American politics tends to produce a limited emotional range, mostly positive, peppered with indignation. But Trump scrawled across the spectrum: not just anger but rage; love and, yes, hate; fear, a political commonplace, and also vengeance. It didn’t feel political. Politicians have long borrowed from religion the passion and the righteousness, but no other major modern figure had channeled the tension that makes Scripture endure, the desire, the wanting that gives rise to the closest analogue to Trumpism: the prosperity gospel, the American religion of winning.
