Donald Trump Jr., Iran, and the Right-Wing Obsession with the Crusades | GQ

The company also displays an overt affinity for far-right extremism: in one poster the company sells, entitled “Not Today Antifa,” a scene depicts men armed with automatic rifles confronting masked protesters. The text above the scene: “Berkeley Portland Charlottesville Boston: Not Today Antifa.” It’s an explicit, gun-happy appeal to far-right extremists at the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and their sympathizers.

This isn’t the first time far-right violence has come enrobed in Crusader imagery. In particular, white supremacists online have spread the “Deus Vult” slogan through memes, posts, and screeds. During the 2016 election, “Deus Vult” became a rallying cry on Twitter for supporters of then-candidate Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States. This week, just days after Trump Jr.’s Instagram post, a teenager in Delaware threw an incendiary device—a home-brewed Molotov cocktail—at a Planned Parenthood facility. On the building, he graffitied a clumsy Templar Cross and the words “Deus Vult.” It’s symptomatic of the way that, over and over again, the Crusades emerge as a nexus of white supremacist fascination, a motif folded in to other expressions of grievance—against Muslims, against feminists, against the supposed degeneracy of modern culture. After all, bigotry seems nobler when retrofitted to a millennia-old tradition of holy struggle.

But more pressingly, Trump Jr.’s Instagram post raises an urgent question: just why have we embarked on a new era of Middle Eastern adventurism? War is a lot of things: it’s hell; it’s violence; it’s expensive, ruinous to cities and countries and whole states. For two decades, the United States has been in an endless war on the nebulous concept of “terror” that has upended the Middle East; this week’s incendiary provocations have the potential to escalate the grinding conflict into something even more barbed and devastating. But for some, war is holy—a clash of religion against religion, like the spark of blade on blade. It’s a Knight Templar with an AR-15; it’s Arabic script as a signal of enmity. That’s the signal Donald Trump Jr. was sending, with his snug Crusader gun-helmet. And it may be ensconced even deeper in the halls of power, with those formally entrusted with our nation’s security under the Trump regime.

Recent reporting has indicated that the biggest driving force behind the Solemani strike in the Trump administration was Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State; officials told the Washington Post that Pompeo spoke to Trump daily in the run-up to the strike, coaxing him into this course of action. A prior avoidance of a retaliatory strike on Iran left Pompeo reportedly “morose”; according to a senior U.S. official, Pompeo has been pushing for the Soleimani strike for months. In recent years, Pompeo has openly expressed his fondness for the Rapture, the eschatological doctrine that will see righteous Christians vacuumed from earth to heaven in the end of days; at a rally in 2015, he described life as a “never-ending struggle” until “the Rapture.” These apocalypse-courting views appear to have influenced his views on Iran, specifically. In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he smiled, nodded, and agreed fulsomely when asked whether Donald Trump had been “raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace.” A New York Times reporter who interviewed Pompeo in 2019 found “an open Bible in his office, with a Swiss Army knife marking his place at the end of the book of Queen Esther.”

A Christian Zionist, Pompeo adheres to an ideology in which Israel is a crucial piece in the set-up to the Rapture: the Jews, in their homeland, converting en masse to the doctrine of Jesus is a crucial, prophesied herald of the end times. The story of the Book of Esther takes place in ancient Persia, under the reign of Xerxes I (486–465 BCE), a lascivious, feast-loving king who passively allowed his chief advisor to plot a genocide of the Jews; conflating that decadent and capricious reign with the modern leadership of Iran displays as much Biblical literacy as it does profound disconnect with contemporary geopolitics. Pompeo’s affinity with the Book of Esther seems to indicate that his politics hover in the sacred realm of holy war—where a drone strike can bring the eschaton closer and closer. It’s a stark, Christ-soaked worldview in which Iran is a menace to that long-awaited prophecy—one which prioritizes the prophecies of yore far more than the contemporary lives of unbelievers.