Why Glenn Beck Is Sorry About Donald Trump
Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck  looks like the dad in a Disney movie.  He ’s earnest  geeky  pink  and slightly bulbous.  His  idea of salty language is bullcrap. The atmosphere at  Beck’s  Mercury Studios  outside Dallas  is similarly soothing  provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October  when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility  I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program  which airs on  Beck ’s website  theblaze.com. On the way  we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck  complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout. On one side of the main stage hung a drawing of an old pickup truck  captioned “Edward Janssen Farms.” (Janssen was Beck’s maternal grandfather; Beck’s family sells a line of American-made clothing that bears the Janssen name.) Over the truck  in large type  was the word honor. On the other side of the stage sat an old-fashioned radio and a comfy blue armchair. The scene was warmly reassuring  except for the television offstage  which was blaring an advertisement for a year’s worth of “emergency survival food” to be consumed in case society unravels.
 Beck  asked an audience member to lead a prayer  then filming started. Someone asked  “How do we get people to come together?”  Beck  responded by citing a book called Pendulum  which argues that as the result of generational change  history shifts in 40-year cycles between “me” eras and “we” eras. In 2003  he explained  America entered a “we” era  a time when individual identity weakens and group identity strengthens. “ ‘We’ generations ”  Beck  declared  produce “genocidal monsters”: The past three “we” generations coincided with the French and American revolutions  Karl Marx and the Civil War  and the Holocaust. Americans can survive the coming “onslaught ”  he  reassured  his  viewers  but to do so will require great character.  He  mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer  who was hanged for resisting the Nazis.  He  invoked Gandhi  who fasted in an effort to prevent India’s Hindus and Muslims from murdering each other. Then  Beck  stopped for a commercial break  during which  he  chatted amiably with  his  audience about the impending collapse of America’s banks. Later in the show  a questioner suggested that Americans were turning away from God.  Beck  said  he ’d been thinking a lot about the prophet Jeremiah  who vainly warned the Israelite kings that catastrophe was near. Finally  when the Babylonians were about to sack Jerusalem  Jeremiah urged the Israelites to accept national enslavement  because it was God’s will.  Beck  saw a contemporary lesson: “Sometimes you have to pay the price for what you’ve done.” Then  he  started talking about Donald Trump’s assault on the Bill of Rights.
Amidst the misery of the 2016 presidential campaign   Beck  showed unusual courage. Many conservative pundits opposed Trump. But they mostly worked for mainstream media institutions like The New York Times  The Washington Post  MSNBC  and CNN. They didn’t rely on Trump supporters to pay their salary. Conservative talk-show hosts  who stoke right-wing populism for a living  reacted very differently. Sean Hannity appeared in one of Trump’s campaign videos. Laura Ingraham spoke at the Republican National Convention. Rush Limbaugh declared in March that  “with the case of Trump  there’s a much bigger upside than downside.” In July  Hugh Hewitt wrote  “Of course I am voting for Donald Trump.” Even the most moralistic conservative talkers—including William Bennett and Dennis Prager  who have made careers of arguing that private character is key to political leadership—endorsed Trump. Mark Levin  who hosts a popular show on the Westwood One radio network  vowed not to. “Count me as Never Trump ” he declared in April. But in September he announced  “I’m voting for Trump.” Among big-time national conservative talk-show hosts  Beck—who is tied with Levin for the third-largest listenership after Limbaugh and Hannity—was a rare exception. He didn’t just oppose Trump. He compared him to Hitler. He warned that Trump was a possible “extinction-level event” for American democracy and capitalism. In an attempt to defeat Trump   Beck  campaigned during the primaries for Ted Cruz. Then  when Cruz endorsed Trump   Beck  apologized for having supported him.
One longtime sponsor of  Beck ’s radio show reportedly tried to pull its ads in protest. In May  SiriusXM briefly suspended  Beck  for implying that if Congress wouldn’t stop a President Trump  Americans might have to do so by force. Nonetheless   Beck  held firm in  his  opposition.  He  considered voting for Hillary Clinton  but ultimately went for the independent candidate Evan McMullin. Why? The answer lies in the very catastrophizing that makes  Beck  sound like a kook. In the mid-1990s   Beck  was  by  his  own account  a “despicable human being ” a divorced  alcoholic  drug-addicted shock jock for a Connecticut radio station.  He  once put on a banana suit and leaped into a pool of Styrofoam.  He  repeatedly considered suicide. Eventually  Beck  got sober and fell in love with the woman who would become  his  second wife. But she refused to marry  him  until they found a religion. So the couple embarked on a “church tour” and were baptized as Mormons in 1999. Many Americans revere the Constitution. Mormons like  Beck  consider it sacred. For a time   Beck  remained apolitical. “I didn’t pay attention to anything until September 11  nothing  nothing ”  he  explained to me after the taping  as we sat in  his  office. “I couldn’t have told you the Bill of Rights in any great detail.”  He  describes 9/11 as “a turning point for me.”  He  was by then hosting a show in New York  and remembers walking from Ground Zero to  his  studio and reading on air a 19th-century hymn written by a Mormon pioneer fleeing Missouri on  his  way to Utah.  Beck  says  he  felt a special calling at that moment. “If you have a position on the gate and you don’t warn the people of what you see ”  he  remembers thinking  “you’re to blame.”
Ever since   Beck  has imagined  himself  as a sentry perched on the national ramparts  warning of looming disaster. Usually  that disaster manifests itself as a threat to the Constitution. Which  given Mormon history  makes perfect sense. Many Americans revere the Constitution. Mormons  however  consider it sacred. In Doctrine and Covenants  a book of Mormon scripture  God says  “I have established the Constitution of this land by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.” According to polling by David Campbell  a Notre Dame political scientist  94 percent of American Mormons believe that the “Constitution and the Bill of Rights are divinely inspired.” That’s only two points lower than the percentage who believe that the Book of Mormon is. But Mormons don’t just consider the Constitution sacred. They believe that its violation has allowed their persecution. Why did the governor of Missouri in 1838 call for Mormons to “be exterminated or driven from the State”? Why were Mormons forced to travel halfway across the continent—leaving the borders of what was then the United States—in order to find sanctuary in Utah? Because America’s leaders disregarded the country’s sacred texts. Today  many Mormons see defending the Constitution the way many Jews see opposing genocide: as a way of honoring their ancestors and affirming their identity. In recounting his own religious conversion   Beck  told me about a parade that he claimed Mormon settlers held upon reaching Utah  after having been expelled from the United States. “The women carried the Declaration of Independence and the men carried the Constitution ” he said. “And the whole point was that people may let you down  people will violate the principles  but the principles are true.” Such a parade likely never happened. Two scholars of Mormonism told me they had never heard of it. But the story nonetheless illustrates the Constitution’s centrality to  Beck ’s identity  and to the identity of many Mormons. According to legend  the Mormon leader Joseph Smith prophesied in 1843 that the Constitution would one day “hang by a thread” and be saved by “the elders of Zion ” by which he meant Mormon men. Church authorities say the quote is apocryphal. Campbell’s polling  however  finds that a majority of Mormons believe it’s true. And yet  Campbell argues  Mormons tend not to accentuate these views publicly. Mormon culture  he told me  emphasizes a “moderate way of speaking.” Think Mitt Romney or Orrin Hatch. Campbell  who is Mormon himself  says that’s in part because many Mormons are desperate to be accepted by a mainstream that has long rejected them. They’re fearful of looking like fanatics or nuts.
 Beck  is not. Perhaps because  he  converted to Mormonism as an adult   he  never imbibed  his  co-religionists’ anxiety.  He  has publicly invoked Smith’s alleged prophecy at least five times  most recently in March. Warning Utah voters of the threat Trump posed   Beck  reminded them that “the body of the priesthood is known to stand up when the Constitution hangs by a thread.” More problematically for liberals   Beck  invoked the prophecy three times in late 2008 and early 2009 to describe Barack Obama. This is the irony underlying  Beck ’s current stance: The same doomsday sensibility that helps him appreciate the menace posed by Trump led him to massively exaggerate the menace posed by Obama—and thus to breed the hateful paranoia on which Trump now feeds.  Beck   in fact  pioneered some of Trump’s most disturbing themes. At the beginning of Obama’s first term   Beck  repeatedly called the president antiwhite. In 2010   he  wondered why Obama “needlessly throws  his  hat into the ring to defend the Ground Zero mosque.  He  hosts Ramadan dinners  which a president can do. But then you just add all of this stuff up— his  wife goes against the advice of the advisers  jets to Spain for vacation. What does she do there? She hits up the Alhambra palace mosque. Fine  it’s a tourist attraction. But is there anything more to this? Are they sending messages?” Trump opponents may appreciate  Beck ’s Hitler analogies now that they’re directed at The Donald. But during the first 14 months of the Obama administration  according to Dana Milbank’s book Tears of a Clown:  Glenn Beck  and the Tea Bagging of America   Beck  and guests on  his  Fox News show invoked “fascism ” “Nazis ” “Hitler ” “the Holocaust” and “Joseph Goebbels” 487 times. For good measure   Beck  in 2007 said that Hillary Clinton sounds like “the stereotypical bitch.”
[TGT]looks like the dad in a Disney movie.  [TGT] ’s earnest  geeky  pink  and slightly bulbous.  [TGT]  idea of salty language is bullcrap. The atmosphere at  Beck’s  Mercury Studios  outside Dallas  is similarly soothing  provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October  when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility  I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program  which airs on  Beck ’s website  theblaze.com. On the way  we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck  complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout. On one side of the main stage hung a drawing of an old pickup truck  captioned “Edward Janssen Farms.” (Janssen was Beck’s maternal grandfather; Beck’s family sells a line of American-made clothing that bears the Janssen name.) Over the truck  in large type  was the word honor. On the other side of the stage sat an old-fashioned radio and a comfy blue armchair. The scene was warmly reassuring  except for the television offstage  which was blaring an advertisement for a year’s worth of “emergency survival food” to be consumed in case society unravels.
 Beck  asked an audience member to lead a prayer  then filming started. Someone asked  “How do we get people to come together?”  Beck  responded by citing a book called Pendulum  which argues that as the result of generational change  history shifts in 40-year cycles between “me” eras and “we” eras. In 2003  he explained  America entered a “we” era  a time when individual identity weakens and group identity strengthens. “ ‘We’ generations ”  Beck  declared  produce “genocidal monsters”: The past three “we” generations coincided with the French and American revolutions  Karl Marx and the Civil War  and the Holocaust. Americans can survive the coming “onslaught ”  he  reassured  his  viewers  but to do so will require great character.  He  mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer  who was hanged for resisting the Nazis.  He  invoked Gandhi  who fasted in an effort to prevent India’s Hindus and Muslims from murdering each other. Then  Beck  stopped for a commercial break  during which  he  chatted amiably with  his  audience about the impending collapse of America’s banks. Later in the show  a questioner suggested that Americans were turning away from God.  Beck  said  he ’d been thinking a lot about the prophet Jeremiah  who vainly warned the Israelite kings that catastrophe was near. Finally  when the Babylonians were about to sack Jerusalem  Jeremiah urged the Israelites to accept national enslavement  because it was God’s will.  Beck  saw a contemporary lesson: “Sometimes you have to pay the price for what you’ve done.” Then  he  started talking about Donald Trump’s assault on the Bill of Rights.
Amidst the misery of the 2016 presidential campaign   Beck  showed unusual courage. Many conservative pundits opposed Trump. But they mostly worked for mainstream media institutions like The New York Times  The Washington Post  MSNBC  and CNN. They didn’t rely on Trump supporters to pay their salary. Conservative talk-show hosts  who stoke right-wing populism for a living  reacted very differently. Sean Hannity appeared in one of Trump’s campaign videos. Laura Ingraham spoke at the Republican National Convention. Rush Limbaugh declared in March that  “with the case of Trump  there’s a much bigger upside than downside.” In July  Hugh Hewitt wrote  “Of course I am voting for Donald Trump.” Even the most moralistic conservative talkers—including William Bennett and Dennis Prager  who have made careers of arguing that private character is key to political leadership—endorsed Trump. Mark Levin  who hosts a popular show on the Westwood One radio network  vowed not to. “Count me as Never Trump ” he declared in April. But in September he announced  “I’m voting for Trump.” Among big-time national conservative talk-show hosts  Beck—who is tied with Levin for the third-largest listenership after Limbaugh and Hannity—was a rare exception. He didn’t just oppose Trump. He compared him to Hitler. He warned that Trump was a possible “extinction-level event” for American democracy and capitalism. In an attempt to defeat Trump   Beck  campaigned during the primaries for Ted Cruz. Then  when Cruz endorsed Trump   Beck  apologized for having supported him.
One longtime sponsor of  Beck ’s radio show reportedly tried to pull its ads in protest. In May  SiriusXM briefly suspended  Beck  for implying that if Congress wouldn’t stop a President Trump  Americans might have to do so by force. Nonetheless   Beck  held firm in  his  opposition.  He  considered voting for Hillary Clinton  but ultimately went for the independent candidate Evan McMullin. Why? The answer lies in the very catastrophizing that makes  Beck  sound like a kook. In the mid-1990s   Beck  was  by  his  own account  a “despicable human being ” a divorced  alcoholic  drug-addicted shock jock for a Connecticut radio station.  He  once put on a banana suit and leaped into a pool of Styrofoam.  He  repeatedly considered suicide. Eventually  Beck  got sober and fell in love with the woman who would become  his  second wife. But she refused to marry  him  until they found a religion. So the couple embarked on a “church tour” and were baptized as Mormons in 1999. Many Americans revere the Constitution. Mormons like  Beck  consider it sacred. For a time   Beck  remained apolitical. “I didn’t pay attention to anything until September 11  nothing  nothing ”  he  explained to me after the taping  as we sat in  his  office. “I couldn’t have told you the Bill of Rights in any great detail.”  He  describes 9/11 as “a turning point for me.”  He  was by then hosting a show in New York  and remembers walking from Ground Zero to  his  studio and reading on air a 19th-century hymn written by a Mormon pioneer fleeing Missouri on  his  way to Utah.  Beck  says  he  felt a special calling at that moment. “If you have a position on the gate and you don’t warn the people of what you see ”  he  remembers thinking  “you’re to blame.”
Ever since   Beck  has imagined  himself  as a sentry perched on the national ramparts  warning of looming disaster. Usually  that disaster manifests itself as a threat to the Constitution. Which  given Mormon history  makes perfect sense. Many Americans revere the Constitution. Mormons  however  consider it sacred. In Doctrine and Covenants  a book of Mormon scripture  God says  “I have established the Constitution of this land by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose.” According to polling by David Campbell  a Notre Dame political scientist  94 percent of American Mormons believe that the “Constitution and the Bill of Rights are divinely inspired.” That’s only two points lower than the percentage who believe that the Book of Mormon is. But Mormons don’t just consider the Constitution sacred. They believe that its violation has allowed their persecution. Why did the governor of Missouri in 1838 call for Mormons to “be exterminated or driven from the State”? Why were Mormons forced to travel halfway across the continent—leaving the borders of what was then the United States—in order to find sanctuary in Utah? Because America’s leaders disregarded the country’s sacred texts. Today  many Mormons see defending the Constitution the way many Jews see opposing genocide: as a way of honoring their ancestors and affirming their identity. In recounting his own religious conversion   Beck  told me about a parade that he claimed Mormon settlers held upon reaching Utah  after having been expelled from the United States. “The women carried the Declaration of Independence and the men carried the Constitution ” he said. “And the whole point was that people may let you down  people will violate the principles  but the principles are true.” Such a parade likely never happened. Two scholars of Mormonism told me they had never heard of it. But the story nonetheless illustrates the Constitution’s centrality to  Beck ’s identity  and to the identity of many Mormons. According to legend  the Mormon leader Joseph Smith prophesied in 1843 that the Constitution would one day “hang by a thread” and be saved by “the elders of Zion ” by which he meant Mormon men. Church authorities say the quote is apocryphal. Campbell’s polling  however  finds that a majority of Mormons believe it’s true. And yet  Campbell argues  Mormons tend not to accentuate these views publicly. Mormon culture  he told me  emphasizes a “moderate way of speaking.” Think Mitt Romney or Orrin Hatch. Campbell  who is Mormon himself  says that’s in part because many Mormons are desperate to be accepted by a mainstream that has long rejected them. They’re fearful of looking like fanatics or nuts.
 Beck  is not. Perhaps because  he  converted to Mormonism as an adult   he  never imbibed  his  co-religionists’ anxiety.  He  has publicly invoked Smith’s alleged prophecy at least five times  most recently in March. Warning Utah voters of the threat Trump posed   Beck  reminded them that “the body of the priesthood is known to stand up when the Constitution hangs by a thread.” More problematically for liberals   Beck  invoked the prophecy three times in late 2008 and early 2009 to describe Barack Obama. This is the irony underlying  Beck ’s current stance: The same doomsday sensibility that helps him appreciate the menace posed by Trump led him to massively exaggerate the menace posed by Obama—and thus to breed the hateful paranoia on which Trump now feeds.  Beck   in fact  pioneered some of Trump’s most disturbing themes. At the beginning of Obama’s first term   Beck  repeatedly called the president antiwhite. In 2010   he  wondered why Obama “needlessly throws  his  hat into the ring to defend the Ground Zero mosque.  He  hosts Ramadan dinners  which a president can do. But then you just add all of this stuff up— his  wife goes against the advice of the advisers  jets to Spain for vacation. What does she do there? She hits up the Alhambra palace mosque. Fine  it’s a tourist attraction. But is there anything more to this? Are they sending messages?” Trump opponents may appreciate  Beck ’s Hitler analogies now that they’re directed at The Donald. But during the first 14 months of the Obama administration  according to Dana Milbank’s book Tears of a Clown:  Glenn Beck  and the Tea Bagging of America   Beck  and guests on  his  Fox News show invoked “fascism ” “Nazis ” “Hitler ” “the Holocaust” and “Joseph Goebbels” 487 times. For good measure   Beck  in 2007 said that Hillary Clinton sounds like “the stereotypical bitch.”