Introduction
I’m going to talk about post-truth. The term burst onto the scene when Oxford Dictionaries made it their word of the year in 2016 in the wake of the Brexit Referendum and Donald Trump’s election. Oxford defines it as a circumstance where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” I don’t think this definition is very useful. I’ll say more about that later. Needless to say, post-truth and “alternative facts” certainly didn’t start with Trump. In his excellent short book Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre concludes that 20th century postmodernism is “the godfather of post-truth” [1]. This is probably the consensus view of most analytic philosophers and scientists. Although McIntyre has good reasons for this conclusion—and I will go into them in depth—it’s probably wrong.
I’ve avoided writing about post-truth for a few years now. I guess I needed some time to go by in order to put it into perspective for myself. To talk about post-truth necessarily entails talking about truth. And talking about truth means a brief foray into discussions of shared reality. So here’s the plan: first I’m going to unpack what McIntyre means when he blames postmodernity for our current post-truth era. This will take us from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger to post-structuralism (postmodernism). I’ll explore the intellectual foundations and academic misadventures that led McIntyre to arrive at his conclusion. Then I’m going to talk about post-truth itself and what is really going on for us right now. I live in the United States, so I’ll confine my comments to the situation here.
Correspondence Theory of Truth
Most of us have a simple common‑sense view of a stable, predictable, and objective world that philosophers call direct realism. This is the idea that the world consists of real objects and properties that exist independently of our perception of them, and that our minds mirror reality back to us more or less as reality is in itself. You see a tree and say “there is a tree.” This is so ingrained in us that it would be strange to walk up and touch the tree just to make sure. On this view, truth is a simple correspondence between statement and fact: if I say “there is a tree” and there is indeed a tree, the statement is true; if not, my statement is false. The Greek philosopher Aristotle captured this idea in his famous definition:
“To say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; while to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false” [2].
This is called the correspondence theory of truth and it has long been a bedrock of Western philosophy. From Aristotle on down through the centuries this view of truth became the dominant view in the philosophical tradition. Its dominance began to wobble in the eighteenth-century when German philosopher Immanuel Kant declared that the really real (noumenal reality) is unknowable to us. We began to ask how our truth claims can correspond to reality if reality is unknowable. This introduced doubt into our notions of truth. This doubt will become a gap that widens with time. After Kant, the nineteenth-century is filled with attempts to recreate a connected world. Most famously, the German philosopher Georg Hegel envisioned a logical and historical order to a living reality (a “world spirit”) as it unfolds itself over time. It will be Nietzsche who pivots away from the idea of a stable world once and for all. He dismisses Kant’s philosophy and declares that any kind of objective world is nothing more than an empty idea. As for Hegel’s metaphysics, Nietzsche regarded it as a sort of poisonous fiction, a bedtime story told to soothe our craving for an ordered world. To understand post-truth we have to go through Nietzsche, because he has a huge influence on what will become postmodernism.
Friedrich Nietzsche
For Nietzsche, reality is a continual “coming to be” of pure chaos and change. This disturbs “weak” people who seek an external, independent reality in order to tame the chaos and turn it into something stable and objective. The idea of God is the ultimate form of stability as He anchors, not just a fixed reality, but universal morality as well. But the “strong” have come to realize that the weak created both God and morality in order to control them. In order to reach their full potential, the strong must look directly at the churning chaos and bend it to their will. Since for Nietzsche there is no stable reality, there is also no single view of shared truth for anything. There is only individual perspective and interpretation. If my tribe’s views express a stronger will to power—if those views are more dominant or compelling—then my tribe’s truth will replace your tribe’s version.
The important point here is that Nietzsche opens the door into relativism. Truth for him is a product of competing narratives and the will to power rather than something objective about our world. While Heidegger hesitates to walk through that door it does compel him to pause and ask: if truth isn’t correspondence between our statement about the tree and the tree itself, then what is truth? What does it mean for something to be true?
Martin Heidegger
Heidegger’s argument against the correspondence theory is that it looks for truth in the wrong place. On the traditional view, there’s a gap between subjective human consciousness—the first-person subject gazing out at the world—and the external independent world of objects. While we all know what I mean when I say “there is a tree,” philosophers struggle to explain how it is that we connect our thoughts and mental representations of things in our “inner” space with the “outer” world of objective reality. In other words, what closes that gap?
Heidegger solves this problem by suggesting there is no inner, no outer, and no gap. Truth isn’t a matter of matching our inner mental representations with objects out in reality. Truth is grounded in being itself. It is in the way the world is disclosed to us:
“To say that a statement is true means that it discovers the being itself. It asserts, it shows, it lets beings “be seen” (apophansis) in their discoveredness. The being-true [Wahrsein] (truth) of the statement must be understood as discovering [entdeckend-sein]. Thus, truth by no means has the structure of an agreement between knowing and the object in the sense of a correspondence of one being (subject) to another (object). Being-true as discovering is, in turn, ontologically possible only on the basis of being-in-the-world. This phenomenon, in which we recognized a basic constitution of Dasein, is the foundation [Fundament] of the primordial phenomenon of truth” [3].
Without going deep into Heidegger’s metaphysics, what he’s saying here is that human beings (Dasein) are always already acting in the world. We are not spectators at a distance but deeply immersed in our world. And the world shows itself to us. This is why by being in the world, we are also “in the truth” [4]. The being of a chair (as a place to sit), a hammer on my workbench (as a tool for driving nails), or a thousand other things, all reveal themselves when I interact with them and discover what was previously hidden in them. I can stare at a chair all day long but it is not until I sit down that I discover something about it. Our actions reveal truth:
“Truth (discoveredness) must always first be wrested [abgerungen] from beings. Beings are torn from concealment. Each and every factical discoveredness is, so to speak, always a kind of robbery.” [5].
“The unhidden must be torn away from a hiddenness; it must in a sense be stolen from hiddenness. Originally for the Greeks hiddenness, as an act of self-hiding, permeated the essence of being and thus also determined beings in their presentness and accessibility.… Truth originally means that which has been wrested from hiddenness. Truth is thus a wresting away in each case, in the form of a revealing” [6].
The violent imagery is unfortunate and the later Heidegger will walk this back. What he’s trying to do here is shake us out of the complacency of a passive correspondence theory of truth. “The idea of an ‘originary’ and ‘intuitive’ grasp and explication of phenomena must be opposed to the naivete of an accidental, ‘immediate’ and unreflective ‘beholding’” [7].
This is a way of saying that truth is not something passive or given over to us as observers gazing out on the world. Nor is it a function of language or statements we might make about the world. Truth isn’t semantic correctness; it’s something we uncover and disclose when we move through our world. I can say “there is a tree” but I go wrong when I think that the truth of the matter is not established until I say it and it correctly corresponds to reality. Truth, as disclosure, is primary and precedes anything I might say. My trying to predicate existence of the tree is superfluous because I have already encountered the tree. In other words, for any statement to correspond to reality, the real must already be unconcealed for us. Of course, Heidegger isn’t saying we can’t make statements about the world. He just wants us to realize that correspondence is derivative of a deeper primordial truth about being itself. Truth “happens” when we engage with the world and disclose the beings in it. This is a serious rejection of the tradition’s correspondence theory of truth and it will influence much of twentieth-century postmodern thought.
The bottom line? For Heidegger, the tradition’s correspondence theory of truth adds nothing of value. Truth is a verb, not a noun. It’s an event—something that happens in the act of discovery—and not the result of justified, true beliefs about trees or other objects in the world. And once truth becomes a verb or an event rather than a static fact of nature, then the ground on which shared reality rests starts to move.
Post-Structuralism
By redefining truth away from correctness and toward being, Heidegger opened the door for the post-structuralist critique of shared truths. If truth is a verb, a disclosure, or an event, rather than an objective fact, then it becomes possible for later thinkers to redefine truth away from a shared reality altogether. That is exactly what happened. The post-structuralists of the 1960s destabilized truth, arguing that our statements were shaped by power or norms rather than correspondence to the world. For them, there is no such thing as a universal truth. Your world of disclosed truths might be richer or different from my world. Where you see a tree, I might see 400 board feet of good lumber.
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida took Heidegger’s destruction of the correspondence theory of truth and radicalized it. He goes beyond Heidegger to argue that neither truth nor meaning are ever fully present. Instead we cobble them together through differences, exclusions, and traces of things around us. Heidegger held on to real being as disclosure. But Derrida thinks that’s like nailing Jello to the wall. As soon as we think we’ve hit on some primordial disclosure, it has already moved on and away from us.
Derrida is notoriously difficult so I’ll use a simple example to illustrate his ideas. I was out on a walk recently and came across a stop sign at an intersection. Below the word “Stop” someone had slapped on a sticker that read “committing genocide.” The sticker only makes sense if it is parasitically joined to the existing signifier, and even then its meaning is unstable. Who knows what the person intended. A stop sign is meant to be a literal, imperative command, but it becomes a semiotic sign the moment another inscription attaches itself. For Derrida, this shows that the sign’s meaning was never self‑contained. The literal meaning of the sign depends on differences, conventions, and exclusions that are not fully present in the sign itself. The sticker simply makes this visible by redirecting the play of meaning to something else entirely. Meaning is never final or self‑contained; it is always open to re‑inscription by other signs and other contexts.
As I looked behind the sign I saw two more black‑and‑white stickers of crudely drawn cartoon characters I did not recognize. They were both at odd angles, as if two people at different times had slapped them up quickly with no thought of placement or orientation. I wondered why they chose the back of the sign rather than the front, and whether there was any intention or meaning in them at all. These stickers are good examples of what Derrida means by traces: marks that are present but not seen, inscriptions with unstable meanings. Their motivations could be anything—a prank, a creative act, a meme, an inside joke. For Derrida, meaning can never be contained in intention. It is deferred and continually reshaped as inscriptions like these appear, fade, overlap, reappear and leave their traces behind. This is what he means when he says that signs are structured as much by what is absent as by what is there.
Stable objective truth for Derrida is undecidable. A moving target. There is no ground, no foundation, no criterion that might support it. Everything appears and fades and reappears and remains open to constant interpretation.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s assertions are probably the sort of outlandish excess that McIntyre had in mind when he blamed postmodernism for decimating truth. For Baudrillard, truth, signs, and meaning are all detached from any stable referent. The world is a simulation that is saturated with images, models, and representations. Signs circulate independently of the realities to which they once pointed but they have no rhyme or reason.
Our world, for Baudrillard, is not just a distortion of reality; it’s a replacement, or what he calls simulacra—copies without originals, representations that no longer refer to anything beyond themselves. The result is a condition he names hyperreality, where the distinction between the real and its representations collapses, and what we take as reality is already shaped by the images that cover it up. These representations grow so elaborate and self‑sufficient that they no longer reveal the world but obscure it entirely. Constantly producing and reproducing themselves, simulacra replace reality.
In the opening of Simulacra and Simulation, he invokes Jorge Luis Borges’ fable of a map drawn at a 1:1 scale and overlaid on the terrain it represents. From there he leaps into a vision of reality as an arid desert fading into ontological insignificance:
“The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.” [8]
His book is metaphysical theater that drifts into a marijuana‑fueled dorm‑room musing, especially later where he talks about nihilism and Disneyland. It was also the basis for The Matrix, a sci-fi movie starring Keneau Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, which inspired hundreds of young men on the online community 4chan to “take the red pill” to see the woke dangers of feminism. But for our purposes here, Baudrillard’s point is clear: there is no reality; therefore, there can be no truth.
Let’s Blame Derrida
Let me sum up where we’re at right now regarding truth. First, there was the traditional view going back to Aristotle in which truth is correspondence between statements and objects (or facts). The statement “there is a tree” is true if that statement correctly corresponds to a state of affairs in which a tree exists in reality. Kant upset the traditional assumptions about what we can know. Nietzsche rejects correspondence altogether and claims that we invent a tree from pure chaos. From there we go to Heidegger who said that truth is a matter of disclosing the tree, then through Derrida who would say the “tree” is nothing more than a vanishing sign, and finally to Baudrillard for whom there is no tree at all.
Is it any wonder McIntyre sees this twentieth-century narrative arc as the godfather of post-truth? I could tell a neat little story in support of this idea. It might go something like this: The line from Nietzsche through the post-structuralists shattered the old realist assumptions that truth simply presented itself directly to us. Instead, both truth and reality were nothing more than social constructions. After postmodernity went mainstream in the nineties, people soon picked up on the idea that everything is interpretation and truth is up for grabs. This landed in a world where institutions were already under strain, local news and editorial oversight became replaced by “citizen journalists,” and social media algorithms began to manipulate the information that people consumed. Fast forward a couple of decades and… post-truth.
There’s just one problem with my story. I don’t believe it. It is absolutely true that liberal and Marxist academics cut truth loose from its old anchors to reality and never bothered to find or build another safe harbor. Adrift at sea, any crank, neo‑Nazi, QAnon conspiracy theorist, anti‑vaxxer, climate‑change denier, or would‑be totalitarian was free to treat truth as something they could shape or discard to suit their own agenda. But that was true long before Derrida and it will still be true a century from now. Philosophy tends to reflect its current culture rather than cause social change. Amidst the chaos, most people still cherish pragmatic shared truths. I just don’t see a thread that connects academic postmodernism with the situation we find ourselves in today. Something else is going on.
Post-Truth
The Oxford definition was coined just after the Brexit Referendum and Trump’s election as President in 2016. So it was a reaction to campaign lies rather than a statement about philosophical truth. Political scandals, coverups, and lies have always been a part of America. How many wars were preceded by propaganda to manipulate public opinion and manufacture consent? Our history is filled with everything from land grabs like the Mexican‑American and Spanish‑American Wars to bungled attempts at regime change in the Iraq invasion and now the Iran “excursion” of 2026. (Mark Twain would have appreciated the irony of “innocents abroad” using the language of a sightseeing tour to refer to an unprovoked war against another country.)
When we talk about post-truth in the U.S. what we really mean is President Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement that form his base of support. Many past presidents have lied about girlfriends, smeared their opponents, cherry-picked economic numbers, or overstated a rationale for war. But Trump stands out as the quintessential liar. By some counts he churns out dozens of lies every day, flooding the zone with so many lies that fact checkers can’t possibly keep up. Most no longer try.
It’s probably for the best that fact-checking has largely gone by the wayside because it misses the point. It’s never been about facts. For the narcissist, pathological lies aren’t gratuitous. They are in service to a fantasy world created in order to protect an eggshell ego and prop up low self-esteem. I’m no psychologist but that’s probably what’s going on for Trump. But for his base of support, post-truth lies serve a different purpose. For them, it’s about racism and identity. The MAGA movement is best understood as a community that sees its truth claims as litmus tests of belonging. If you agree with its claims then you are one of “us” and opposed to “them”—immigrants, blacks, liberals, gays, elites, feminists, academics. Post-truth statements are not about facts or truth. They are loaded code words that signal existential belonging to the tribe; markers and memes to know who is in and who is out. Who belongs. That’s why it feels like something is off when journalists go through the exercise of fact-checking obvious lies. They treat the lies as mistakes, while the MAGA movement sees them as performative gestures—social transgressions designed both to “own the libs” and to signal belonging.
More interesting to me is how this tribe came about in the first place. There is a huge overlap between the MAGA movement and White Christian Nationalism. They tend to be white, male, and conservative evangelical Christian. It is no coincidence that this demographic is virtually identical to the Tea Party movement that thrived during the Obama years (2009-2012). And I’m guessing you could trace a lineage from there back to the White Citizens’ Councils of the Deep South (1954-1965) or the Ku Klux Klan before them.
These movements are all variations on a theme, with white identity and racism at the center. On camera, Tea Party protestors might have told journalists that they were all about taxes, but it was obvious at the time to anyone with any sense that the movement was a strong reaction to the first African-American president. White fragility has been on full display ever since. False or exaggerated fears about immigrants, jobs, and crime; an obsession with diversity, equity, and inclusion; even attempts to erase the history of slavery at national parks—throughout all of it white anxiety is the motivating force. As American film producer Franklin Leonard tweeted in 2015, “when you’re accustomed to white privilege, equality feels like oppression (It’s not).” The MAGA movement is afraid of the possibility that whites in general (and white men in particular) might lose their status on top of a historical racial hierarchy.
As for Trump, he is not the leader of MAGA. He has simply hitched his wagon to them and makes sure to keep his finger on their pulse. There is a humorous (and probably apocryphal) anecdote about a French revolutionary leader who frantically asks which way the mob is running. “I must follow them for I am their leader,” he goes on to say. This is Trump’s situation. He has an uncanny ear for populism and promotion. He knows the MAGA base and uses social media, stunts, and even a manufactured war to deliver the dog whistles they want to hear. Aside from being a racist himself, he is not really one of them. When he held that Bible upside down it was the perfect metaphor for his relationship with them. But he is very good at making them think he belongs and they are more than willing to overlook his many faults if he can deliver what they want. If ever this relationship breaks down, it will be a hard fall because they are the only support he has left.
At this point, I have walked through the history of philosophical truth, the current phenomenon of post-truth, and historical racism in America. But it is not enough to talk about the effects rather than the cause. We need to go deeper still. What is at the root?
Totalitarianism
We are in the very beginning stages of a dangerous populism that is veering into totalitarianism. This is probably no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. According to Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, all totalitarian regimes begin with ideological thinking divorced from truth and reality. Specifically, they focus not on how things are but on what will become [9]. The “glorious utopian future” if you will. For Nazi Germany, it was to be global domination purged of inferior people and ruled by the master race. For the Soviets, it was a perfect classless society brought about by the dialectical movements of history.
Needless to say, these utopias require loads of propaganda in order to replace the norms of reality with the preferred illusion. Eventually “ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a ‘truer’ reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from the place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it” [10]. Today, our post-truth lies are in service to an American-style totalitarianism that has been several decades in the making and is maturing rapidly.
This new American-style totalitarianism is neither Fascism nor Communism but a third something that I’ll label Dominionism—after right-wing dominion theology, the core ideology of Christian Nationalism. Dominionism is the belief that Christians have a divine mandate to seize control of society and its institutions as a precursor to the Second Coming of Christ and the establishment of God’s kingdom on Earth. It has similarities with Nazi and Soviet ideology. There is the same utopianism for instance. But this one is centered on scriptural proof texting, revealed destiny, and the imminence of the End Times.
As this new ideology takes hold, and the break from reality is complete, new criteria from within the movement itself will determine what is true or false. Facts are forced onto a Procrustean bed and made to fit the ideology. Everything flows and builds consistently from that starting point until nothing is left of the old shared reality. This began most noticeably during the Second Gulf War when George W. Bush was president. Ron Suskind interviewed former Reagan staffer Bruce Bartlett, who noticed something peculiar about the new breed of Republican. They bought into the idea that President Bush was a “sort of weird, Messianic” figure who, by taking the fight to Al Qaeda, was obeying God’s will:
“‘This is why he [Bush] dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,’ Bartlett went on to say. ‘He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.’ Bartlett paused, then said, ‘But you can’t run the world on faith.’” [11]
Truth became “emancipated” from reality and took on a life of its own. In the same article, Suskind quoted an anonymous Bush aide who expressed this new logic in terms that would not have sounded out of place had it come from a political commissar in the Soviet system:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’” [12]
The Bush years were a sort of “exploratory” period. Dominionism really came into its own during the first Trump administration. Many commentators were mystified that evangelicals would pick Trump as their new Messianic figure given his amoral history of extramarital affairs and sexual misconduct. But that framing came from “enlightenment principles” and traditional American ideals. It failed to understand Dominion ideology that had taken over the Christian right in the Republican party. Evangelicals needed Trump to enact their policy goals. They made the calculation that he would do whatever it took to bring about the conditions for the End Times. It’s nothing more than pure political power wrapped in the cloak of religion. If one believes that God has mandated dominion over the Earth, then old ideas of truth or morality lose their importance. If Trump is to be a part of the “master plan” then so be it—God raises men up for his own purposes.
If this much is understood then the ideology’s internal logic makes sense when the influential evangelical pastor Paula White-Cain, Trump’s spiritual advisor, recently compared Trump’s legal troubles to Christ’s Passion:
“‘Jesus taught so many lessons through His death, burial and resurrection. He shows us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life,’ she said. ‘You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused.” [13]
She went on to say that God told her to tell Trump that he will be victorious. Just a few days later Trump threatened on social media that if Iran did not cede to his demands a “whole civilization will die tonight” [14]. As I write this Trump has stepped back from the brink but continues to saber rattle in late-night social media posts. I wonder if the Dominionists are relieved or disappointed?
Somewhere between a quarter to a third of U.S. adults identify as Christian Nationalists [15]. They are not confused about truth, nor are they victims of postmodern sophistry. They are driven by an apocalyptic ideology that has its own internal logic from which its truths are derived. The battle lines are drawn between opposing views. On the one hand is the founding vision of our Republic—where political power is limited, divided, and answers to citizens who have the freedom and the right to worship as they please. On the other hand is a theocracy where the rule of law is replaced by the idol of a complete misreading of Scripture. History, education, law enforcement, and regular daily life will be forced to conform to the regime’s new rules and regulations. Those who are deemed insufficiently loyal to the new state will become marginalized as second-class citizens.
Will this come to pass? Will we tip over into full totalitarianism? I have no idea. I do know that ideologies (like conspiracy theories) are popular because they provide answers in a rapidly changing world. None of this is really about truth. It’s about fear, identity, and belonging.
It seems I’ve ended this with a lot of doom and gloom. Sorry. But things really are gloomy. Even so, I’m an optimist. I have enormous faith in the American people and in our shared values. I believe that collectively we still stand for the original ideas of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That most of us still believe that we are free to worship (or not to worship) as we see fit. And that we still hold to the idea that the government derives its authority not from the divine right of kings, but from the consent of the governed. Perhaps that sounds naive. But I don’t think so.
Footnotes
[1] McIntyre, Lee. Post-Truth. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. 2018, p. 150.
[2] Aristotle. Metaphysics. Hugh Tredennick, Trans. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. 1935. Reprinted: 1997, 1011b25.
[3] Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (BT). Translated by Joan Stambaugh and Revised by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1996. 219.
[4] Ibid., 226.
[5] Ibid., 222.
[6] Heidegger, Martin. “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Pathmarks. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. William McNeill, Ed. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998, 223.
[7] Heidegger, Being and Time, 37.
[8] Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Sheila Faria Glaser, Trans. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 1994, p. 1.
[9] Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Mariner Classics. 2024 Edition with Introduction by Anne Applebaum, p. 509.
[10] Ibid., p. 509.
[11] Suskind, Ron. “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
[12] Ibid.
[13] “Paula White-Cain likens Trump to Jesus during Easter lunch,” The Christian Post at Paula White-Cain likens Trump to Jesus, stokes backlash | Politics spotted on 12 Apr 2026.
[14] “Trump pulls back on Iran threats after warning,” PBS News at Trump pulls back on Iran threats after warning a ‘civilization will die tonight’ if deal isn’t reached | PBS News, spotted on 12 Apr 2026.
[15] Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey 2024-2026. See: Christian Nationalism Across All 50 States: Insights from PRRI’s 2024 American Values Atlas – PRRI