. While much of the religious content of this vision has been transcended in the twentieth century, the centrality of America as a divine tool to lead and protect the world has been a mainstay in American politics, one that is often referred to as American Exceptionalism, most recently restated in Obama’s nomination convention speech in Philadelphia in July 2016. The Democratic president and the 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton successfully wrestled the language of American uniqueness and mission away from decades of Republican dominance on the theme.
Donald Trump espoused a radically different vision of the American status in the world during the election season. Instead of the common appeal to America’s mission to lead the world during dark days of international struggles, a common theme among Republican candidates, he chose to represent America as on the brink of collapse, in the midst of an apocalyptic dystopia that only he could lead it out of.
Trump’s acceptance speech for the GOP candidacy was widely panned as “disgusting,” “angry and dark,” and aspiring to rank among the world’s “authoritarian strongmen.” In the speech Trump continued many of his themes from his stump speeches: crime is on the rise, the police are now targets of an unruly crowd, Mexicans are pouring over the border to rape and pillage good American households, American airports resemble third world countries, household income is stagnant, and inner cities are cesspools and hellish for their trapped inhabitants.
This vision of America on the brink of collapse, while a common form of political argument, tapped into a seemingly contradictory apocalyptic theme within American culture. For Obama and Reagan, America was chosen to deliver progress and democracy to the world through its shining example, playing off of the Puritan desire to use that as a vehicle of evangelization that would prepare the world for the second coming of Jesus. For Trump and Nixon, American is quickly falling out of its leading role in the world which is itself spiraling out of control and only they can lead the country out of these doldrums. This theme appeals to a different religious track in America because the dissolution of the world order is seen as the precursor to the Rapture according to many evangelicals.
This apocalyptic vision, officially known as “premillennial dispensationalism,” believes that when the world is on the brink of destruction a key apocalyptic event will take place: Christians will be raptured out of the destruction for eternity in heaven. Those “left behind” will suffer the remaining destruction of this belief system’s apocalyptic scenario. Thus Trump can avert the destruction, bring America back from the brink of collapse, return order to the world (without the elites), and “make America great again.” What is key about these two visions is that one sees America as consistently struggling to become a better, more equitable leader in the world, while the other sees America as struggling against the forces of evil and destruction but will ultimately not be victorious. In one the American arc bends toward progress and peace, in the other the arc collapses just before the inevitable return of Jesus.
