How Trump, Epstein, & Evangelical MAGA Have Us in a Domestic Violence Cycle
Relearning the same 200 year old lessons is a choice
I was dismayed, but not devastated, by that “vote” to “cave” and reopen the government. And that’s because I know the battered woman mindset from the inside, and that the Democrats were always going to lose that one. If they hadn’t caved, the government would still be shut down. Withholding food, money, and access to our families is a gainful, well-tested strategy for them. How the patriarchy governs their household is how they want to rule the country.
She’s had her little standoff. Now it’s time to get back to business as usual. Surrender is humiliating and cruel because business-as-usual requires complicity in harm, and that’s the point: big bad Daddy can’t get his work done without little mama standing behind him, laboring to do his will. Trump is even trying it again this week, over the Epstein vote: “I DON’T CARE!” Trump wrote in a social media post Sunday that read like Karoline’s pentameter. “All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT.”
There’s no negotiating with terrorists. The same goes for bullies and abusers, who, of course, reign through fear and a dismissal of the pain their actions cause.
I understand why people want to uphold a higher standard and fight for healthcare. Why do we cling to the norms as much as we can? We want to think we can win the little fights and change the tide of the war against the oppressor. We haven’t learned how to gray rock the narcissist. We don’t know how to stay focused and refuse the bait because the stakes are always so high. We are the essence of the wife who thinks her virtue will change the dark heart of an evil man, or at least mitigate his damage. They teach it in church. It isn’t true.
By his own words, Trump didn’t care and still doesn’t. From Heather Cox Richardson on November 10:
As Dan Drezner noted in his Drezner’s World, Trump’s behavior during the shutdown made it clear he simply didn’t care how badly Americans got hurt. “He did not just refuse to negotiate,” Drezner noted. “During the shutdown month he also completely bulldozed the East Wing, cut SNAP benefits, witnessed producers passing on the cost of tariffs to consumers, announced curbs on air travel, and participated in a Great Gatsby–style party at Mar-a-Lago.”
Voters hated this, but Trump didn’t appear to care. Indeed, his administration was working to ratchet up the pain of lost SNAP payments and canceled flights, including not just passenger planes but cargo planes right before the shopping season in which many businesses make the income that keeps them afloat for the year. In the senators’ statements about why they voted with the Republicans, Drezner noted a pattern: the words “pain” and “hurt.”
You’ve undoubtedly heard this before. Cruelty is the point. It’s violence itself in the heart of darkness of this administration. They are not simply seeking reform, which might include collaboration, research, acclimation, experimentation, and bipartisan cooperation. They seek to punish, humiliate, and smear our faces in the ICE and spittle they just sprayed in our faces.
Evangelical Republicans have stewed for decades over feeling forced to provide for the impoverished. They hate SNAP. They hate Medicaid. They hate paying taxes for the good of society. Instead, they promise benevolence that never materializes. And they like it when we beg.
I keep thinking about Scrooge and the factory owners who relied on child labor, abusing women with brutal hours and conditions. There’s a period of history where orphanages were the answer for labor, and a slow infanticide through starvation and neglect was normalized.
There’s a scene in the 1984 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that has stuck with me since childhood, and I reference it in my new book, I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma.
Even the Ghost of Christmas Present, with his enormous green cloak and jolly good feasts, gave me the chills, and that everything to do with what he was hiding beneath his robe: two twisted and starving children that looked like they could gnaw off your leg. The children represented realities, Ignorance and Want, because poverty and a lack of education were two issues in Dickens’s society and work. Feasting people didn’t like to remember they existed, and it was the ghost’s job to remind Scrooge that they did.
How (how??) is it possible this work of Dickens is so relatable and relevant today? Down to the feasting leaders as the people hungered? I think it’s because we’re insane. We keep doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results. Are we addicted to hope? To wishful thinking despite the evidence before us?
A Christmas Carol was published in 1843. The high-pressure religious movement in the UK at that time was fueled by the Church of Scotland, creating tensions between evangelical Calvinists and moderates. In America, a similar strain was at work during the Second Great Awakening: a Protestant religious revival that sought to purify the world by restricting alcohol, maintaining enslavement, and ushering in the second coming of Christ. This ultimately resulted in the Seventh-Day Adventists, the beginning of the Southern Baptists, and “The Great Disappointment,” when Jesus failed to return. For all that religious dickering, poverty, and a lack of education remain unsolved.
The links in the previous paragraph lead to modern-day manifestations of the same historical problems. In the long litany of reasons why I increasingly find organized religion a cyclical waste of time, this unavoidable fact is near the top. The fruit of religious tension isn’t holiness, improved societies, or care for the downtrodden, but the continuation of the powerful systems that seek to exploit humanity and the planet as a consumable resource. The best religions, like my cathedral experience last week, endeavor in response to these atrocities. But do they ever get ahead?
What was different in 1843 and now? Back then, ideas from the Enlightenment and the American Revolution—science, secularism, and the separation of church and state—held. All three remain under attack, now.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”--George Santayana
I refer to this scene in I Belong to Me in the chapter that introduces the twins who’ve haunted my recovery most: Guilt and Grief.
In systems where mothers are abused, denied resources, stripped of agency, and indoctrinated to value the ideas of the system over the humans in their home, there will be guilt and grief for both mother and child. In systems that turn victims into perpetuators and eventually perpetrators, there will be guilt and grief. And in systems that punish dysregulation, imperfection, and diverse neuroprocessing, there will be a fawning scramble to people-please and overexplain, because we know to be different is dangerous and to be different is to be guilty. We grieve when we’re guilty, and we’re guilty of what must be grieved.
There have been a few surprising milestones in my journey of exposing religious abuse, church-sanctioned domestic violence, and dark political agendas informed by Christian Patriarchy.
At several comforting points, I’ve paused to realize the education is working; that all the content creators (survivors) who populate the exevangelical and post-fundamentalist movement are having an impact. Our tender choice to share our stories, to speak out, and warn how antithetical life in the Christian Patriarchy is to health, safety, progression, and equality, has been worthwhile.
This comes through in the comment section mostly, as people pass the information about Project 2025, systemized abuses, and the methodical destruction of our rights like a baton. They listened, they learned, they made their connections and related, and then they helped further spread the word. As brave insiders, our decision to speak publicly made a difference. I can see the tipping point.
I feel like the patriarchy is gasping for its last breaths in those moments. Then, I ease up a little. I’m on my phone less. I take more walks, read for fun, and laugh. I imagine a day when I talk about the marriage of Christian Patriarchy and MAGA as a thing of the past, instead of how it’s coming around again, waiting for us to relearn yet again how these abuses, neglects, and perversions repeat.
Then there are the yawning gaps where I see the horseshoe of fundamentalist beliefs, polar binaries, and the dogmatic, rigid expectations and rules of ideological purity loom from the other side. I realize the quest for nuance, complexity, and progression has hit an obstacle. We will never win against the patriarchy if we fight our own, doubling down on ideals over humans, and failing to grasp who the real enemy is: the bullies themselves, not the beleaguered and battle-weary representatives on our side.
That happened last week (just a week ago!) with the volume of people reacting with actual despair and devastation that the Democrats “caved” when we were “so close” to winning the standoff with Republicans in Congress and Trump. Some of the comments I read were undoubtedly bots programmed to increase the bandwagon effect. But many of them were leftist influencers whose work I ardently respect. And dishearteningly, I knew: they don’t get it yet.
“It” being that this populist + patriarchal theo-tech coup protects an abuser, and Congress is his battered wife, and we the people are the struggling and destabilized children.
Or, maybe they do get it, and seeing their representatives cave triggered their own old traumas from when would-be advocates disastrously let them down. Do you remember the nail-biting, silent tension of waiting to find out if the person speaking for you would stay strong and hold out for your protection? The devastating loss when they failed?
The other reason why it’s terrifying to watch ideologically-driven far leftists resist the far right by eating the moderates in the middle is that they fail to acknowledge that fundamentalism can happen on both sides. Horseshoes have two ends that collide into a circle. When the woman stays with her abuser but becomes just like him instead of leaving, the children don’t win. In fact, violence increases, and so does the danger for everyone.
It turns out Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and House Democrats were right to call it the “Epstein Shutdown” for the last several weeks on social media and in interviews. As Marc Elias of Democracy Docket put it today, while it was clear what the Democrats wanted from the shutdown—lower costs for healthcare insurance premiums, affordability, and for Trump to stop breaking the law—it was never clear what the Republicans wanted. They seemed simply to be doing as Trump demanded. — Heather Cox Richardson November 12, 2025
This week, we’re in a precarious situation with the release of the Epstein files. Trump flailed and panicked, only to turn about face and order Republicans to vote to release them, an unnecessary step for a man with the ability to wield his pen and order it. That stinks of doctoring to me, of convenient redactions and unprotected files.
But something else happened over the last weekend, and survivors will know what I’m talking about. MAGA began justifying the age of the Epstein victims. And then, they went to church.
I wish more people understood that their ability to do this began in evangelical churches, which have justified SA against minor girls by refusing to hold abusers accountable, and by vilifying girls as the temptress and enemy of men, and by shopping for wives in the youth group, and even by using 14-year-old Mary as the first holy example, for years.
Do you remember when MAGA pastors campaigned for Trump by telling their congregations they were voting for a president, not a pastor? The presidents-not-pastors set up was really funny-not-funny because they accept SA as “imperfections” in pastors, too. MAGA voters voted for a rapist because, for them, rape isn’t a dealbreaker. And it’s possible, Trump heard Kelly loud and clear: he knows he won’t lose MAGA, no matter what those files say.
The stories—and not just the Epstein women—have been out there for years. A failure to protect children from predators is part of the very spine of the exevangelical movement. Survivors have learned the agonizingly hard and heartbreaking way that any accountability will come from secular, legal society, not from evangelical MAGA churches.
That’s part of what makes the Epstein case so egregious: Will the secular legal society and leadership take abuse seriously?
Will civilized society in 2025, armed with research, history, testimony, and evidence—the lessons of the past— expect more out of their presidents than MAGA Christians do their pastors?
We can only fault the battered woman for her defeat if we deny the wider situation. We can only keep dinner on the table and life moving “as usual” through this term by maintaining our own dissonance. It takes courage to rip off our Pollyanna progressive sunshine hopes and keep the main thing, the main thing. He is corrupt. He is illegal. He is the bully. We can’t accommodate abuse; we have to do what we can to leave it. We don’t do that by screaming about our pet ideologies and factions right now, no matter how precious. We need to render this man and his minions powerless.
Then, we need to clean house.
Comment section notes:
I recently opened my Substack and removed the paywall from ongoing posts, as well as the comment section. The shift is bringing in new readers, and I’d love it if you said hello.
For those new here: this column is primarily written to those who have left high-control religion and/or are seeking a translation of evangelical influences in our culture, news, politics, and headlines. I maintain my social media spaces to foster healthy conversation on those topics in support of survivors of religious trauma. It is not a space for debate or Christian apologetics. If you have a different viewpoint, your curiosity and questions are welcome.
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As a survivor, I just read the situation early. No amount of protesting will result in meaningful change. They will just double down until you lose too much. Every inch you give is not seen as a gesture of goodwill, but an opportunity to take even more ground. Power isn’t ever satisfied.
I hear you. Loud and clear. Sadly, I understand at gut level what you are saying because I too am a survivor of the patriarchy and an abusive religion, namely The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church). My exit was many decades ago, long before we had the internet, but somehow by listening to the radio, I heard a kernel of truth and realized the full truth of my plight and was able to get out. Mainly I learned then, and have learned over and over again, there is no negotiating with a bully. “…we have to do what we can to leave it.” And, “We need to render this man and him minions powerless.” May it be so!