Trump Takes On Rampant Allegations
Chart to describe Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 and the respective regulation of 14 November 1935. The “Nuremberg Laws” established a legal basis for racial identification. Only people with four non-Jewish German grandparents (four white circles in top row left) were of “German blood”.
Injecting religious fear and fervor into any situation is a classic authoritarian tactic. That fear will bring people into the streets and cause trouble (see Charlottesville, Unite the Right, August 11 and 12 2017). In that case, one thing Trump wanted to highlight as dangerous to the majority was explicit (“Jews will not replace us,”). It seems, however, that in 2025, Trump’s strategy is changing: He is limiting any explicit reference to the group his followers should fear, focusing, instead, on the threat, in this case an anti-Christian bias. He is not blaming any one group for the anti-Christian bias; he is simply identifying a bias. It’s vintage Trump, “I and my people are being harmed,” without identifying exactly who the offenders are. He gets to be the savior without identifying any particular party to blame; all the benefit of being the “wounded” victim, with no blame for whatever subsequent harm may be done to whoever is wounding him. Unlike previous autocratic wannabes, Trump is not calling on any minority group to be harmed, banned, jailed or killed, he is just announcing that there is a bias against the majority (inference: his) group, and letting the chips, as it were, fall where they may. This has nothing at all to do with any religious group; this is not who is or isn’t to blame, this is Trump’s strategy to sick the majority against any and every one else.
On February 6, 2025, only a little over two weeks after his inauguration as president, Donald J. Trump wrote an executive order, the purpose of which was “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” This established a US policy, according to the words of the Executive Order, “to protect the religious freedoms of Americans and end the anti-Christian weaponization of government. The Founders established a Nation in which people were free to practice their faith without fear of discrimination or retaliation by their government.” The Executive Order states that the founders tried to do this, but the observant Catholic Joe Biden, alleged by Trump to be a virulent anti-Christian and anti-Catholic, denied Catholic rights by upholding the right to abortion in the US. Also, the Trump faction notes that the Biden Department of Education sought to repeal religious-liberty protections for faith-based organizations on college campuses, and that the Biden Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sought to force Christians to affirm radical transgender ideology against their faith. Trump goes on to accuse the Biden Department of Health and Human Services of seeking to drive Christians who do not conform to certain beliefs on sexual orientation and gender identity out of the foster-care system. Finally, the Biden Administration declared March 31, 2024 — Easter Sunday — as “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Each of those actions is, here in the real world, not an indication of anti-Christian bias, but a protection for people, some of whom are Christian, who may not fit into the belief structure of more extreme religious groups.
A new Trump Department of Justice report detailing the reason/s for the Executive Order was completed on 6 June 2025, and finally released to the public on 5 September 2025. In it, the Trump administration charged that the Biden administration had a “consistent and systematic pattern of discrimination” and pointed out the many times when officials of the 46th Administration “weaponized the full weight of the federal government” against the members of the Christian religion. The report was the first of its kind from the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, and found and reported instances of the State Department limiting humanitarian relief for Christians, the Justice Department targeting Catholics as possible “domestic terrorism threats” and multiple agencies declining religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
This “report” amounts to a misstating of law, the constitution and what was actually happening in society; and it is unclear whether that misstating is deliberate or just flat out uninformed. Reading the whole Executive Order does not bring clarity or sharper focus; the reader is assaulted by a standard Trump jumble of contradictory or irrelevant “policies” proposed by the current administration as ways to wipe out this alleged rampant anti-Christian bias. The words in this EO highlight that, in the real world, the Biden administration (repeatedly taken to task in this Executive Order) put in place laws or processes to protect small numbers of people who fall outside of larger, routinely protected groups.
Reading this report required a couple of Tylenol and a suspension of belief, since many of the “examples” included in the report are instances of actual policy differences between groups of people, rather than bias against Christians. Reading through that which is supposed to pass for “research” and “proof of bias,” allows one to conclude that this is yet another example of Trump et al whining about something completely different than what they claim to be whining about.
The whole Executive Order, the examples of Biden’s anti-Christian, anti-Catholic behavior and “policies,” the choice of Joe Biden as the embodiment of anti-Catholic behavior is classic Trump and his acolytes. It could be Roseanne Roseannadanna 2025, a fabulous opening sketch for this season’s first SNL episode, if they don’t yet have one.
Upon close reading, this piece of Trumpianism is not the terrifying document people like myself thought had arrived. Monday, September 15, 2025, however, was the 90th anniversary of the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in interwar Germany. Those laws changed who could be a German citizen, which by definition stripped Jews and others of their rights and left them stateless. It took Hitler only about 6 weeks to open the first German concentration camp, Dachau, and only another 3 weeks to impose a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses and to enact Laws for Reestablishment of the Civil Service which barred Jews from holding civil service, university and state positions. Shortly thereafter, the Gestapo or secret police was established. Trump is already stripping people who live in the United States of their rights and deporting them. He trades in violence, while building or pretending there is a framework of law which somehow justifies this violence and his actions. While this latest entry into the biggest fascist contest is not what we feared it might be, Trump has already built his first concentration camp, and we need to be ready.
Margaret Henoch served in the Clandestine Service of the CIA for 25 years, at Headquarters and in the field, focusing on operations and counterintelligence and retiring as a Senior Intelligence Officer. She is a member of The Steady State.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 300 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.