According to the Washington Post, Donald Trump made 30,573 misleading statements between 2016 and 2020, more than half of them during the final year of his first term in office.
In Trump’s second term, the Post has lost its enthusiasm for fact checking. It only alienates conservative readers, Jeff Bezos has concluded and, with the nation retreating into hermetically sealed information bubbles, accuracy doesn’t pay the bills.
Lies fire up the political base; that’s why politicians tell them.
Bill Adair, founder of PolitiFact, has concluded that Republicans lie far more than Democrats because conservative news sources have little regard for the truth. If a dramatic claim generates clicks on social media and attracts eyeballs to cable news programs, it will be amplified even if it is a pants-on-fire lie.
Liberals, by contrast, depend on center-left publications like The New York Times that still take fact checking seriously, so moderate-to-liberal politicians are forced to speak with caution. In a media environment driven by outrage, liberal restraint can be deadly.
“In Trump’s second term, lying has become the administration’s standard form of communication.”
In Trump’s second term, lying has become the administration’s standard form of communication. When Renee Good and Alex Pretti were gunned down by federal agents, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance and the president himself, slandered the slain as “domestic terrorists,” “violent resisters” and even “would-be assassins.”
These scurrilous slurs were broadcast before the blood-stained snow had been shoveled away. When oceans of video evidence exposed the patent falsity of the official narrative, Trump, Miller, Noem and Vance simply doubled down on their lies.
Even conservative pundits were appalled by such monstrous mendacity. George Will opined that it is “more than prudent” and “good citizenship” for Americans “to assume that everything ICE says, and everything the administration says in support of its deportation mania, is untrue until proved to be otherwise.”
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (C) US Vice President JD Vance (2nd-R) and US White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller (R) arrive to greet members of the National Guard at Union Station in Washington, D.C., August 20. (Photo by AL DRAGO/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Why they lie
Crushed by an avalanche of negative publicity, Kristi Noem claimed she was only following the dictates of Stephen Miller, the leading architect of Trump’s war on immigrants. While Trump uses anti-immigrant rhetoric to juice the MAGA base, Miller wants results. He is determined to deport at least 1 million illegal residents every year.
That means 3,000 arrests per day, a feat that requires the deployment of thousands of armed federal agents, the construction of scores of holding facilities (run by the private prison industry) and unspeakable human suffering.
“The lying was tactical. Everyone knew Miller and his subordinates were lying.”
Trump has joked that, if Miller had his way, there would be only 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like Stephen Miller. The quip is frighteningly close to the mark. Miller knows full well most Americans, including many who voted for Trump in 2024, will be disgusted by the militarized anti-immigrant campaign he has sponsored in places like Los Angeles, Chicago and now Minneapolis.
Voting for mass deportation is one thing; seeing the whole nasty process unfold is something else altogether. For his audacious plan to succeed, Miller believes, opponents must be ignored, marginalized, denounced and even demonized.
Miller crafted the official response to the public execution of Good and Pretti and demanded Trump officials echo his lies virtually word-for-word. The lying was tactical. Everyone knew Miller and his subordinates were lying; the video evidence was overwhelming. Miller and the Trump administration were twisting reality before our very eyes. They were saying, in effect, “What happened in Minneapolis is what we say happened, and if you don’t like it, you are the enemy. See what happened to Good and Pretti? Don’t let it happen to you!”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks during the memorial service for political activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium on September 21 in Glendale, Arizona. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Darkness and light dualism
Speaking at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk on Sept. 21, 2025, Miller described two Americas: a liberal America that hated Kirk and rejoiced in his death (the children of darkness), and a patriotic America that mourned Kirk’s passing (the children of light):
The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army which they have arisen in all of us. Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy, you are envy, you are hatred, you are nothing.
Ten days later, Miller used the same good-versus-evil language to distinguish the police officers of Memphis, Tenn., from the dark criminal underworld controlling the streets of their city:
The gang-members that you deal with, they think that they’re ruthless. They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough. They have no idea how tough we are. They think that they’re hardcore. We are so much more hardcore than they are, and we have the entire weight of the United States government behind us. What do they have? They have nothing behind them. So we are going to win. They’re going to lose.
Notice Miller describes criminals and liberals in precisely the same terms. In his mind, there is no real distinction between hardened criminals and the men and women protesting Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. There are good Americans and evil Americans. If you find yourself in the wrong camp, you have forfeited basic human rights. You don’t deserve the truth because you don’t count.
Orthodoxy and imperialism
For most American white evangelical Christians, Miller’s darkness-and-light dualism has a familiar ring. If you believe God has consigned unbelievers to eternal conscious torment, you may, at least in the beginning, want to snatch as many brands from the burning as possible. But what if your dire warnings are dismissed with a chuckle and a sneer? The pages of the Bible are riddled with good-evil dualism. If we are the children of light, doesn’t God want us to win? And if God wants us to win, doesn’t the opposition have to lose?
“The good-evil dualism of the political right blends naturally with the religion American evangelicals imbibe with their mother’s milk.”
The good-evil dualism of the political right blends naturally with the religion American evangelicals imbibe with their mother’s milk.
There is nothing novel about any of this, of course. In a recent podcast interview, cultural theologian David Congdon drew a parallel between the contemporary American culture war and the battle for Nicaean orthodoxy in the fourth century. The early Christian theologians who produced Christian orthodoxy believed “the truth has to be uniform.” Christian doctrine didn’t just work for Christians; it was universal truth. That is, it had “to be held by all people in the same way.” If a doctrine was true, the orthodox reasoned, everyone must “hold that exact doctrine, and they have to believe it and mean it in the same way.”
In the process, uniformity became a sign of truth.
While Christianity was a minority religion subsisting on the margins of the Roman Empire, dreams of universal truth were relatively harmless. Then opportunity came knocking in the form of an emperor who wanted to organize his unruly domain around a shared religious vision.
“The revolution that happens to Christianity in the fourth century,” Congdon believes, was “the realization that we need political power to achieve this vision of pure Christianity.”
In fact, Congdon says, “any vision of Christianity as a culture is going to be imperialistic by definition, because it has to then exclude anything that will possibly alter that culture.”
Trump officials like Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem and JD Vance speak of “real America” as a homogenous Christian culture. Those who reject this vision (progressive Christians included) must finally be defeated. They must be excluded from the corridors of power. The insurrection that failed on January 6 must succeed by different means.
And that is what paramilitary incursions into “liberal” American cities signify. It isn’t about deporting the worst of the worst. And it isn’t just about frightening undocumented aliens into self-deporting. The ultimate goal is to establish conservative Christian hegemony throughout the United States of America.
“The ultimate goal is to establish conservative Christian hegemony throughout the United States of America.”
Which is why the children of light (militarized federal agents representing “Christian America”) are intentionally provoking a dramatic showdown with the children of darkness (anyone who tries to stop them).
In a liberal democracy victory is always temporary
Anyone who sat through a high school civics class knows Miller’s strategy can’t be squared with the kind of liberal democracy envisioned by the United States Constitution. By “liberal democracy” I don’t mean a form of government controlled by ideological liberals; I am talking about a form of government designed to tolerate ideological diversity. In a liberal democracy, the fortunes of any particular class or faction will wax and wane over time; but ultimate victory is forever out of reach.
Of course, progressive types, both religious and secular, have their own versions of Manichean dualism and their own hegemonic dreams. This is particularly true in settings where liberal values tend to be ascendant: Ivy League universities, Hollywood, big city politics, late night talk shows, NPR and the administrative and academic leadership of Mainline Protestant denominations. If there is an upside to the overreach of Trump 2.0 it is this: Liberals of every stripe are being forced to reckon with the abiding presence of anti-liberal power.
Stephen Miller’s war on the children of darkness will eventually founder on the rocks of a backlash politics. It’s already happening. But that doesn’t mean America will evolve into a progressive utopia. Too many Americans side with the MAGA revolution for that to happen. Instead, we will stagger forward as what we have always been — a house divided.
“Miller’s war on the children of darkness will eventually founder on the rocks of a backlash politics.”
Will the Democrats take back the House in the 2026 midterm elections? Probably. Will the next president be a Democrat? Possibly. But visions of America-first monoculture will continue to fester in the heartland. The fever-dream will be organized, well-funded and joined at the hip with reactionary religion.
If progressive Christians want a seat at the cultural table, we must make room for alternative expressions of Christian faith. I often have argued that Christian nationalism isn’t Christian. From where I stand, that harsh conclusion seems obvious. But maybe I should curb my tongue.
Truth be told, there is no pure expression of Christianity. There never was; there never will be. If conservative Christians want to fall prostrate at the feet of Donald Trump, that’s their right. If they want to associate Jesus Christ with a religio-political stew of their own devising, that too is their right. I don’t have to like it, but I can’t make it go away, and maybe I shouldn’t want to.
Defenders of liberal democracy can’t bar Christian nationalists from the political table just because they keep calling us the children of darkness. Slurs of this sort will continue, and a stiff middle finger won’t change that. They have just as much right to a seat at the table as we do; they just can’t own the table. And they won’t. Elections have short-term consequences, but losers always stage a comeback.
There are no children of light in America; and there are no children of darkness. There are no “real Americans.” There are no “genuine” Christians. We’re just a tangle of confused pilgrims fumbling about in the half-light.
May God have mercy on our souls and on our fragile republic.
Alan Bean
Alan Bean leads the nonprofit Friends of Justice and lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attends Broadway Baptist Church.