Political ideologies become cults when they adopt religious tenets. As a political movement, Trumpism has had nine years to develop into a religious cult. What lies behind that cult is a dangerous and bizarre coalition of disparate sects that have a single goal: transforming the United States into a political and fascist theocratic dictatorship.

The most shocking element of Trumpism’s religious coalition is that Protestant evangelicals supporting Trump are playing second fiddle to those at the top of the religious pyramid calling the shots. It is the Opus Dei sect of the Roman Catholic Church, which is in league with the Church of Scientology, that sits atop the religious food chain that nurtures Trumpism with votes and political donations.

The religious coalition upholding Trumpism has been on full display in recent days. Trump’s racist festival of hate on October 27 at Madison Square Garden, followed the next day by his participation in the National Faith Advisory Board summit in Powder Springs, Georgia. Present at the evangelical summit were some of Trump’s most ardent supporters, including Paula White-Cain, Jentezen Franklin, Jack Graham, and Kenneth Copeland. along with former Kansas Governor and U.S. Senator Sam Brownback. Capping off the summit was the playing of 1970s The Village People hit, “YMCA,” Trump’s favorite on his playlist but also the recognized anthem for the gay community. Make of that as you will for the one-time closest consort of the notorious New York mob attorney Roy Cohn and one of Manhattan’s more flamboyant homosexuals.

Brownback is a key interlocutor between the Protestant evangelicals, whose doctrines often label the Roman Catholic Church as the “Church of Satan” and the Pope as Satan’s earthly emissary, and Opus Dei. Brownback was an evangelical member of  the Topeka Bible Church in Kansas up until 2002. That year Catholic Rev. John McCloskey, [left] Opus Dei’s chief recruiter and converter as the one-time director of the Catholic Information Center on K Street in Washington, DC, brought Brownback into the fold of right-wing Catholic activism. McCloskey was no stranger to converting non-Catholics into the Opus Dei sect. The sect was founded in 1928 by the fascist Spanish Catholic prelate Josemaría Escrivá to promote right-wing political causes, including Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s fascist Falangist movement that seized control of Spain in 1936 following a bloody civil war.

Opus Dei, while not a secret organization, is one that has many secrets. Among these are their lists of supernumeraries, active sect members, and cooperators, those who may or may not be members of Opus Dei but assist it in carrying out its goals. In 2017, when Trump appointed Brownback to be the first Catholic “ambassador for international religious freedom,” it was clear that among Brownback’s top priorities was to cobble together a coalition of pro-Trump religious supporters ranging from Catholics and evangelicals to conservative Jews and Christian nationalists of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and the Seven Mountain Mandate. The latter includes House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is, according to a recent statement of Trump, is working secretly with the former president on a plan to make Trump’s re-election a certainty, regardless of the November 5 election results.

Others within the Trumpist religious movement include the armed and militant Rod of Iron Ministries founded by Hyung Jin Moon and Kook-jin Moon, two of the sons of the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon -- founder of the cultish Unification Church, also known as the “Moonies” – and New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The militant Christian Dominionist preacher Lance Wallnau, a major promoter of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, is affiliated  with both the Seven Mountain Mandate and NAR, along with disgraced Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk. Flynn and Wallnau have been making appearances around the country billed as the ReAwaken America Tour. The tour, a political venture masked as a religious effort, has targeted 19 “swing” counties seen as vital to Trump’s election this year. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, has appeared at one of Wallnau’s rallies.

On October 21, Trump spoke to another group of far-right evangelicals in Concord, North Carolina. Among the religious figures at the Trump conclave was Franklin Graham. Polling shows that between 78 and 82 percent of white evangelicals support the once- convicted, twice-impeached, four times-indicted, and one-time adjudicated sexual assaulter Trump.

The extremely non-Christian – in the truest sense of the word – core that has morphed into a peculiar Trumpist religious coalition not only threatens the constitutional separation of church and state but also the very foundations of America’s democratic republic. But it is the influence of the very top of the Trump religious pyramid that poses the greatest danger to the republic.

Opus Dei’s McCloskey, who died last year, left a powerful cabal of Opus Dei supernumeraries and cooperators who have served as the backbone of the effort to turn the United States into a fascist dictatorship. It is believed by many opponents of Opus Dei that among the fascist sect’s cooperators on the U.S. Supreme Court are Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas (and his wife Ginni Thomas), Samuel Alito,  Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, as well as non-Catholic Neil Gorsuch. It was this group that ruled that, as president, Trump could constitutionally issue any order, including having Seal Team 6 assassinate his political opponents. This legal interpretation comes right out of the fascist playbook that saw Franco, Benito Mussolini, and several Latin American junta leaders commit heinous war crimes against their political enemies.

McCloskey’s attempt to take over the Supreme Court began with former U.S. Solicitor General Robert Bork, who was another McCloskey convert to Catholicism. Bork’s nomination to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court failed in the Senate in 1987. Bork, whose wife Mary Ellen Pohl Bork had been a nun prior to becoming a conservative activist, was seen as the key to overturning Roe v. Wade as early as 1992. With Bork’s failed nomination, the task of converting the Supreme Court to a bench of right-wing anti-abortion activists fell to Opus Dei supernumerary Leonard Leo, the long-time activist officer of the Federalist Society and influencer of the Heritage Foundation and its blueprint for fascist control of the U.S. government under a second Trump administration, Project 2025. In 2022, Leo received the Catholic Information Center;s highest honor, the John Paul II New Evangelization award. Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation president and chief author of Project 2025, is a frequent habitué at the Catholic Information Center.

Serving as board members of the Catholic Information Center under McCloskey’s tenure were two suspected Opus Dei supernumeraries who served in key positions in the Trump administration: White House General Counsel Pat Cipollone and Attorney General William P. Barr. Barr stifled the investigation of the 2016 Trump’s ties to Russia led by former FBI director Robert Mueller. That makes the following factoid even more sinister: among the more notorious Opus Dei supernumeraries was Robert Hanssen, the longtime FBI spy for the USSR and Russia who received a life sentence for espionage and died last year.

Another convert to the Opus Dei ranks was Linda Poindexter, the wife of Iran-contra scandal figure, Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter. She had been ordained an Episcopal priest in 1986 prior to converting to Catholicism and working as a “volunteer” at the Catholic Information Center.

A suspected recent convert to Opus Dei is Republican vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance, who claims that he became a hardline Catholic after being an atheist. Vance credits his conversion after he became friends with two previous converts to Catholicism, the Iranian-born author Sohrab Ahmari, who was raised as a Shi’a Muslim, and Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule, who converted from Episcopalian.

Those familiar with the power structure of Opus Dei contend that one is likely to find more sect members and officials meeting at the stodgy Cosmos Club in Washington than at church.

McCloskey, who had worked on Wall Street for Citibank and Merrill Lynch prior to being ordained as a priest in 1981, immediately set out to bring as many converts as possible into the Opus Dei fold. As a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei and member of the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, McCloskey oversaw the conversions of politicians, social influencers, and journalists into the Opus Dei sphere of influence. These included conservative publisher Alfred Regnery, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former abortion specialist and founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) Dr. Bernard Nathanson, Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow, New York investment banker and GOP candidate for Governor of New York Lewis E. Lehrman, and the late journalist Robert Novak. The latter four were converted from Judaism to McCloskey’s Opus Dei brand of Catholicism. McCloskey also baptized the son of Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum McCloskey was no stranger to the media having been a frequent guest on CNN’s  “Crossfire” with Novak, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), a Catholic cable channel.

As has been the case with many right-wing religious figures, McCloskey was relieved of his position as director of the Catholic Information Center after an internal investigation discovered that the good father had engaged in sexual misconduct with an adult woman. The only surprise for many is that the indiscretions involved an adult woman.

While Opus Dei should send shivers down the spines of all constitutionalists should Trump return to the White House, it is another speaker at the Madison Square Garden event that should also alarm every American citizen. Ranting before the Trump loyalists was Grant Cardone, who said Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris was handled by “pimps,” an unusual slur for someone considered to be among the world’s top motivational speakers. Much like Trump with his corporate branding, Cardone, who lives in Aventura, Florida, heads up a group of companies that market themselves on Cardone’s name. These include Cardone Capital, which owns some $2 billion in real estate. Cardone is also an influential member of the Church of Scientology, founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. Cardone is considered by many experts of the “church’s” activities to be one of the more militant members of the cult. Cardone is said to have the personal ear of Scientology’s secretive chief, David Miscavige. Scientology hopes that under a second Trump administration, the United States will apply pressure on two of its closest allies, Germany and France, to lift bans on the cult. Germany does not recognize Scientology as a religion but as an “abusive business masquerading as a religion.” In 2009, Scientology nearly was banned in France after the sect was convicted of organized fraud when a court found that members had been manipulated into paying large sums for Scientology products. The sect has also come under legal pressure in Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Greece.

The danger of Opus Dei, Christian nationalists and Dominionists, and Scientology calling the shots in a second Trump administration is that as part of the conversion pf America into a fascist state will be the establishment of a state religion beholden not to God, Christ, or Allah but to Trump. Adolf Hitler attempted to create such a religion in 1936 with his Reich Church, which scrapped the Christian cross and replaced it with a swastika. Americans who were born into a democracy may face dying in a dystopian dictatorship barely recognizable to anyone not pulled into the cult of Trumpism.

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