So who is Robert Ussery, really?
The available evidence suggests that Ussery is two things: 1) His day job as a medical professional working in Perioperative Services at MercyOne Central Iowa in Des Moines. 2) His political role as a registered lobbyist for an organization called the Iowa Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.
In 2018, the Cedar Rapids Gazette wrote of Ussery that “His track record… raises the question whether Ussery, whose day job is in a hospital surgical unit, is the state's most powerful lobbyist.”
Since January of last year, Robert Ussery has lobbied elected officials in the state government of Iowa about 110 different pieces of legislation.
Robert Ussery is not a religious leader who just so happens to feel called to support Donald Trump for President this year. Robert Ussery is a part of the political establishment in Iowa, and a consistent partisan activist, supporting Republican politicians and a right wing political agenda.
What is the Iowa Minuteman Civil Defense Corps?
The organization is certainly not a part of any National Guard or any other regulated militia. The Iowa Minuteman Civil Defense Corps has been identified as a “nativist extremist” group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
As a national organization, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps fell apart back in 2010, but under Robert Ussery’s leadership, the Iowa Minuteman Civil Defense Corps has continued to agitate against legal immigration and asylum for victims of political violence.
As a national organization, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps urged its members to bring rifles to the Mexican border and engage in acts of violence against immigrants there.
Robert Ussery continues to promote political violence at the US border with Mexico. On January 27, 2024, for example, Ussery posted a message on his Facebook profile of a man carrying a gun next to razor wire on the border along with the phrase, “come and cut it”.
Robert Ussery is listed by the 2024 Trump for PResident campaign as an “evangelist”…
…but there is no record anywhere online of any time when Robert Ussery has been an evangelist in anything other than a personal, individual capacity. There is no public evidence that Ussery is a “faith leader” with religious leadership status that merits him a place in Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.
The context of this threatening message is that an American court had ordered the removal of razor wire from the US border with Mexico.
The razor wire was supposed to be removed by Americans.
Robert Ussery was threatening to shoot and kill Americans in a campaign of political violence.
This is the man that Donald Trump celebrates as a “faith leader”.
Donald Trump achieved victory in the Iowa caucuses due to support from the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. That victory enabled him to clinch the Republican Party presidential nomination for 2024.
That makes the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition the most politically influential Christian Nationalist group in the country… but very little has been known about this organization, until now.
The book Donald Trump’s Army of God: Christian Nationalism in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition reveals the terrorism, faith healing, fraud, demonic obsessions, and fantasies of global religious genocide that pervade the Christian Nationalist movement that Donald Trump has promised to take all the way to the White House.
It’s a terrifying new political reality, but we can’t afford to look the other way.
The Iowa Faith Leader Coalition is a radical political organization that violates American law
Let’s learn more about the extremist Christian Nationalists who are members of Donald Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.