I Was Wrong About Barack Obama

A confession, a reckoning, and a question I should have asked myself years ago

I used to watch Barack Obama give a press conference and feel something close to contempt.

There he was, behind the podium, measured and careful and professorial, parsing every question with the kind of precision that made it clear he had thought about this longer than the reporter had. And something about that made my skin crawl. I read it as smugness, as arrogance, as a man who believed he was the smartest person in any room he entered and wanted everyone in that room to know it. I thought he was ideologically dangerous, theologically liberal, and determined to impose his vision on a country that hadn’t really asked for it.

My biggest specific policy disagreement was the Affordable Care Act. I felt like he was forcing it on the country, and in some procedural sense, he was. That feeling was real. What has changed is not the memory of it but the lens through which I’m looking back. I no longer see a healthcare model that works for everyone as a liberal carrot to dangle. I see it as something closer to what the Good Samaritan actually did: meeting the person in front of you who needs help, without calculating whether they’ve earned it.

I want to say all of this plainly, because the essay that follows depends on honesty about where it starts.

I was not a birther. Even at my most ideologically rigid, the conspiracy that Obama was foreign-born or somehow illegitimate struck me as overreach, the kind of paranoid tribalism I could distinguish from principled disagreement. My opposition was principled, I believed. Biblical, even. Obama’s progressive theology, his social policies, his vision of government’s role in human flourishing were, in my reading, antithetical to what Scripture actually taught. I was defending a faith and the truth it contained, or so I was entirely convinced.

That is what I thought I was doing. I was wrong, and the wrongness is interesting, because it is not the simple kind.

I. The Elephant Moves First

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU, has spent much of his career studying why people disagree about morality. Not just what they disagree about, but how. His central finding, developed across two decades of research and laid out most fully in The Righteous Mind (2012), is that moral intuitions precede moral reasoning. The elephant moves, then the rider constructs a justification for where the elephant went. We do not reason our way to our moral convictions. We feel them first, and then we build the argument. The argument feels genuine because in some sense it is. We are not consciously lying. The argument’s function, though, is not discovery. It is defense: explaining and justifying what the gut already decided.¹

This is uncomfortable but not particularly controversial among cognitive scientists. What Dan Kahan at Yale added to the picture is more troubling. His research on what he calls identity-protective cognition demonstrates that the more analytically capable a person is, the more polarized their political beliefs tend to be, not less. Kahan’s argument is that the problem is an excess of rationality rather than a deficit: sophisticated analytical capacity deployed entirely in service of protecting group identity rather than seeking truth. Smart people are better at building the justification. They are not, on this evidence, better at questioning the conclusion.²

I was not a stupid man during the Obama years. I read widely. I engaged with the arguments. I had theological reasons for my political positions or at least believed I did. Kahan’s research suggests that this is precisely the profile of someone most at risk: analytical enough to construct a sophisticated defense, motivated enough by group identity to need one. The intelligence becomes the problem. You are better than most at building the cage and calling it a house.

Haidt’s framework illuminates the specific shape of my misperception. Conservative moral psychology draws on five moral foundations: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Liberal moral psychology draws primarily on Care and Fairness. Someone formed in conservative evangelicalism, as I was, runs largely on a moral operating system that weights Loyalty, Authority, and Purity heavily. Obama’s entire public presentation — his skepticism of tradition, his comfort with complexity, his willingness to question received authority — activated all three threat responses simultaneously.³ The contempt I felt watching him speak was a moral immune response first and a political judgment second. He looked like disorder. He looked like a threat to the things my formation taught me were sacred.

Iris Murdoch, the British philosopher, wrote about what she called the “fat, relentless ego” that distorts moral perception. Her argument was that the primary failure of moral vision is not wickedness but a kind of solipsism: the inability to see other people and the world as genuinely other, rather than as extensions of your own needs, fears, and assumptions. Clear moral vision requires what she called “unselfing” — the deliberate effort to stop seeing the world through your ego’s requirements and see it as it actually is.⁴ The person in Sartre’s terms who lives in bad faith, pretending their choices are not even choices, their tribe’s ideology is simply truth, their formed perception is simply reality, has not done this work. I had not done this work.⁵

Plato called it the cave. You sit with your back to the light, watching shadows on the wall, and you call the shadows reality because they are all you have ever seen. The exit is behind you. Most people never turn around. I am writing this because I eventually did, and because what I saw when I turned around and stepped out embarrassed me in ways I am still processing.

II. What I Said I Opposed

The stated objections to Obama in evangelical circles were not random. They clustered around two issues above everything else: abortion and gay marriage. These were the culture war’s twin pillars, and Obama’s positions on both were understood as not merely politically wrong but theologically catastrophic, evidence of a man whose Christianity was liberal, nominal, or simply false.

On abortion, Obama was genuinely pro-choice and made no pretense otherwise. On gay marriage, he publicly opposed it through 2012, then supported it — a position he later acknowledged he had held privately before saying so. For evangelical voters this was confirmation of what they already believed. Obama’s faith was performative and his values antithetical to Christian teaching. It is worth pausing on the fact that this is precisely what many of us now on the other side say about Trump. The mirror is uncomfortable.

What I did not ask at the time, and what I ask now, is what Trump’s actual record on these issues looks like when you set the rhetoric and pandering aside.

On abortion, Trump was vocally pro-choice as recently as 1999, describing himself as “very pro-choice” on Meet the Press. He changed positions when he began exploring a presidential run, took five different positions in three days at one point during the 2016 primary campaign, and has spent most of his second term insisting abortion should be left to the states while privately blaming anti-abortion messaging for Republican electoral losses.⁶ He appointed three Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, which is a genuine policy legacy. Whether that legacy reflects conviction or political transaction is a question his own words over three decades do not resolve.

On the actual rate of abortions, the measure that most directly reflects whether the underlying problem is being addressed, the data is striking. The abortion rate fell 30 percent during Clinton’s two terms and 26 percent during Obama’s, compared to roughly 4 percent drops under Reagan and George H.W. Bush. The policy that reduces abortions most effectively is access to contraception and economic support for mothers. The evangelical community mostly opposed both.⁷

And then there is the post-Dobbs reality. In the three years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, the national abortion rate has not declined. Per Guttmacher Institute data, the rate has increased approximately 16 percent from 2020 levels, reaching roughly 1.14 million abortions in 2024. The decrease in ban states was more than offset by increases elsewhere, driven by telehealth, shield laws, and medication abortion shipped across state lines.⁸ Maternal mortality has risen sharply in states with bans; Texas saw a 50 percent increase in maternal sepsis in the year following its ban. The policy the evangelical community fought for and received has produced, at the national level, more abortions, not fewer. If the stated goal was reducing abortions, the strategy failed. If the actual goal was to win a political and cultural battle, the strategy succeeded.

On gay marriage, Trump’s record is best described as convenient ambiguity. His wife Melania called him “the first president to enter the White House supporting gay marriage” as he sought reelection in 2020.⁹ He urged the Republican Party to soften its platform language on the issue in 2024. He has not pursued any federal legislation restricting it. His vice president, JD Vance, actively opposed the Respect for Marriage Act when running for Senate in 2022, called LGBTQ advocates “groomers,” and has introduced legislation targeting transgender rights. Meanwhile, Justice Clarence Thomas, in his Dobbs concurrence, explicitly signaled he would like the Court to revisit its same-sex marriage ruling.¹⁰ The evangelical community got a president who personally shrugs at the issue while the judicial architecture he built actively threatens it. Over two dozen states still have same-sex marriage bans on the books, unenforceable since 2015 but waiting for a Court willing to revisit. That Court exists. Trump built it. This is the champion they chose.

I am not making the argument that policy positions are irrelevant. I am making the argument that the evangelical case against Obama on these grounds was considerably weaker than it appeared, and the evangelical support for Trump on these same grounds is considerably more tenuous than most of its proponents are willing to acknowledge. The intensity of the opposition was not proportional to the policy differences. Something else was clearly at work.

III. The Conversation Nobody Wants to Have

I want to say again, I was not a birther. This bears repeating because what comes next requires distinguishing my opposition from its most toxic variant.

But I also need to say what Michael Tesler’s research documents with uncomfortable precision. The 2008 presidential election was more polarized by racial attitudes than any other presidential contest in modern American history. Tesler, in Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era (University of Chicago Press, 2016), demonstrates that racial resentment — not overt racism, not slurs, but the attitudinal measure that correlates with beliefs about Black Americans’ work ethic, commitment to traditional values, and demands for special treatment — was the single strongest predictor of 2008 vote preferences. Stronger than policy positions. Stronger than ideology. The same racial attitudes predicted opinions on policies that had no obvious racial content: economic assessments, health care views, evaluations of politicians entirely unrelated to Obama. Racial resentment began predicting everything, because everything had become about him.¹¹

Tesler notes that people even displayed more positive feelings toward Obama’s dog, Bo, when they were told the dog belonged to Ted Kennedy. Just saying.

I am not making the claim that everyone who opposed Obama was driven by racial animus. I am saying that the data, across multiple studies and methodologies, shows that racial attitudes explained a significant portion of the opposition in ways that policy preferences and ideological alignment alone cannot sufficiently account for. And I am saying that the evangelical community, which provided some of the most intense and organized Obama opposition, is also, per Robert P. Jones and PRRI research, the demographic most sympathetic to Christian nationalism — a worldview that correlates strongly with racial resentment, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the belief that America was intended to be a promised land specifically for European, Anglo-Saxon Christians.

Jones and PRRI found that nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as either Christian nationalism sympathizers or adherents, and that majorities affirm the belief that “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world.”¹² These beliefs correlate strongly with anti-Black sentiment, opposition to immigration, support for patriarchal gender roles, and tolerance for political violence. I was formed in that world. I breathed that air. I did not affirm the most extreme versions of these views. But the worldview that shaped my perception of Obama was not racially neutral, and pretending otherwise would be another form of the bad faith this essay is trying to call out.

Here is what I actually think happened, stated plainly. Obama’s race was not the explicit content of most evangelical opposition, but it was part of the context in which that opposition formed and intensified. A Black president with a Kenyan father, an Islamic-sounding middle name, and a theological framework that prioritized the poor and the marginalized over the cultural authority of white Christian America activated every defense mechanism in the evangelical immune system simultaneously. It is worth noting that the man this same community would later crown as its political savior never refers to Obama without invoking all three names. Not Barack Obama. Not President Obama. Always “Barack Hussein Obama,” every time, in post after post, speech after speech, most recently in a Truth Social screed published Mother’s Day 2026. The middle name does the work. Everyone in the room knows it. But that’s not racial.

I was among those people, though not in the cynical register Trump occupies when he says it. He appears to know exactly which nerve he’s touching. The more dangerous formation is the sincere one — the person who invokes that name out of genuine alarm, who believes the alarm is purely principled, who has never examined what the alarm is actually responding to. Kahan’s research, Murdoch’s philosophy, and Plato’s cave are all describing the same condition of the person formed entirely inside a closed system, defending it faithfully, certain they are defending the truth. I was that person. The shadows looked like reality because I had never looked away from the wall.

IV. The Matthew 25 Question

I have a different question now than I had then. Not which man’s policies align better with evangelical orthodoxy, but which man’s life and public conduct more closely resembles the character Jesus described in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 25, in the Beatitudes, in the encounter with the rich young ruler.

This question is pivotal.

Obama spent eight years in the White House visiting sick children in hospitals, reading every night from the stack of constituent letters his staff selected for him, carrying the weight of drone strikes and their civilian casualties with documented moral seriousness, maintaining a marriage of evident respect and affection, and speaking about his faith with a consistency that his harshest evangelical critics usually dismissed as performance. He was, and occasionally still is, condescending. He can sound professorial in ways that read as impatience with lesser minds. I noticed this before. I notice it now. The difference is that now I have a comparison point that has reset my calibration entirely.

To my knowledge, Obama was never credibly accused of financial corruption, never indicted, never impeached, never found liable in civil court for anything approximating the charges his successor has faced. He left office without a single major personal scandal. The contrast on this point with Donald Trump is not subtle.

Donald Trump has demonstrated, across two presidencies and thirty years of public life, what actual textbook narcissism looks like. The clinical portrait: the inability to acknowledge error, the compulsive need for flattery, the casual cruelty toward the weak, the manipulation of devoted followers, the transparent transactional relationship with faith. He stood in front of St. John’s Church holding a Bible he did not open, tear-gassed protesters cleared from his path for the photo opportunity, and evangelical leaders called it prophetic.

By comparison, and I mean the comparison is now unavoidable, Obama’s demeanor looks like what I always wanted from a president and couldn’t see because my formation had taught me to see an enemy, or the caricature of one.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in Jesus and John Wayne (2020), traces the decades-long project within white evangelicalism to construct a theology of muscular, dominant, combative Christian manhood. Trump did not create this theology. He arrived as its fulfillment, the culture war strongman the tradition had been preparing itself to receive. The Jesus of this tradition is not the one who blessed the meek, loved enemies, and told his followers that whatever they did for the least of these they did for him. That Jesus has been quietly pushed aside. The Jesus of white evangelical politics is a fighter, and his followers chose accordingly.¹³

For years I chose the same formation, the same worldview, the same tribe though not the same candidate. I never voted for Trump, never supported his candidacy, and was not among those who anointed him. But I had breathed the same air and opposed the same man for many of the same reasons. The formation and the vote are different things, but they are not entirely unrelated things.

V. What Comes After

I cannot give this essay a clean resolution because I do not have one.

I carry no party registration. I am not a Democrat, not a Republican, not formally anything at this point. I did not vote for Trump in 2016 or in 2020. I want to be clear about that because nothing in this essay should imply otherwise. What I am confessing is the worldview that made his rise possible in people who thought exactly as I once did and my recognition that I was formed in the same place they were, even if I did not follow the full trajectory.

I do not think Obama was without fault. The drone program, the deportation numbers, the way the ACA was passed — which did feel forced, and not just to conservatives. He is a complicated man who held an impossible office in a polarized country and managed it with considerably more grace than I gave him credit for at the time. I think he came into office believing he could be post-racial in a country that turned out to be most-racial. His restraint in the face of that was either admirable or a strategic error, and historians will debate it. What I know is that I spent years criticizing him for things I now recognize in him as virtues.

I notice, sometimes, that I now get a genuinely optimistic feeling watching Obama speak, where I used to go cold. I’ve asked myself whether this is simply TDS in reverse: a reaction to Trump rather than a genuine reassessment. The honest answer is probably some of both. But the reassessment predates the reaction or at least runs deeper than it. What changed was not just my feelings about Trump. It was my understanding of what I had been doing all along.

Recently I read the transcript of Obama’s keynote address to the Call to Renewal conference in Washington, June 2006, the speech he gave on faith and politics two years before he ran for president. Reading it now, I hear something I could not have heard then: genuine theological seriousness, intellectual honesty about the difficulty of bringing religious convictions into democratic public life, and a man who had actually read the same Bible I claimed to be defending. At one point he asked which scripture should guide public policy, and then answered his own question with this: “Should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount — a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application?”

That sentence connects directly to everything this essay has been arguing. Obama was pointing at the same Jesus I have spent a lot of energy insisting the evangelical tradition had abandoned. The evangelical community’s response, channeled most vocally by James Dobson, was to call the speech a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution. The people defending authentic Christianity called a man citing the Sermon on the Mount a fruitcake.

In 2006 I would have been squirming in my seat. The filter was on. Perspective is a hell of a thing.

The squirming is the mechanism. That is what I am trying to describe. Not someone who knowingly defended the wrong thing, but someone so thoroughly formed by a closed system that the right thing produced a threat response. The system told me my ideology was theology, my tribe’s interests were God’s interests, and my perception of a political opponent was a faithful reading of reality — faithfulness to Christ itself. I believed all of this sincerely. Kahan’s research is precise on this point. Sincerity is not protection from the mechanism. It is the mechanism. The most thoroughly formed person is the hardest to reach, because they have the most sophisticated apparatus for dismissing exactly what they most need to hear.

I find myself now wanting to ask friends why they still hate Obama so much. Then I remember that I did the exact same thing, for the same reasons, in the grip of the very same formation. The question stands, even with that memory attached to it. Why so much hate? What, specifically, did he do that warranted it? If the answer is abortion or gay marriage, does Trump’s actual record on those issues satisfy the concern, or has the goalpost simply moved? If the answer is something else, what is it, exactly?

I suspect many people who hold the hatred cannot fully answer those questions. I know I couldn’t have answered them honestly in 2010. The hatred was not primarily about policy. It was about what Obama represented to a particular vision of America, a vision of whose country this was and who got to define its values. That vision had deep roots and a theological vocabulary, and I spoke it fluently for a very long time.

The most common defense I still hear, when I ask people directly, is some version of “Trump supports Christian values; Obama did not.” The word Christian in that sentence is doing a lot more than most of its users have examined. In the tradition’s own texts, Christian values specifically include feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick, loving the enemy, and practicing humility, restraint, and truth-telling. The record of which man’s public conduct more closely approximates any of those is not genuinely contested.

One man ran a global charitable foundation, maintained a faithful marriage across his entire public life, spoke about his faith with consistency across decades, and left office without a personal scandal. The other has been found liable for sexual assault in civil court, paid hush money to a porn actress during a campaign, been criminally convicted on 34 felony counts, and recently had a gold-plated statue of himself erected at his private golf club that his personal pastor had to preemptively defend as not being a golden calf. The people who describe this man as closer to Christian values than Obama are not using the word ‘Christian’ the way I understand the Bible or the tradition to define it.

Inigo Montoya had the right phrase for exactly this situation: you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Sartre said that bad faith is a contradictory, ultimately psychotic effort at self-deception, despite being common in many people’s lives.¹⁴ The exit from bad faith is not found in a single moment of clarity. It is a slow turn toward the light, a willingness to look at what you have actually been doing and call it by its right name. That process is what ideological deconstruction feels like from the inside: not a dramatic awakening but a gradual and uncomfortable recognition that the map you were handed does not match the territory you’ve been walking through.

I was defending a tribe and calling it theology. The tribe is still out there, still defending itself, still calling it the same thing. I am not in it anymore, by choice, and I am not sure I can fully explain how I got out. In some real ways, I’m still getting out. But I can say what the view looks like from here.

Obama was certainly not perfect. He was not Jesus. But he was a serious, decent, intellectually honest man who served the country with evident integrity and was rewarded, in a significant corner of American Christianity, with eight years of contempt from people who never asked whether their contempt was really about what they said it was about.

I was one of those people. Does this constitute an apology? I think it does, or at least the beginning of one. To Obama himself, should this ever reach him: I misjudged you in ways that had more to do with what I had been taught to see than with what you actually were. To the people who saw this more clearly at the time and were dismissed for saying so: I was among those doing the dismissing. I’m sorry for that too. Apologies do not undo the conclusions they confess to. But they are better than the alternative.

Author’s Note: Due to the high number of comments on this essay, I am including a link to the follow up piece here for a continuation of this important conversation. Click here to go to the follow up, “The Cave Writes Back.”

Notes

1. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012). The elephant-and-rider metaphor appears throughout Part I; the core argument about moral intuition preceding moral reasoning is developed in Chapters 2–4. For the empirical foundation, see also Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814–834.

2. Dan M. Kahan, “Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition,” Yale Law School Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper No. 164 (2017). Available at SSRN: ssrn.com/abstract=2973067. For the finding that higher cognitive ability intensifies rather than reduces political polarization, see Kahan et al., “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks,” Nature Climate Change 2 (2012): 732–735.

3. Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96 (2009): 1029–1046. The study across four methodologies demonstrates that conservatives endorse all five foundations roughly equally, while liberals concentrate their moral concern primarily on Care and Fairness.

4. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge, 1970), pp. 51–52. The “fat, relentless ego” phrase appears in “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” the first essay in the collection; the argument about unselfing as the basis of moral vision runs throughout. For the application to political perception, see also Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 30 (1956): 14–31.

5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (Philosophical Library, 1943; English translation 1956), Part One, Chapter Two. Sartre’s account of bad faith describes the person who treats their own character and choices as fixed facts — things that simply are — rather than as ongoing decisions for which they remain responsible.

6. CNN, “15 Times Trump’s Abortion Position Shifted Over the Past 25 Years,” April 9, 2024, cnn.com; NBC News, “A Timeline of Trump’s Many, Many Positions on Abortion,” April 8, 2024, nbcnews.com. The “five positions in three days” characterization was reported by The Washington Post during the 2015–2016 primary cycle.

7. PolitiFact, “Graph on US Abortion Rate During Different Presidents Based on Real Data, But Needs More Information,” September 25, 2020, politifact.com. The percentage declines are drawn from CDC abortion surveillance data and are broadly consistent across reporting years, with the caveats about state reporting variation noted in the PolitiFact analysis.

8. Guttmacher Institute, “Abortion in the United States,” updated 2026, guttmacher.org. The abortion rate of 16.7 per 1,000 women aged 15–44 in 2025 represents a 16% increase from the 2020 rate. See also KFF, “Abortion Trends Before and After Dobbs,” January 2026, kff.org; Society of Family Planning, “#WeCount Report April 2022 through June 2025,” societyfp.org. On maternal mortality increases in ban states: Milbank Memorial Fund, “The Impact of Restrictive State Abortion Laws,” October 2025, milbank.org, documenting a 56% rise in maternal mortality in Texas and a 95% increase among White women in the first year of the state’s ban.

9. Melania Trump, quoted in CBS News, “Compare Trump and Harris’ Views on LGBTQ Rights and Marriage Equality,” November 7, 2024, cbsnews.com. Trump also described same-sex marriage as “settled law” in a post-election interview in November 2016; see The Washington Post, “Trump Says 17-Month-Old Gay Marriage Ruling Is ‘Settled’ Law,” November 14, 2016.

10. Justice Clarence Thomas, concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), calling for the Court to revisit Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), as well as Griswold v. Connecticut and Lawrence v. Texas. On Vance’s opposition to the Respect for Marriage Act: NBC News, “JD Vance Faces Criticism from Advocates for His ‘Cruel’ Record on LGBTQ Issues,” July 17, 2024, nbcnews.com. The Republican Party’s 2024 platform removed the 2016 platform’s explicit condemnation of same-sex marriage; see The Washington Post, “GOP Adopts Platform That Softens Language on Abortion, Same-Sex Marriage,” July 8, 2024.

11. Michael Tesler, Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Chapters 1–3. Tesler’s analysis draws on multiple national surveys, including panel studies that reinterviewed respondents before and during Obama’s rise to national prominence. The “spillover of racialization” thesis is developed in Chapter 4. On the Obama dog finding, see Tesler, pp. 85–86.

12. Robert P. Jones et al., “A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” PRRI/Brookings Survey, 2023, prri.org. The survey of 6,000-plus Americans found 29% of white evangelical Protestants to be Christian nationalism adherents and 35% sympathizers, making them the most nationalist-sympathetic religious demographic in the country.

13. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020). Du Mez traces the construction of militant Christian masculinity from the Cold War through the Trump presidency, arguing that Trump’s appeal to white evangelicals was not an aberration but the logical conclusion of decades of deliberate cultural formation.

14. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Part One, Chapter Two. The description of bad faith as “contradictory, baffling, and ultimately psychotic” appears in numerous commentaries; the source text describes it as an attempt to be what one is not and to not be what one is, a condition Sartre treats as pervasive in ordinary human experience rather than exceptional.