Donald Trump’s authoritarian aspirations face one major obstacle: He is not very popular. As counterintuitive as it may seem, political science shows that would-be dictators need strong public support, especially early in the regimes. Successful autocrats convince broad swaths of the public that the nation is in a crisis so great that democracy must be sacrificed to save them. Trump has tried to create this illusion by spinning dramatic lies about American cities being “war-ravaged,” a hoax he’s tried to bolster by sending National Guard troops to cities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to Portland. Most alarmingly, he’s been terrorizing immigrants with something akin to zeal, painting food cart operators and day care workers as an existential threat to middle America.
None of it has worked. Trump won by convincing a bunch of low-information swing voters he’d make groceries cheaper. After the election, it quickly became clear that he had no intention of doing so. Instead, he embraced tariffs and other economic policies that sent prices soaring. Trump’s approval rating dropped to the 42% of people who will never be able to admit liberals were right about him, according to pollster G. Elliott Morris. His numbers have stayed there, seemingly depressed from voters who disapprove of his National Guard stunts and immigration crackdown; they have told pollsters the president went “too far.”
Trump and his administration are cynical and grasping, so it’s no surprise they reacted to the death of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk not only as a tragedy, but also as an opportunity. He was supposed to be their very own Horst Wessel, the murdered brownshirt the Nazis used as a martyr to rally people to fascism. But now — only three weeks after Kirk was gunned down on a university campus in Utah — although there is widespread disapproval of his violent demise, the tragedy hasn’t made Americans feel any more enthusiasm for the MAGA cause.
There are many reasons Kirk’s death isn’t turning out to be the flashpoint Trump and his allies wanted. Despite the pressure on mainstream media to whitewash Kirk’s rhetoric, ideology and approach to politics, people can look online to quickly verify that he wasn’t the saintly figure the right portrayed him to be. The administration immediately exploited Kirk’s death to target some who critiqued him. An attempt to go after late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel backfired, and caused a public outcry against censorship.
But to really understand why the MAGA movement failed to capitalize on Kirk’s death, it helps to look at the televised memorial service held at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., on Sept. 21.
Mainstream pundits were tactfully silent in their appraisals of this event, no doubt wanting to avoid the appearance of mocking anyone’s grief. But the truth is that, for anyone who isn’t already immersed in the aesthetics of the megachurch world, the whole event was unsettling. The activist’s widow, Erika Kirk, was greeted with pyrotechnics as she came on stage. Multiple speakers — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — declared it was time for “spiritual warfare.” But the music at the memorial really exposed MAGA’s struggle to broaden the movement’s appeal past its core base.
The musicians who performed at Kirk’s memorial hailed exclusively from the niche worlds of contemporary Christian music (CCM) and worship music. CCM, while lucrative for musicians, is mostly the domain of artists who don’t have enough juice to cross over into the more desirable secular market. Traditionally, those artists who do manage to transition — think Creed or Evanescence — drop the “Christian” moniker and will even insist that they never intended to be categorized as such. Worship music, a genre that was popularized in the late 1990s and early 2000s by groups like Hillsong — a band affiliated with a controversial church in Sydney, Australia — and singer-songwriters like Chris Tomlin, who performed at the memorial, bills itself as producing modern hymns built around simple choruses.
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The prominence of these Christian genres, which are almost exclusively associated with white evangelical culture, worried some progressive commentators who feared their propaganda value. Poet David Gate compared MAGA’s use of worship music to the Nazis attaching themselves to Richard Wagner, worrying it represented the “seduction of fascism.” On the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, which is billed as “a leftist’s guide to the conservative movement,” the hosts complained that the left doesn’t offer artistic transcendence like what was offered from a bunch of musicians playing B-rate adult contemporary tunes in a football stadium.
Look, we’re all very worried here about rising fascism. But it’s time to take a deep breath and remember this: If Christian music appealed to anyone outside the white evangelical world, we’d have seen evidence of it by now. CCM has been around for decades, and yet it remains what it always was — watered down versions of sounds that were popular on the radio years ago. Gate attempted to equate the popularity of CCM in white evangelical circles with the way Wagner was synonymous with German cultural pride. But they are categorically different. Despite his rancid politics, Wagner was a true genius who remains popular nearly 150 years after his death. Both CCM and worship music are subpar forms that white evangelicals settle for because they think you can catch demons from the real stuff.
Popular music may not be satanic, but MAGA is right to see it as mostly liberal. That’s why they fear it. Far from avoiding transcendent artistic experiences, the left can lay claim to most of them. Most everything from Taylor Swift to the grittiest punk music is made by people on the left. That’s why evangelicals want their kids to avoid it. They rightly believe that it’s hard to go back to mediocrity after you’ve tasted excellence.
The emphasis on worship music at Kirk’s memorial is symbolic of the larger problem that faces the MAGA movement in its attempt to expand the fascist project beyond Trump himself. As Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said so memorably during the 2024 presidential campaign, MAGA is just plain weird. Most supporters are firmly ensconced in the world of white evangelicalism, which is famously alienating to most everyone outside it. That fact is a primary reason why their numbers keep declining despite decades of aggressive proselytizing. The rest of the loyal MAGA base tends to adhere to one cultist belief or another, be it QAnon — which has a lot of evangelical overlap — the incel world or whatever artificial intelligence-driven faith is taking hold of Silicon Valley.
Trump has twice gotten into office by the skin of his teeth, and that’s because he has managed to convince just enough ordinary Americans — especially those who don’t pay close attention to politics — that he’s different from his rabid followers. A lot of people see the president less as a frothing-at-the-mouth fanatic and more like a glib businessman, the guy they remember with some fondness from “The Apprentice.” That Trump so obviously doesn’t believe all the Christian platitudes he parrots may annoy liberals, but for those middle-of-the road types, his phoniness is weirdly soothing. They can tell themselves he doesn’t really believe that stuff, and he’s not one of those Bible wavers.
In the days after Kirk’s death, I was pretty scared. I saw the excitement that MAGA leaders were displaying. They really thought they had their Horst Wessel moment and that American fascism would experience a surge in popularity. But after Kirk’s memorial, I started sleeping again. Perhaps his brutal murder was never going to win over a majority of Americans to MAGA. But if there was a chance for that, Trump and other MAGA leaders blew it by so strongly associating Kirk’s legacy with a very specific brand of white evangelicalism — a faith with which only 23% of Americans align themselves.
The music isn’t a sign that MAGA is about to break into the mainstream. It’s a reminder that the movement can’t help but alienate everyone else. Trump can bamboozle the Joe Rogan swing voters into thinking he’s not so bad just long enough to win an election, but the rest of the MAGA leadership still hasn’t figured out how to hide their weirdness.
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