After the Iowa Caucuses

It’s been over a week since the Iowa caucuses, and a couple of days since the New Hampshire primaries.

This much has become clear: Unless something dramatic happens to change the race’s political dynamics, Donald Trump will obtain the Republican presidential nomination for 2024.

The goal of this podcast was to document a crucial portion of Trump’s efforts to secure the Republican nomination with a demonstration of overwhelming political dominance. This project has focused on the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, a shadowy organization created as a branch of the Trump 2024 campaign with the goal of presenting Donald Trump as the choice of Iowa’s religious leaders.

This podcast went beyond the superficial stories offered by journalists who accepted the Trump campaign’s claims about the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition at face value. We investigated the truth about the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, and covered a lot of ground in the two and a half weeks before the Iowa caucuses. 

We uncovered Christian Nationalists who purposefully spread misinformation. We saw how Douglas and Julie Wolfe spread false information about a supposed federal property tax plan that never existed. The Wolfes also accused the deceased Senator John McCain of being part of a human trafficking ring, even though there was never any evidence connecting Senator McCain to any such thing.

We learned how a cruel and vindictive form of Christianity dominates the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. One member of the Coalition, Ryan S. Howard, a failed politician and Christian podcaster, declared recently that Christians need to start attacking people they disagree with, going on the offense instead of being kind.

We discovered dark apocalyptic fantasies of global genocidal violence. Preachers such as Robin and Bill Claeys of Riverzedge Church in Sioux Falls are teaching their followers to expect the return of a violent and vengeful Jesus who will lead attacks against non-Christians. This violent Jesus, they say, will punish those who don’t obey, because he’s too hungry for power to bother with peace.

We found that, in defiance of the wrathful partisanship of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, there are many other religious leaders in Iowa who have declared their opposition to allowing churches to be made part of Donald Trump’s political machine.

We documented that the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition would be more accurately described as the Iowa Conservative Christian Coalition. There is not even one non-Christian faith leader in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition, and the Coalition does not even represent the full diversity of Christian beliefs and organizations in Iowa.

We learned that members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition want to interfere with Iowans’ marriages and even make it more difficult for Iowans to get married to the people they love. The anti-marriage agenda of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is based on an extremist theology that has been fabricated in our own time out of whole cloth, and isn’t supported by the tradition of diverse marriage practices documented through the Christian Bible.

We identified pastors and preachers in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition who are preparing their followers to begin a violent religious civil war in which Christian Americans will kill their neighbors to establish a terrifying religious monarchy that enforces strict cultural purity.

We came upon links between the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition and false prophets such as Julie Green. Some Christian leaders in the Coalition claim that their own words are a new testament from the Christian god, despite the fact that their supposed prophecies repeatedly fail to come true.

We explored the ways that the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition involves churches across Iowa in an organized crime network in which pastors knowingly violate the law in exchange for corrupt access to power. 

We saw how many members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition indulge in delusional fantasies of supernatural warfare, encouraging their followers to immerse themselves in paranoid hunts against evil spirits, demons, witches, and evil sorcerers.

We learned how the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition includes preachers who have called for the assassination of the President of the United States.

We discovered pastors who lead their churches into networks of white supremacy, teaching people to hate their neighbors and engage in racist discrimination against people in their own communities.

We found faith healers in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition who encourage people with deadly illnesses including cancer and genetic diseases to abandon the use of real medicines that work. Vulnerable people, even children, have been encouraged by these members of Trump’s Coalition to replace scientific medicine with magical rituals.

We uncovered elected politicians participating in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition who have attempted to pass legislation that would revoke essential freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America.

We found that the political operatives in the Trump for President campaign who put together the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition exaggerated and even outright lied about the people named on the list of Coalition members. Included in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition were people who aren’t actually religious leaders at all, creating a false impression that Donald Trump has more organized support from religious organizations than he actually has. About half of the people listed as members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition appear to not be who the Trump for President campaign says they are.

Now that the Iowa caucuses have come and gone, what should happen to this project? What should happen to this podcast?

All of this we found in just a short investigation of just two and a half weeks. One other thing we found, however, is that there is much more to find out about the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

What we have discovered so far has profound implications for understanding the Christian Nationalist movement that powers the 2024 presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Many of the people and ideas we have identified as active within the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition haven’t been talked about in any other coverage of the 2024 presidential election.

So, we cannot in good faith abandon this project so early in the election year. The members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition have stepped forward to present themselves as exemplars of what the Trump for President campaign is all about.

So, in the weeks and months to come, we’re going to keep telling the stories of the members of the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition along with the agendas and political maneuvers they represent.

This project will continue as a weekly podcast and online report throughout 2024.

Stay tuned for more.