SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
christian nationalism
Bannon Says Trump Will Run for an Illegal 3rd Term Because ‘He’s a Vehicle of Divine Providence’
Journalist Mehdi Hasan said Trump and his allies "plan to overturn the Constitution and democracy. They’re not hiding it. They’re bragging about it.”
Oct 24, 2025
In a frightening interview, one of President Donald Trump’s top allies said there is a “plan” for the president to remain in power after 2028, despite constitutional limits.
Speaking to a pair of interviewers at The Economist, Steve Bannon—Trump’s former chief strategist and one of the most influential voices in the MAGA movement—described a third Trump term as a divinely ordained fait accompli that people must simply accept.
“Well, he’s gonna get a third term, so Trump ’28,” Bannon said. “Trump is gonna be president in 2028, and people ought to just get accommodated with that.”
Asked about the 22nd Amendment of the US Constitution, which plainly forbids a president from serving more than two terms in office, Bannon proclaimed that “there are many different alternatives” to get around it.
“At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is,” he said. “But there’s a plan. And President Trump will be president in ’28.”
Bannon continued: “We have to finish what we started... I know this will drive you guys crazy, but [Trump] is a vehicle of divine providence. He’s an instrument. He’s very imperfect. He’s not churchy. But he is an instrument of divine will.”
“We need him for at least one more term,” Bannon reiterated, “and he’ll get that in ’28.”
In recent days, Trump has increasingly signaled his intent to run for a third term, selling “Trump 2028” merchandise on his website and displaying it in the Oval Office during negotiations with Democrats over the government shutdown.
His recent demolition of the White House’s East Wing to build a luxury ballroom has also raised alarms that Trump increasingly views himself as its permanent resident rather than a temporary steward.
Bannon was adamant that Trump would not only serve a third term, but that his staying in office would be “by the will of the American people.”
This assumption is out of line with what polls would seem to predict: Trump’s support recently hit a new low in his second term, with just 37% of voters approving of his job performance in the latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, compared to 61% who disapprove.
Bannon’s comments came days after the New York Times reported that Trump’s handpicked election officials have called for him to declare a “national emergency” ahead of the 2026 midterm election, which they say would allow him to assert more control over election laws and impose new rules on state and local elections without approval from Congress.
Max Flugrath of the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, who warned earlier this week of Trump’s plans to “hijack” the next elections, said that by pushing for a third term for the president, “Bannon is basically saying, ‘Let’s light the Constitution on fire.’”
Author and activist Jim Stewartson noted that Bannon “uses the same alchemy as [House Speaker] Mike Johnson and [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth to rationalize destroying the Constitution: ‘spiritual war.’”
Johnson has argued that the US government “must be biblically sanctioned” and that the Founders’ idea of the separation of church and state was “a misnomer.” Hegseth, meanwhile, has endorsed a video of a far-right pastor discussing the need to repeal the 19th Amendment, which enshrined the right of women to vote.
Some pointed out that Bannon often manages to create a stir in the media by saying provocative things and claiming to have privileged knowledge about the machinations of Trump’s inner circle. It’s not the first time Bannon has raised the possibility of a third Trump term.
“A question that I’ve never seen fully resolved is to what degree Bannon is just trying to get attention as a media figure and to what degree he’s actually clued in to what’s going on in the White House,” said HeatMap News correspondent Matthew Zeitlin.
However, Bannon was in the know about Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election well before it happened. Days before the vote, he was recorded telling right-wing allies that “What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory... He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
Others said that Bannon’s prognosis about a third Trump term is gravely serious, especially given Trump’s other actions during his second term.
“I would love to be wrong, but they keep saying this in public,” said writer John DiLillo. “He’s selling Trump 2028 merch. He’s massively remodeling the White House as if it were his personal residence. I don’t really see why the idea shouldn’t be taken seriously just because it’s ‘unconstitutional.’”
Mehdi Hasan, founder of the media outlet Zeteo, meanwhile, said: “They’re literally shouting it out loud! Their plan to overturn the Constitution and democracy. They’re not hiding it. They’re bragging about it. And the media are just ignoring it, or worse, normalizing it; the biggest story perhaps in modern American history.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Religious “Liberty” Commission Just Another Buffoonish Trump Reality Show
We need to call this what it is: a sham, a joke, a mendacious misuse of the fundamental American principle of religious liberty meant to lay the groundwork for the obscene Christian Nationalist policies this administration wants to implement.
Sep 30, 2025
As a kid, I’d ask to stay up late to watch the Celebrity Apprentice.
Donald Trump was a master of putting washed-up celebrities in absurd situations: Kevin Jonas fighting with Geraldo Rivera over a TV commercial for a digital scanner. Clay Aiken and Penn Jillette arguing over how to manage a distracted and frenetic Lou Ferrigno while trying to film a viral video to promote a spray mop.
Trump’s latest celebrity sideshow—featuring Dr. Phil and a former Miss USA runner-up, is the federal government’s “Religious Liberty Commission.” It’s about religious liberty in the same way the Celebrity Apprentice was about business. Which is to say, in name only.
It’s sad, because as someone who runs a nonprofit that protects atheists, agnostics, and other religious minorities from discrimination, I can imagine a Religious Liberty Commission that could actually do something useful. Houses of worship have to deal with the constant threat of gun violence. People still get discriminated against at work for not participating in group prayers. Kids still get proselytized in public school.
A Religious Liberty Commission that was truly interested in ensuring that every single person in America has the right to follow whatever religious tradition is right for them—or none at all—could be a great thing.
When Trump says he wants America to be “more religious”... What he wants, it appears, is more people who worship a specific type of Christianity—the kind of conservative Evangelical Christianity that is increasingly loyal to and organized behind him.
But that’s not the Religious Liberty Commission we got. Instead, we have Dr. Phil rambling about a “cultural war,” former Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean bemoaning that “morality has dropped across America” since we took a 430-year-old Christian textbook called the New England Primer out of schools, and eleven other right-wing Christians (and one right-wing rabbi) interviewing guest speakers who call atheists “demonic” and insist that government’s proper role is to promote “public recognition of truths about divine realities.”
In other words, it’s the state’s job to tell you God is real.
This isn’t new. Even before he started trying to plug a Christian prayer app with in-app purchases in his speeches, Trump said "we’re bringing religion back to America” and has explicitly written that he wants to make America “more religious.”
On Trump’s commission, Dr. Phil and Miss Not-Quite-USA are flanked by third-rate religious scholars who insist our Founders—who fought a war to break away from an empire with a state religion and immediately declared that America would have no such thing, ever—intended for America to be a religious nation from the very beginning, citing a vague reference to a “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence.
That would have been news to the Declaration’s author, Thomas Jefferson, who coined the term “wall of separation between church and state” and famously said “the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.”
To understand why the Founders were so preoccupied with protecting religious freedom, it’s worth considering what exactly Trump means by “more religious.” This is, after all, a man who called an Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde a “so-called Bishop” and “not very good at her job” when he disliked her sermon, who publicly agreed with one of his cronies that Doug Emhoff was a “crappy Jew,” who misquotes the Bible and compared it to “a great, incredible movie.”
When Trump says he wants America to be “more religious,” he doesn’t mean more of Mariann Budde’s Christianity, or Doug Emhoff’s Judaism. What he wants, it appears, is more people who worship a specific type of Christianity—the kind of conservative Evangelical Christianity that is increasingly loyal to and organized behind him.
We’re going to see the right-wing Christians on the commission argue that our tax dollars should be used to push their religion on other people’s kids.
The Commission’s membership tells the story. Thirteen right-wing Christians and a token right-wing rabbi. No effort to include any of America’s other minority faiths—Islam, Unitarian Universalism, Buddhism, or Hinduism. And absolutely no representation for the 30% of Americans who aren’t religious at all, but face discrimination for their nonbelief. Trump put Penn Jillette—a famous atheist and advocate for church-state separation—on the Celebrity Apprentice twice, but somehow lost his number when it was time to cobble together the Religious Liberty Commission.
So if the Religious “Liberty” Commission is a sham, why make a big deal about something so asinine?
Because just as the Celebrity Apprentice helped Trump make the argument that he was a successful businessman people could trust, the Religious Liberty Commission is designed to make arguments for several key policies that have nothing to do with religious liberty—and everything to do with making America a Christian Nationalist hell on earth.
For instance: multiple speakers at the first Religious Liberty Commission meeting, including Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick, argued that historically—before things like Social Security and Medicare—social services were provided not by the government but by religious institutions. The subtext was clear: the government shouldn’t be doing things like taking care of the sick and elderly; the church should.
Rather than focusing on how to teach kids math and science, we’ll focus on teaching them that gay people and religious minorities—maybe even their own families—are going to Hell.
Multiple other speakers used the specific language of “unjust laws.” But religious institutions have claimed—and Trump’s Supreme Court has backed them up—that “unjust laws” include things like…paying into unemployment benefits for their own employees. We’re going to see the Trump administration create more and more “religious” exemptions to laws that are meant to protect consumers or employers—where anyone’s claim to being religious becomes a “get out of jail free card” to mistreat your workers or discriminate against consumers.
Finally, the first Commission meeting was hyper-focused on prayer and Christian teaching in schools. We’re going to see the right-wing Christians on the commission argue that our tax dollars should be used to push their religion on other people’s kids. Rather than focusing on how to teach kids math and science, we’ll focus on teaching them that gay people and religious minorities—maybe even their own families—are going to Hell.
The commission’s latest meeting took place Monday, September 29th—150 years, to the day, after President Ulysses S. Grant gave a speech declaring that America should “leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school…keep the church and state forever separate”—what can we do now?
We can’t stop Trump from putting on celebrity sideshows. It’s what he’s done his whole career.
But we can call it what it is: a sham, a joke, a mendacious misuse of the fundamental American principle of religious liberty meant to lay the groundwork for the obscene Christian Nationalist policies this administration wants to implement, which would fundamentally change America by making us the kind of religious government our founders fled and fought.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Critics Warn Trump's 'Religious Liberty' Panel Wants to Impose 'Christian Nationalist Agenda' Nationwide
One critic warned that the Trump-created Religious Liberty Commission is "working to obliterate church-state separation, turn public schools into Sunday schools and misuse religious freedom as a license to discriminate."
Sep 29, 2025
Church-state separation advocates on Monday issued new warnings about the Religious Liberty Commission established by US President Donald Trump earlier this year.
Ahead of the commission's meeting that took place on Monday morning at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, argued that Americans should be particularly worried by the commission's focus on public education.
"Yet again, President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission demonstrated that its true purpose is to advance a Christian Nationalist agenda and impose one narrow religious view on the nation’s public school children," Laser said.
Laser went on to highlight some of the featured speakers at the gathering, including one teacher who has said she's engaged in "spiritual warfare" against the LGBTQ+ rights movement and a former high school football coach whom the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found created "a deceitful narrative" about coercing his players to pray with him.
Laser went on to charge that "the majority of speakers at today’s hearing are affiliated with Christian Nationalist organizations," which she said were "working to obliterate church-state separation, turn public schools into Sunday schools, and misuse religious freedom as a license to discriminate." She further said the commission was "an outright assault on our country’s promise of church-state separation."
Laurel Burchfield, advocacy director for Mainstream Coalition, also warned about the commission's ambitions in an editorial published earlier this year by The Missouri Independent.
In addition to citing the concerns raised by Laser about the commission's effort to influence public school curriculum, Burchfield argued that it would also attempt to "rewrite history" to justify false claims that the US was founded as an exclusively "Christian nation."
She also said that the commission has ambitions to "promote religion in all parts of American culture, politics, and public life."
Monday's Religious Liberty Commission meeting began with a tribute to slain right-wing activist and Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk, before moving on to a series of panels whose stated goal is to "understand the historic landscape of religious liberty in the educational setting, recognize present threats to religious liberty in education, and identify opportunities to secure religious liberty in this context for the future."
"These individuals were hand-selected for holding a worldview that advances the Christian Nationalist agenda and threatens any religious beliefs that fall outside of this ideology," said Burchfield.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular