“Four more years and it will be fixed” [UPDATED]

Bonus track: "I am not Christian"

I know it is a fool’s errand to try and parse out what Donald Trump means, but this is a bit of a doozy.

The following are things that should be disturbing for any candidate for office to say, most especially for someone seeking to be the next POTUS.

The best interpretation of the whole thing is that it is all nonsensical promises with no substance. But I also think, to my previous point, these are not the kinds of things that a candidate for the presidency should be saying and they are not the kinds of utterances that should be ignored.

Beyond the BS interpretation, the next best interpretation of “Four years, it will be fixed, it will be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore…” is that he is promising policy changes so profound, and so permanent, that conservative Christians would never again have to have any concerns or objections. This is an authoritarian promise and an anti-democratic message.

If that is not obvious, consider what he is saying. He is asserting if he is elected that something will happen in the next four years to make certain Christians so happy that they will be able to stop caring about politics in the future. That’s plainly authoritarian. And to then tell a group of citizens that that would only need to vote one more time and then could stop is plainly anti-democracy.

Of course, the worst interpretation of that quote is that he is saying that they won’t have to vote in four years because, well, “fix[ing] it” means there won’t be elections in 2028. That is not the kind of thing a candidate for office should be intimating. I realize that many will dismiss that as a hyperbolic statement–but I am just looking at what the guy is saying. And it is in the context of other statements of grave concerns in this arena to include his support for the January 6th attack on the capitol and statements that he will only be a dictator on “day one.”

The bonus quote, which really should be getting attention amongst his base was the “I am not Christian” aside amidst all the authoritarian ramblings. This would be a surprise to many who have attested to Trump’s born-again status.

I know this won’t make any difference to the base, or even to most Republican-identifying voters, but it just seems worth pointing out.

UPDATE: As per the comments, I can see that he is probably claiming to be a Christian (but it is hard to tell). Since that makes more sense in context, I retract that portion of the post. I stand by the first part, however.

FILED UNDER: 2024 Election, Religion, US Politics, , , , ,
Steven L. Taylor
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog). Follow Steven on Twitter and/or BlueSky.

Comments

  1. Gustopher says:

    Isn’t the Rapture supposed to be preceded with the Anti-Christ rising to power? Maybe that’s why Christian’s won’t have to worry — he’ll be ushering in the End Times!

    Anyway, he should clearly not be the seat of power. Neither should JD Vance, but there we are also concerned about the literal seat.

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  2. Kathy says:

    A charitable interpretation is that Convicted Felon has no plans, yet, to run for a third term*, and he doesn’t give a damn what happens to the country after he’s done using it to mastrubate his ego.

    *I have read the constitution. Also history. Laws apply when those in power choose to obey them, or when someone can keep them from breaking them. Otherwise they’re just words on paper.

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  3. Tony W says:

    @Kathy: This was my interpretation. Don’t vote in four years because it doesn’t affect me personally, therefore it’s no longer important to vote.

    Trump is enough of a narcissist that this could be the explanation, but either way it doesn’t reflect well on him.

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  4. gVOR10 says:

    Over at Marginal Revolution this morning Tyler Cowen reacted to this statement of Trump’s with a rant about people like you spreading misinformation by quoting Trump’s statements verbatim, backed up with videos.

    After reading Cowen I made it a point to watch the video. I heard what you did, “I am not a Christian”. Jarring. But I’m seeing it quoted in the press as “I am a Christian”. I went through it a couple more times and it seems to be “I’m nahah Christian”. Could go either way. No point to asking the campaign to clarify.

    It comes down to Trump having deliberately cultivated a slippery speaking style designed, with malice aforethought, to allow supporters to hear what they want to hear and allow deniability for anything that gets him in trouble. Cowen’s pissed because we’re not reading into Trump’s meanderings what he thinks Trump meant. We think Cowen’s an idiot because he’s ignoring obvious context.

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  5. just nutha says:

    Of course, part of this, as it relates to evangelicals, may reflect the conviction that they will have the sort of dictatorship of which they would approve. Especially among the “take over for Jesus” subsets.

    And the fact of him declaring that he’s not a Christian won’t trouble them–they aren’t in this arena of their lives, either. They’re just as fed up with the “turn the other cheek” crap as Trump is. It’s high time for them to start laying the smack down for Jesus, ya kno.

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  6. CSK says:

    I listened to this and I’m pretty sure Trump said “I am a Christian,” but I agree it can be hard to tell.

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  7. Ol' Nat says:

    @Dr. Taylor, any sense why the NYT and WaPo haven’t covered this?

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  8. Jen says:

    @Ol’ Nat: You might be getting served different content…this is on the front page for me:

    NYT: Trump Tells Christians ‘You Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’

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  9. Gustopher says:

    @CSK: I’m pretty sure he meant “I am a Christian”. As to what came out of his mouth, perhaps there was divine intervention?

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  10. CSK says:

    @Gustopher:

    Could be. I do think it’s clear that he said “I am.” His audience seems to have understood what he meant. Even he isn’t idiotic enough to stand in front of a bunch of MAGAs and proclaim he’s not a Christian.

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  11. @CSK: I will confess I listened to it several times before I posted and I hear “I’m not a”. But upon a relisten it could be “Imma”.

    The man is a mess.

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  12. Franklin says:

    Has anyone thought to just ask Trump what he means when he says he’s Christian?

    3
  13. CSK says:

    @Steven L. Taylor:

    To repeat myself, even Trump wouldn’t be so stupid as to claim he’s not a Christian in front of a bunch of Christians.

  14. Scott F. says:

    The best interpretation of the whole thing is that it is all nonsensical promises with no substance.

    I contend that even the best interpretation of this verbal vomit can only be read as another iteration of Trump’s “I alone can fix it all” rhetoric that has been boiler plate for him since his 2016 campaign. This quote isn’t so much a smoking gun or a Kinsley gaffe that reveals an unspoken truth, but simply more of the same. It is plainly authoritarian as you note and Trump has never been subtle.

    I know this won’t make any difference to the base, or even to most Republican-identifying voters, but it just seems worth pointing out.

    The base is pro-authoritarian and they don’t hide it. Listen to them in interviews, they want a champion who will wield power to make American again what it once was at some imaginary time in the past. As Trump is their champion using his power in their name for the greater good, his bad character becomes a virtue. The base is a lost cause.

    But the base alone isn’t big enough to hold power, so keep pointing this kind of talk out to the “Republican-leaning voters” and independents. There’s some number of them who want cheaper groceries but don’t want to sacrifice their freedoms to get it.

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  15. Michael Reynolds says:

    He has to be careful to mumble – if he said clearly that he is a Christian, God would have to strike him dead. I mean, God has to listen to a lot of bold bullshit, but still, God has his limits.

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  16. Kurtz says:

    @gVOR10:

    He gets one thing correct in that post.* He also provides yet another possible interpretation of Trump’s words:

    Listen to the entirety of the very end of the speech. What he said is that he will end electoral fraud if he wins, and thus, in the future, Republicans won’t need all their supporters to vote to give them huge, fraud-proof margins. (To be clear, that claim itself involves some significant misinformation.) He was not heralding the end of democracy.

    I bolded the part he gets correct. Yes, the claims of electoral fraud constitute “significant misinformation.”

    He cites the following Timothy Snyder tweet:

    Timothy Snyder
    @TimothyDSnyder
    What
    @POTUS
    did last Sunday was humanly magnificent and morally extraordinary. And it was also spectacularly strategic. Years from now historians will be searching for words to describe the Biden benediction.
    10:04 AM · Jul 26, 2024

    Cowen:

    Or how about the patently absurd claims from Timothy Snyder, famous historian from Yale, who cannot even get right the events from a few days ago?

    Snyder is likely in a much better position than Cowen to judge whether Biden’s decision should be considered historic, and how future historians are likely to interpret it. Something Cowen would know if he was something other than a conceited ideologue. (I doubt he sees his view of economics as ideological in nature.)

    Moreover, Cowen, who has at least some agreement with behavioral economics, should easily see how Biden’s decision–to put aside his own ego and give up a position of great power–is quite rare historically. Not to mention that an old men are often obstinate, whether or not he has some form of dementia.

    Of course, perhaps Cowen disagrees with Snyder’s positive assessment of strategic value of Biden’s decision. Perhaps he thinks Snyder is over-the-top. My guess is he thinks that Biden was forced out–indicating that Cowen is out of his depth in two fields: history and political science. Indeed, if Trump regularly struggles to speak clearly, then I would think that may be a real problem in a prospective president. The problem isn’t with ‘elites’ spreading misinformation about the intent behind Trump’s words–the problem is Trump’s words.

    Actually, I do not think that his interpretation of Trump’s words make a lot of sense anyway. Why would fixing electoral fraud mean that Republicans should stop voting? It does not square at all with the rest with the messaging strategy employed by Trump and the GOP that portrays the Dems as dishonest and a personal danger to every Republican. If Cowen is correct, he skips the opportunity to argue that Trump makes no sense. But he makes damn sure he fires some bullets at Timothy Snyder.

    I do not know whether Cowen prefers Trump or not. And if he does, it’s fair to question his sincerity in esposuing Libertarianism and classical liberalism.

    I’ve read more than enough of Cowen’s work to reasonably question whether his reputation exceeds his intellectual talent. I do not think all his work is trash, but his reputation is based on his ideological position rather than the quality of his work.

    Maybe Cowen should produce an episode of his over/under rated podcast wherein he stares in a mirror and asks himself whether he is over or underrated as a scholar and intellectual. It’s not as if the GMU economics department bases its hiring decisions on anything other than scholarly achievement. /s

    I do not even think Cowen is always wrong. But in my view he is a textbook example of serious problems within economics, both as a whole and certain schools within it. He represents a corrective to a certain view of the academy–he is exactly the type of ideologue his benefactors claim most other academics to be.

    His linked post about the classical liberal right vs. what he calls the New Right is rife with ye olde pejorative use of “elite” as if the word has any real meaning other than a specific signal to a specific readership.

    *I suppose we can say that he gets his own preference correct.

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  17. Tony W says:

    @CSK: Trump could strangle the second coming of Jesus, live on stage, and his fans would cheer the whole time.

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  18. @Kurtz:

    I’ve read more than enough of Cowen’s work to reasonably question whether his reputation exceeds his intellectual talent. I do not think all his work is trash, but his reputation is based on his ideological position rather than the quality of his work.

    I have to admit that this is the conclusion that I reached a while ago.

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  19. just nutha says:

    @Franklin: Actually happened in 2016. He said a bunch of gibberish about “my wine and my little cracker” (no relation).

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  20. I will circle back to note again: it is profoundly weird to tell a group just vote this time and you won’t even have to do so again. He doesn’t have to be threatening the end of democracy for that statement to be a problem.

    If anyone else said it, there wouldn’t be all this parsing. And the weird thing to me is that Trump has proven he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, yet he gets it all the time!

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  21. mattbernius says:

    @Steven L. Taylor:

    If anyone else said it, there wouldn’t be all this parsing. And the weird thing to me is that Trump has proven he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, yet he gets it all the time!

    100% this. And yet every time there is talk of him moving towards unity or tacking to center or that he’ll fix everything in four years (despite utterly failing at over his last four years) it gets covered as if it’s the first time he’s saying that.

    He isn’t a cipher. He has a record of saying lots of things and accomplishing very few of them.

    Again, thanks in part to a lot of past working of the refs, the press doesn’t know how to cover a serial fabulist without sounding “biases.”

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  22. CSK says:

    The MAGA explanation is that Trump was joking when he said Christians would never have to vote again. Or, alternately, after Trump, everything would be so perfect they could resume their non-voting ways.

    4
  23. @CSK: I really have come to hate the “he’s just joking” defense.

    Reminds me of my post “Just Joking”.

    9
  24. just nutha says:

    One observation, the Trump blather seems to be directed at “my Christians” and pledge that they will never have to vote again. This pledge could appeal to segments of the evangelical community that lean conservative but apolitical, but I don’t know who would have come up with this from his camp, and their numbers are small.* I can see the pledge appealing to the Millennialist camp, too, but for different reasons.

    No, he didn’t not say he’s not a Christian. My hearing is bad but not that bad.

    *Back in my salad days, I used to hang with Christians who felt voting and politics was a worldly distraction from the focus of living a Christ-like life. They were probably right. It was an artifact of the Jesus Movement or at least segments of it. I occasionally encounter such thinking still. My take is that some evangelicals want to want to be more apolitical but can’t manage it.

    3
  25. Barry says:

    “Isn’t the Rapture supposed to be preceded with the Anti-Christ rising to power? Maybe that’s why Christian’s won’t have to worry — he’ll be ushering in the End Times!”

    The Right is heavily into Freudian projection. By that standard, *of course* the Antichrist will be a right-wing US politician.

    4
  26. DeD says:

    @Gustopher:
    That depends on if you’re a pre-tribulationist or a post-tribulationist, Gustopher. You would think that most believers would be pre-trib, ‘cuz who the hell wants to endure three and a half years of suffering and torture? Then there are the sadomasochistic Christians who believe they have to suffer through the Great Tribulation as some sort of metaphorical flagellatory cleansing before they are “married to Christ.”

    Either way, it’ll be great to be well-rid of them.

    4
  27. charontwo says:

    @Jen:

    Because the NYT got so much blowback on their original account that they revised/updated to include it.

    4
  28. charontwo says:

    @Jen:

    Because the NYT got so much blowback on their original account that they revised/updated to include it.

    1
  29. Rick DeMent says:

    @just nutha:

    <blockquote>

    Brother, you need to copyright that before I do. Grin.

    2
  30. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @DeD: There might well be some sadomasochistic people out there in the community of faith, but the post-Trib rapture camp that I’m familiar with is more concerned with the combination of Calvinist eternal security, Christian liberty teaching that are even disputed within the text of the NT itself, and Dispensationalist teachings they fear can make Christians lax on sanctification–exemplified in complaints that Christians “are no better than the rest of us” (a valid complaint in many cases). Becoming like Christ is hard enough (as you yourself have alluded to here in the past) without obstacles that suggest that how Christians live only matters for marketing purposes. Desire to suffer is probably less important than desire for having the strength necessary to endure* (another quality I would imagine you have direct experience with, based on allusions you’ve made in the past).

    *One of the key points in the part of The Revelations of John that we don’t study in our end times workshops is the admonitions to the Seven Churches to “hold on to what you have.”
    I wonder what that’s about? /s

    2
  31. gVOR10 says:

    Kevin Drum heard “am not a Christian”. He allows that Trump meant to say “am”, but also considered the possibility of a Kinsley Gaffe.

    1
  32. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Rick DeMent: I don’t think anything in that comment is original from me. I’m usually not very creative, relying on my associative thinking/thought webbing skills.

  33. Scott F. says:

    @Steven L. Taylor:

    And the weird thing to me is that Trump has proven he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, yet he gets it all the time!

    I guess what I was trying to say is that his supporters shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt either. They get it all the time as well.

    The core of his supporters want a dictator, if that dictator will give us MAGA. Not just his base voters, but the Project 2025 people, the TPUSA like advocacy groups, Thiel’s boy JD Vance and most of his ardent supporters in the media. The US isn’t MAGAfied to their liking and they’re done wasting their time on the winning over the governed part of the governing a democracy.

    Trump supporters are parsing his words because he is saying the quiet parts out loud and they are afraid Republican-identifying voters are going to figure out the game before they vote for their team like they usually do.

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  34. Barry says:

    @Steven L. Taylor: About Cowen – my opinion is that law professors frequently assume that their ability to make arguments, untested in court, carries over to the real world.

    5
  35. Chip Daniels says:

    Its important to understand Trump as a salesman, saying whatever he needs to say to win the audience over. He didn’t exactly say the undercoating was free, but just used the words “free” and “undercoating” in the same breath so the sucker thinks its free because the sucker wants to believe it.

    In this particular case, the suckers want to believe that he will rig elections in their favor forever.
    Which is actually worse because there will be an executive branch staff of thousands who will find ways to make this happen.

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  36. Franklin says:

    I told myself I wasn’t going to waste time considering about every stupid thing Trump said in the run-up to this election. And yet here I am :/

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  37. drj says:

    Very telling that neither JKB nor Jack are showing up in this thread.

    They know what they support. They are just too cowardly to admit it.

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  38. Ken_L says:

    “I don’t know when it was, but it has not been long,” Dobson said. “And I believe he really made a commitment. He’s a baby Christian, if you will – (Christians) need to be praying for him.”

    There have been no signs of him growing up since.

    It’s easy to overlook that like Hitler in the bunker, Trump spends his days with cynics hoping to use him for their own purposes and lunatics/fanatics lost in a make-believe world. Both, for different reasons, may have spoken so often of a second term in which a Christian Nationalist movement comes to dominate US politics that Trump simply takes it for granted it’s going to happen. Certainly Speaker Johnson would be encouraging that kind of thinking.

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  39. Jay L Gischer says:

    @Ken_L: Well, in my view, Christians should be praying for him. Just not voting for him.

    3