There’s a quote often attributed to Sinclair Lewis that has gone viral again and again since Donald Trump first ascended to the White House, fodder for liberal memes on Facebook and reposts on the platform X: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.”
There’s no evidence that Lewis, the early 20th-century novelist, ever said or wrote that sentence — its origin remains unknown — but it’s understandable why people think he did. Lewis, after all, wrote “It Can’t Happen Here,” the widely read 1930s dystopian novel depicting an Adolf Hitler-like figure rising to power in the U.S. — the type of fascist who eschewed the word “fascist” itself but “preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty,” and who “could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson” — and setting up concentration camps for members of certain marginalized groups, as well as for his political enemies.
The book’s sardonic title has served as the genesis for innumerable op-eds and magazine features in the decades since it was published, with headlines like “Could It Happen Here?” and “Did It Happen Here?” musing whether the horrors of 1930s and 1940s European fascism might be arriving on America’s shores. These musings, of course, sometimes elided the fact that many Americans, especially Black and Indigenous people, were already living under a type of fascism: white supremacy.
Still, with the 2024 election victory of Donald Trump, there’s a very good argument that the particularly virulent strain of fascism imagined in Lewis’ novel, and the destruction of whatever semblance of democracy this country has enjoyed, are on the cusp of happening here and now. Like the apocryphal quote said, it is wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
Jessie Wardarski via Associated Press
Trump’s connection to Christianity has always been tenuous, with critics speculating whether his faith was authentic or crafted out of political expediency, especially after a 2015 interview in which he was asked to name his favorite Bible verses and repeatedly demurred. But since his initial ascent to the White House, and especially after a July assassination attempt this year, his religious rhetoric intensified.
“My faith took on new meaning on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, where I was knocked to the ground, essentially, by what seemed like a supernatural hand,” Trump said last month, suggesting that divine intervention saved him from a would-be assassin’s bullet. “And I would like to think that God saved me for a purpose, and that’s to make our country greater than ever before.”
While Trump’s rise to power in 2016 instigated an explosion in fascist groups — the Proud Boys, Identity Evropa and so many more — many of those organizations have since collapsed, falling to infighting and scandal, their members arrested or doxxed. These groups, in many ways, served as shock troops for the “Make America Great Again” agenda, sacrificing themselves to open the Overton window — that is, the spectrum of acceptable political discourse — so wide that Trump frequently parrots their words and ideas these days, openly talking about “remigration,” for example, a well-known euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
Yet the most enduring fascist formation, the one that has survived and thrived out in the open over the past eight years, counts millions of members among its ranks. As HuffPost has reported extensively, they gather at a loose confederation of churches on Sunday mornings, speak in tongues, perform faith healings and are led by self-described prophets and apostles who claim to have a direct line to God. Their revealed word always bears a striking resemblance to the latest MAGA or Republican Party talking points you might hear on Fox News, and contains prophecies that Trump is destined to rule over the U.S., returning to the White House to implement a reign of terror and vengeance over those who ever dared oppose him.
Trump has repeatedly threatened revenge, lashing out at the “enemy from within,” calling the press “the enemy of the people” and promising “retribution” and to be a “dictator” on day one of his next administration. His work will begin in earnest this January.
And he’ll have the support of churches in the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR — a burgeoning movement of charismatic evangelical churches that are characterized by a belief in the supernatural, in modern-day miracles and in modern-day apostles and prophets, as well as an embrace of Christian dominionism, the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation and should be governed with an ultraconservative interpretation of scripture. This latter belief is articulated in something called the Seven Mountain Mandate, which states that Christians must conquer the “seven mountains” of societal influence — the financial system, the church, education, arts and entertainment, family, media and government — to form a perfect world. Once that is accomplished, the prophecy goes, Christ will return to Earth.
It is a movement that is fundamentally hostile to the type of democracy required for equal governance in a diverse and pluralistic society like the U.S., which is why it’s no surprise that NAR prophets and apostles played such a fundamental role in fomenting the antidemocratic Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and why they’ve found a home in the highest reaches of a Republican Party increasingly beholden to a politics of outright domination.
The GOP’s official party platform is rife with NAR-inflected language, including a call to “keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America.” Such language can also be found in Project 2025, the sprawling fascist blueprint for a new conservative administration that was spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation think tank and depicts Christians in America as under siege by “woke” enemies.
Trump and JD Vance, now the vice president-elect, have repeatedly courted the New Apostolic Reformation, including in September when Vance spoke at an event hosted by an apostle who believes that Trump was destined to save America from Kamala Harris, with the Democratic presidential nominee purportedly sent by the devil to “take Trump out.”
Fascist movements often imbue their leaders with mythological, divine qualities, and the NAR is no exception. Trump was destined to rule for “such a time as this,” according to the movement’s prophets and apostles, who have at various points over the last eight years “made a hobby of connecting the famously profane, philandering, greedy real estate mogul to biblical heroes and quotable Bible verses,” wrote Matthew Taylor, a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies and the author of “The Violent Take It by Force.”
Taylor, writing just before the election for Religion News Service, chronicled how these prophets and apostles have alternately compared Trump to Cyrus, the ancient Persian emperor; “a modern Job, defiantly enduring devilish persecutions”; “Esther, positioned by providence ‘for such a time as this’”; or “David, a flawed but anointed man of God.”
But the most bone-chilling biblical comparison Taylor observed was from last month, as NAR prophets and apostles rallied for Trump in Washington, equating the billionaire former president to King Jehu.
“Donald Trump is a type of Jehu, and Kamala Harris is a type of Jezebel. As you know, Jehu cast out Jezebel,” apostle Ché Ahn said at the rally. “I decree in Jesus’ mighty name, and I decree it by faith that Trump will win on November the 5th, he will be our 47th president, and Kamala Harris will be cast out, and she will lose.”
As Taylor noted, Jehu in the Bible not only “cast out” Jezebel, but killed her in a horrifying manner. “He demands her servants cast her out of a high tower, then tramples her body with his horse,” Taylor wrote. “Wild dogs come and eat her corpse. The message of the story: Jezebel was so profane, so heinous, that all memory of her was eradicated.”
Afterward, Taylor said, “Jehu goes on a rampage, slaughtering all of Ahab and Jezebel’s children, piling up their heads at the city gates. He goes on to murder hundreds of Israelite citizens, including religious leaders who backed Jezebel. One of the most brutal and vindictive scenes in the Bible, Jehu’s vengeance is being offered as the divinely ordained template for a second Trump term.”
It might be easy to wave this all away as hot air or bluster, to say that these Christian nationalists don’t mean such comparisons literally. Eight years ago the press, the commentariat, Democratic politicians and academics who study fascism hesitated to call Trump a fascist. But in recent months they’ve largely become comfortable with the term, observing Trump’s increasingly hostile anti-immigrant rhetoric and reports that he admired the ur-fascist: Hitler.
“We might dismiss the comparisons to Jehu as metaphor if we had not listened to Trump’s recent rally speeches,” Taylor wrote. “These biblical citations echo Trump’s own campaign rhetoric, which itself has taken a more vengeful, violent turn. He launched his 2024 campaign by declaring, ‘I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.’ He’s closing it with promises to eradicate ′the enemy within’ and calling his American opponents ′vermin.’”
Ultimately, the quote so often misattributed to Lewis has proven actually prophetic. There is a fascist movement with real power in the U.S now. It’s draped in a flag. And it’s carrying a cross.