MadowBlog-After Trump claimed to care about church-state separation, his team drops the pretense [View all]

[LetMyPeopleVote]

The week before Christmas, the president asked, “What ever happened to separation of church and state?” It was a question better left to his own team.

Dec. 18: Trump asks, “What ever happened to separation of Church and State?”

Dec. 21: Vance says the U.S. is a “Christian nation.”

Dec. 25: DHS insists that Americans “share a nation and a Savior.”

Maybe Trump’s team can answer his original question? www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-12-29T17:06:00.407Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/after-trump-claimed-to-care-about-church-state-separation-his-team-drops-the-pretense

Seven days later, however, Trump’s question about what became of the separation of church and state took on an even greater significance when his own administration released official statements on the Christmas holiday. My MS NOW colleague Anthony L. Fisher reported:

The Department of Homeland Security, for example, posted two videos to X with ‘Christ is Born!’ as the text. But DHS posted another one that was far more menacing than Christ-like.

With the message ‘Merry Christmas, America. We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior,’ this post featured a 85-second video with hundreds of smash cuts of ‘American family’ Christmas imagery, snippets of Charlie Brown and Bruce Willis in ‘Die Hard’ and, of course, Trump iconography.

When a local church celebrates Christmas with a “Rejoice, America, Christ is born!” message, that makes sense. When religious leaders do the same thing, no one is surprised. But when the Department of Homeland Security publishes an official statement, followed by a related official statement in which DHS declares as fact that Americans share “a Savior,” it’s far more problematic — legally, politically, culturally and even theologically — in a pluralistic country with a First Amendment that requires government neutrality on matters of faith......

After all, to hear Team Trump tell it, this is a “Christian nation” in which Americans share a “Savior.” It is a perspective rooted in radical Christian nationalism, in which minority faiths (as well as those who have chosen no religious path) are effectively told, “You’ll be tolerated, but you’re still the Other, relegated to second-class status.”

The week before Christmas, the president rhetorically asked the public, “What ever happened to separation of church and state?” but it was a question better left to his own team, which appears to have fundamentally rejected the constitutional principle.