MSNBC anchor Alex Wagner argued Monday night that "Trumpism" has become a quasi-religion for some Americans, including for White, evangelical Christians.
Wagner said in a live report that Christian evangelicals believed Trump was a "second coming," referring to Jesus Christ, adding that she felt "fascinated" by the evangelical voting bloc "because the number of really esteemed reporters have been talking about the way in which the Trump coalition, the MAGA coalition, has absolutely just devoured the evangelical coalition."
Some polls indicate that "55% of White born-again or evangelicals are going for Trump," Wagner said.
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"That is an exponential increase from 2016," she continued.
Wagner pointed out that despite evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats' endorsement for presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, Trump still won the Iowa caucus vote overwhelmingly.
"It clearly does not matter," Wagner said of Vander Plaats' support for DeSantis, who came in a distant second place to Trump, losing by roughly 30 percentage points in Iowa. "Evangelical America is behind Donald Trump."
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Wagner said that Iowa displays the "roots of what Trumpism is now," arguing that evangelicals' "affiliation with Trump and MAGA-ism runs deeper" than previously thought.
She cited New York Times columnist David French, saying that "Trumpism in some way has become religion for a certain section of the American electorate and especially for evangelicals."
"It's not about the virtue anymore," the MSNBC anchor said. "It's about the vice that Trump expresses."
MSNBC host Joy Reid also made controversial comments on Monday night when she claimed that "White Christian" Iowans want people of color to "bow down" to them.
Reid told her co-hosts, "All the things that we think about, about electability, about what are people gaming out, but none of that matters when you believe that God has given you this country, that it is yours, and that everyone who is not a White, conservative Christian is a fraudulent American, is a less real American. Then you don’t care about electability. You care about what God has given you."
Later in the show, she argued that this ideology cannot be separated from its religious ties.
"It is religion," she said. "And I think what we have to actually confront – and this is what the Democrats are going to face – is this is now what White evangelicalism is. It is Christian nationalism. That’s the name of it, right?"
She then said that "White evangelical Christians of a certain mindset" think "that they own this country, that immigrants, that Brown people, that Hindus like Vivek Ramaswamy and his wife are illegitimate Americans. They are less legitimate Americans than they are."
Fox News' Alexander Hall contributed to this report.
