Manic Monday coming, because shtick and an apocalypse.
“These are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster,” Mr. Trump told his Mar-a-Lago guests, according to the attendee. The former president has made a similar claim the heart of his campaign speeches.
He then appeared to refer to an episode during his presidency when he drew significant criticism after an Oval Office meeting with federal lawmakers about immigration during which he described Haiti and some nations in Africa as “shithole countries,” compared with places like Norway.
“And when I said, you know, Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries, I’m trying to be nice,” Mr. Trump said at the dinner, to chuckles from the crowd. “Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”
He continued, “And you know, they took that as a very terrible comment, but I felt it was fine.”
Mr. Trump went on to say that there were people coming from Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place.”
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If you’re unacquainted, Christian nationalism refers to how some (not all) American Christians blend their religious devotion with nationalistic ardor, aiming to refashion America as a Christian nation. Some conservative Christians have begun pushing back on this phrase, claiming that “Christian nationalist” is a slur, representing a progressive effort to make the idea of Christians involved in politics sound scary.
As a scholar who’s studied American Christianity for years, I can confidently state that the term is not an insult. Rather, it’s descriptive: When people blur any religious identity with their partisan political identities, we call that religious nationalism. It’s an extremely common phenomenon, occurring in numerous modern nations, from India to Turkey to Brazil. “Christian nationalism” is just the Christian variety.
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