Few Americans, if any, had ever heard of John Eastman before the events of January 6, 2021. The legal architect of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election was hardly a high-profile name, even for those steeped in covering American politics. He was, in many ways, an unknown, pulled by the events and the aftermath of January 6 into the riptides of American history.
A handful of analysts and investigators tracing the contours of the American far right, however, knew of Eastman’s work long before the events of January 6, and of the kind of churning, burning illiberalism that brought him into Trump’s orbit. One of those was Katherine Stewart, whose new book, Money, Lies, and God, threads the diffuse movements that have congealed into the authoritarianism at the core of Trumpism.
Stewart first intersected with Eastman not in the aftermath of Trump’s failed insurrection but in 2019, when she tracked him to a tony, rarefied conclave in, of all places, Verona, Italy. Eastman was speaking at the annual conference of the World Congress of Families—a far-right, Russian-American organization dedicated to the abolition of abortion and the buttressing of so-called “traditional values”—regaling his audience with tales of “how secularism, liberalism, and gender confusion are destroying everything good in the world.” The speech, as Stewart writes, revealed Eastman to be “a committed ally of the theocrats.” But there was also “some foundation other than biblical literalism,” Stewart sensed, propelling him and cementing the kinds of illiberal alliances crucial to Trump’s reign.
The search for the broader foundations of Eastman’s and his allies’ beliefs is at the center of Money, Lies, and God, the follow-up to Stewart’s critically acclaimed 2020 The Power Worshippers. That book explored the dogmatism at the core of the American religious right, and how such forces drew American evangelicals further and further into the illiberal abyss. It was, at the time, a signal flare of just how willingly such professedly godly groups could embrace a figure like Trump.
Stewart’s newest book is a continuation of that theme. But after the events of January 6, it was clear that the right had changed. This movement—with all the ideological allies, deep-pocketed donors, and misogynists massing around Eastman, joining him in this antidemocratic fight—presents a new face of the American far right. And it is that edifice that Stewart masterfully details in her new book, explaining not only why these pro-Trump forces have already attempted to drive a stake through the heart of American democracy, but how they will try to do so once again.
Part on-the-ground conversations, part sociological analysis, Money, Lies, and God is a convincing tour of the mutually reinforcing elements of American reaction:
“apostles” of Jesus, atheist billionaires, reactionary Catholic theologians, pseudo-Platonic intellectuals, woman-hating opponents of “the gynocracy,” high-powered evangelical networkers, Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand, pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (white) babies, COVID truthers, and battalions of “spirit warriors” who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about undermining democracy at its foundations.
Trumpism is hardly one thing, even if it is overly reliant on Trump himself. Instead, Stewart uses her deep familiarity with the American far right to chart out what are, by the mid-2020s, the major elements of Trump’s political project, which she describes as the Funders, Power Players, Infantry, Sergeants, and Thinkers. The “Funders” are those within the billionaire class bankrolling the forces below them, using access to effectively bottomless pots of wealth to guide American politics. Some of these names are increasingly familiar, like Leonard Leo, the benefactor who helped steer the Supreme Court picks during Trump’s first term, building out Trumpist allies on the highest court of the land and helping rule in favor of things like all-encompassing presidential immunity, a position once ridiculed when espoused by figures like disgraced Richard Nixon. Leo serves as the chair of CRC Advisors, which, as Stewart writes, “directs over $1 billion in right-wing funding toward reactionary causes.” Nor is Leo alone. There is Carl Anderson, head of the Knights of Columbus, who helps bankroll think tanks and media outlets. There are even organizations like Opus Dei, a far-right Catholic group that does not publicize its membership rolls. All of them together have access to, and help direct, a greater pile of money than anything hard-right forces in America have ever known. “The decisive development in the first decades of the 21st century was not the alliance between Team Money and Team God but the simple fact that, thanks to escalating inequality, the big money got a lot bigger,” Stewart notes. “What was new was the number of zeroes in the checks—and the extremism of the thinking guiding the money people.”
Elsewhere, the “Power Players” Stewart identifies are those just underneath the “Funders,” helping direct some of the ocean of money flooding pro-Trump, pro-authoritarian movements. These managerial types comprise a “tiny elite” who “amass tremendous personal power by mobilizing others around their agendas.” Many of these are well-established figures, “super-lobbyists” like the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Ralph Reed or Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who act as both organizers and mouthpieces for pro-Trump policies. These, Stewart says, are the “operational masterminds of the antidemocratic movement,” putting the funding into action through sponsoring conferences, conclaves, and publications. They are, in effect, middlemen—a kind of managerial class directing America’s antidemocratic turn.
The “Infantry,” meanwhile, is made up of the rank-and-file Trump voters who lap up the kinds of antidemocratic rhetoric spilling out of everything from conspiratorial social media feeds to, now, the White House itself. These are the militias, the Tea Party turned Trumpers, and the assorted flotsam of Trump supporters who launched an attempted insurrection on January 6—and who were all recently pardoned by Trump. They are those who Stewart writes about meeting in Las Vegas in 2023. Alongside a German documentary crew, Stewart joins a swell of Trump backers at the ReAwaken America Tour, a pro-Trump conference-cum-revival that gathers an audience of QAnon supporters, antivaxxers, racists, and conspiracy theorists. Stewart finds the crowd descending into increasing mania, with speakers not only regurgitating the most malign conspiracies they can find but even calling for “Nuremberg trials” for Trump’s enemies, leaving one of the German team members to ask Stewart, “Are we safe here?” For those tracing America’s descent into authoritarianism, some of these faces are well known; figures like Reed and Perkins have both been peddling illiberal policies for years, long predating the rise of Trump, and it’s hardly news that Trump’s base is comprised of conspiratorial racists. In that sense, Stewart’s book is treading familiar ground. But it sets itself apart in describing the two remaining groups—the “Sergeants” and the “Thinkers”—and how these two now buttress not just Trump but modern Christian nationalism itself.
The “Sergeants” are primarily pastors and related church officials, many of whom have accelerated their rightward lurch in recent years. These groups have ominous, vaguely militaristic names, including things like the Black Robe Regiment and the Watchmen on the Wall. These are the followers of the vengeful God of the Old Testament, believers in the efficacy of retribution. “There is little room for the old ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’ trope here,” Stewart writes. Instead, they embody a Christian nationalism that “is not a policy program; it is perhaps best understood as a political mindset.” It is a political proclivity that “includes four basic dispositions: catastrophism; a persecution complex; identitarianism; and an authoritarian reflex.” All of it comprises the kind of kindling from which opposition to democracy, and even support for fascism, can emerge.
Many of these “spirit warriors” found their way to the so-called “Jericho March” in Washington on January 5, 2021. A “combination of nationalism, conspiracism, and demon obsession,” according to Stewart, the rally featured a range of pastors trying to outdo one another in their antediluvian rhetoric. One, Greg Bramlage, claimed they were engaged in a “spiritual battle,” while another, Bishop Leon Benjamin, called for followers to “kill” unspecified “demons.” Another pastor, the Reverend Kevin Jessip, described the rally as a “strategic gathering of men in this hour to dispel the Kingdom of Darkness.” Twenty-four hours later, as Stewart notes, many who prayed under these “Sergeants” took up arms and took the fight directly to the Capitol itself—bringing with them a “large wooden cross,” a separate “flag with a cross,” and banners blaring, “Jesus Saves.”
It is the final group, the “Thinkers,” that presents arguably Stewart’s most insightful sections. These are the figures like Eastman and his allies who posit themselves as the ideological, intellectual class crafting the contours of Trumpism—and identifying the kinds of legal cover Trump can use to dismantle American democracy. Much of this cohort can trace directly back to the Claremont Institute, the California-based organization where Eastman remains a senior fellow. As Stewart points out, it is the Claremont Institute where the “erstwhile reverence for America’s founders has been transfigured, with the help of political theorists purloined from Germany’s fascist period, into material support” for Trumpism.
The institute’s modus vivendi centers on the “Straussian man in action”—the man who bends history to his own ends, regardless of the consequence and regardless of democratic legitimacy. Stewart writes:
His mission is to save the republic. He must tell a few lies, yet he is nonetheless a noble liar, at least in his own mind. He acts in the political world, where natural right reigns, and not merely in the legal world where lawyers are supposed to toil. Aware of the crooked timber from which humanity is made, he is prepared to break off whatever branches are needed for the bonfire of liberty.
This core Claremont belief leads to the yearning for a so-called “Red Caesar”—a masculine leader untrammeled by anything like democratic oversight or political pushback, grabbing a society by the throat and forcing it back into a world in which men, and especially white men, are once more restored to the top of America’s sociopolitical hierarchy. Indeed, there is an almost obsessive approach at Claremont to restoring supposed masculinity within American society. Stewart traces this belief system at Claremont—where, she says, all of the board members “appear to be male”—to Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., who wrote a 2006 book called Manliness and “counts as nobility among Claremont’s extended family.” As Mansfield argued, “gender stereotypes are all true”—including, bizarrely, that women would make bad soldiers because “they fear spiders.”
As Stewart details, Mansfield was “far too sophisticated to openly argue for stripping American women of the rights they have fought for over the past two centuries—but in the private sphere, “those highly accurate stereotypes should reign triumphant.” This belief has seeped into Claremont’s bones and manifested itself at Claremont many times over. There is a 2020 alumnus of their Lincoln fellowship named Jack Murphy who once said that “feminists need rape.”* There was another Claremont official who gave a talk titled, “Does Feminism Undermine the Nation?” There is the promotion of work by an author named Coston Alamariu—better known by his nom de plume “Bronze Age Pervert”—who oozes undiluted misogyny and rails against “the gynocracy.” As Alamariu wrote, “It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization”—and the only way forward is to “use Trump as a model of success.”
These Claremont-based “Thinkers” also include figures like Curtis Yarvin, who has contributed to the Claremont publication American Mind and “appeared as an honored guest on Claremont podcasts.” Yarvin’s affections for despotism have been widely reported elsewhere, but it is his historical ignorance that highlights just how shallow the Claremont men’s pretensions at intellectualism truly are. Not only does Yarvin preposterously believe that “European civilization” wasn’t responsible for any genocides before the Holocaust—as if genocides in places like the Africa, North America, or even Ireland and Ukraine never existed—but he further maintains that America now needs to collapse into dictatorship in order to rebuild.
The “men of Claremont frame their not-so-hidden longing for revenge as a series of ruminations about the rise of an American Caesar,” Stewart writes. “And when that ‘Red Caesar’ arrives, he can thank the oligarchs for funding his rise, and he can thank the rank and file of the movement for supporting him in the name of ‘authenticity.’ But he would owe at least as large a debt of gratitude to the unhappy men of Claremont, those spurned would-be members of the intellectual elite … for explaining just who he is, and why he should go ahead and blow the whole place up.”
Taken together, Money, Lies, and God paints not only a devastating picture of the state of American democracy (as if one was needed) but one that also contributes texture and context to understanding the current American political moment. The book convincingly argues that, when it comes to figures like Eastman or Leo or any of the men affiliated with the Claremont Institute, calls for dialogue and civility are futile. “In earlier times this may have been sage advice,” Stewart writes. “Today it is a delusion. American democracy is failing because it is under direct attack, and the attack is not coming equally from both sides. The movement described in this book isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house.” American democracy isn’t simply dying. It is, as Stewart observes, being murdered.
Another revelation from the book, however, is not nearly as ominous. Because the movement comprises so many moving parts, there’s no guarantee that such a constellation of forces can last. Trump remains the glue that holds such a coalition together, with each group—the billionaires and the bullies in the pulpits, the keyboard conspiracists and the misogynists trying to put an intellectual sheen on it all—each seeing, and often getting, what they want with him. But once Trump goes, there’s every reason to suspect that such a coalition will splinter, undone by competing claims. Wide cleavages remain on subjects from China to health care to tax cuts, bridged only through Trump’s person and persona.
This is cold comfort for those hoping for a resuscitation of American democracy anytime soon. Trump has spent the first months in his second term sprinting toward a constitutional crisis, cheered on by the allies he’s found along the way—not least the supposed “Thinkers” claiming intellectual leadership of the movement. For figures like Eastman, it’s not an executive run amok that presents a threat to the core of American democracy but, rather, those who would stand in Trump’s way. The Democratic Party, Eastman said in 2023, is “an existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world. That’s the stakes.” From his lips to God’s—or at least Trump’s—ears.
* This article previously misstated Jack Murphy’s title.
