Over the weekend, there was once again an act of horrific violence and once again the president suggested his enemies are to blame. 

According to USA Today, a 40-year-old Marine Corps veteran by the name of Thomas Jacob Sanford rammed his pickup into the side of a Mormon church in a suburb outside Flint, Michigan, open fired with an assault-style rifle and set the building ablaze during Sunday services. 

The news network reported that four victims were killed, eight others wounded or injured. The suspect is dead after exchanging gunfire with police in the church parking lot. Bodies are still being recovered from the ashes of the inferno. The tabernacle is a total loss, authorities said. 

The investigation has only begun, but as he did before the indictment last week of former FBI Director James Comey, Donald Trump has already determined guilt. “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America. THIS EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE IN OUR COUNTRY MUST END, IMMEDIATELY!”

“Epidemic of violence” is how Trump and the GOP are exploiting the memory of a dead demagogue to criminalize speech. Since Charlie Kirk’s murder, they have increasingly conflated legit criticism with violent rhetoric to create conditions justifying crackdowns on dissent. 

Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom characterized the “authoritarian actions by an authoritarian government.” In response, Trump adviser Stephen Miller said “this language incites violence and terrorism.” On Friday, the president signed an executive order that designates liberal groups as “domestic terrorist organizations.” He said, “they are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it.”

Trump’s statement about this weekend’s massacre, issued before the facts of the investigation were fully understood, is in keeping with that objective. By accusing his perceived enemies of inspiring horrific acts of political violence, he creates a pretense for suppressing them.

The available facts, however, are not cooperating with the effort. By all appearances, Thomas Jacob Sanford was at least peripheral to maga. He flew two American flags on poles on the pickup that he used in the attack. He displayed a Trump-Vance sign on his residence. He posted a picture of himself with a “Trump 2020 campaign shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Make Liberals Cry Again,’” The Telegraph reported. Friends told the Times that he was “a right-wing Republican.”

But complicating things more are his views on Mormons. 

He believed they were “the antichrist.” 

That’s according to Burton City Council candidate Kris Johns. He told the Detroit Free Press that he encountered Sanford while canvassing Sanford’s neighborhood. Johns said that while Sanford was “extremely friendly,” his opinion of Mormonism was the “standard anti-LDS talking points that you would find on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook.” (Johns also confirmed the Trump 2024 sign was displayed at Sanford’s residence.)

The newspaper said the more questions Sanford asked Johns about Mormonism, the more pointed the questions got. He asked “about the Mormon bible, the role Jesus plays in the religion, the history of the LDS church and Joseph Smith Jr, the founder of Mormonism and the LDS movement. … Everything Sanford asked him about Mormonism led to Sanford declaring the religion as ‘the antichrist’” (my italics).

I think the most important detail is that Sanford told Johns that Mormonism is the religion of the antichrist after asking Johns if he believed in God and after ascertaining where he went to church. Johns said he is indeed a believer and that he’s a member of Solid Rock Community Church in Burton, a conservative Protestant assembly. I’m guessing here, but that was probably all Sanford needed to begin his rant. It looks like he believed he was speaking to a kindred Christian.

“From there, the conversation takes a very sharp turn,” Johns said.

Why is that the most important detail? Because Trump said “this appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians.” That statement is undoubtedly true – if you believe Mormons are Christians. Trump clearly does, at least so far as Mormons are a key faction of the coalition that elected him. But many Trump supporters, especially the white conservative Protestants among them, do not. 

There is a long history of animosity between them, mostly from the conservative Protestant side. For decades, they regarded Mormons as cultists, heretics or even Satanists. That friction waned sharply after the 1980s, when evangelical Protestant leaders like Jerry Falwell and James Dobson forged LDS alliances to advance their mutual political interests, namely anti-abortion, under the banner of Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes after him. But it never went away. As recently as 2012, Mike Huckabee suggested that GOP candidate Mitt Romney, who is a Mormon, wasn’t really Christian. Then there’s social media. As Kris Johns said, it’s lousy with “anti-LDS talking points.”

Why this spasm of violence now? I don’t think anyone will ever be certain. The investigation may shed some light, but shooters’ motives often don’t add up. (Perhaps the reason is as dumb as Sanford “getting even” with the Mormon who murdered Donald Trump’s “close friend,” Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson, the killer, grew up in a Mormon family.) 

But I think less puzzling is the larger pattern. 

While the Mormons have been a key faction of the Trump coalition, the president himself is consolidating power such that it may seem to some of his supporters that he doesn’t need the Mormons anymore, and that they are free to indulge the religious hatreds of yore. The old fathers of evangelical Protestantism set those hatreds aside so the Mormons could become useful allies in tearing down the wall between church and state. However, to many Trump supporters, Charlie Kirk’s memorial wedded the One True Religion (Christian nationalism) with the One True Leader (Trump). The message? Mission accomplished.

I don’t mean to suggest that Thomas Jacob Sanford was thinking about any of this. (As I said, the motives of shooters often don’t add up.) I do mean to suggest, however, that entering into any agreement with a tinfoil dictator like Donald Trump is fated to end in betrayal, whether you’re a university, a corporation, a farmer or a religious minority. 

In the case of the Mormons, Trump will hasten their betrayal by providing cover for those who no longer see the need to tolerate religious minorities and as a consequence, regard them as expendable. And he will do that by claiming that the epidemic of violence, which is real, comes solely from “the left,” putting his allies deeper in peril.