Among his innumerable services to the nation and the world, Tucker Carlson has lately explained that Trump believes in spiritual forces but not in God as in the Christian Bible, and that to the extent Trump subscribes to a religion, that religion is Israelism.
It occurs to me that Israelism is not much understood in America and not at all understood in the wider world, and that for reasons I'll spare the dear readership, I am uncommonly well-placed to explain it, hence this little post to this de-indexed blog. Israelism may be an obscure latter-day apostasy and abomination, but it's accepted as a sort-of national religion or anyhow a party religion by practically the totality of the present administration and Congressional majorities, and it has driven this presidency and Congress and destroyed them, so it bears explaining.
Israelism is not Christianity or some novel sect of Christianity, inasmuch as Israelism reads out of the Bible the New Testament and New Covenant, and repudiates Christ. It's Christianity absent Christ and the Christian Scripture, or Christianity as the Jews would have it, and so Israelism is objectively not Christianity.
Israelism worships Jews and Jewishness and the Jewish state. Israelism believes that Jews are born saved and born superior. I.e., these are nominal Christians who imagine that Jews ascend to Heaven by virtue of their bare Jewishness, having no need of Christ, and they're Gentiles who conceive of Jews as the Master Race. Israelism imagines that Jews are magic, like Charlton Heston as Moses in the movie raising his staff and parting the sea.
Israelism believes that reward in the here and now and salvation in the hereafter are earned by service to Jews and the Jewish state. Israelists believe that supernatural forces intervene in human affairs to favor those Gentiles who make themselves servants of Israel and the Jews. This is of course applied to government by Israelist politicians, who impose sacrifice and inflict suffering on the country and people they're meant to represent and serve, in the service of Israel and the Chosen People half the world away.
Israelism fixates on the Holocaust and the Second World War, and reduces the Second World War to the Holocaust, and assigns the guilt for the Holocaust to all Gentiles, to those Gentiles who rescued the Jews as much as the ones who massacred them. Israelism fixates also on antisemitism, and reduces all disagreement and criticism to "antisemitism", and regards "antisemitism" as the first of sins and crimes.
Israelism believes that the government of Israel can do no wrong and can only prevail, because for Israelists the Jewish state is God on earth, the material manifestation of God's will in the world and history. In Israelism, the Israeli government and military and leadership are infallible.
And Israelism makes religion of politics and geopolitics, the Pentagon and the CIA, defense spending and defense contractors, coups d'etat and color revolutions, assassinations and airstrikes, proxy wars and forever wars, death and destruction. Maybe the foremost clerical figure in Israelism preached at the Pentagon, no less, that "The Christian God is a god of war." Israelism makes religion of war.
But what is most dire is that Israelism is expressly Armageddon-ist: so far from laboring to avert a war to end everything, Israelists conceive of Armageddon as their happy ending. Israelists affirmatively want Armageddon, and it is their object to precipitate Armageddon and provoke it, to hurry God along. Israelists have no fear of Armageddon, fortified as they are by their conviction that before life on earth turns very ugly, they will be sucked up alive into Heaven.
The Israelism of Trump accounts in large part for his launching this hated, needless, fruitless, disastrous Iran War and his carrying it on indefinitely: Trump's religion tells him he must serve Israel and the Jews, and that he must necessarily prevail and will surely be rewarded for that reason that he's serving Israel and the Jews. If the war and the politics and the economics and the geopolitics have turned disastrous then that may be a test, but surely it's not an end, because the end can only be victory. Trump imagines he'll win a great victory and tower over the national politics as the conquering hero, and that he'll be renowned in the world and history as a colossus, if only he persists in his service to Israel and the Jews, and earns their Jew-magic.