The rise of the Republican apostate

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On Apr. 8, 2020, in the chaotic early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Fox News host Laura Ingraham welcomed a little-known state senator onto her prime time show. With his unmistakable Minnesota accent and an aw-shucks bearing, Scott Jensen, a Republican, was the furthest thing from the typical fire-breathing cable news guest. But the message that he wanted to share was nothing short of explosive.

He told Ingraham that he believed doctors and hospitals might be manipulating the data about COVID-19. He took aim at new guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warning that they could lead medical institutions to inflate their fees. "The idea that we are going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue because we are going to undermine the trust" of the public, he said.

Ingraham's guest offered no evidence or data to back up this serious allegation. Coming from a random state senator, the claim might have been easily dismissed as partisan politics. What gave it the sheen of credibility was his other job: He is a medical doctor.

He would go on to make numerous appearances on far-right conservative outlets. In February of this year, Ingraham invited Jensen back on to her show. Jensen was, in Ingraham's telling, a truth-teller who had been demonized by the media and the left, a medical professional who'd had the temerity to defy the establishment and call out the corruption when he saw it. "You were vilified," Ingraham said. "I was vilified for featuring you."

By that point, Dr. Jensen, 67, had left the state Senate after a single term in office. Instead, he was a leading contender for the Republican nomination for governor of Minnesota. Riding a wave of grass-roots support, he easily won the primary after defeating four other candidates, including the former Republican majority leader of the state Senate, at the party's endorsement convention. Jensen's COVID theories proved central to his message. "I dared to lead when it wasn't popular," he said at the GOP convention. "I dared to lead when it wasn't politically safe."

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At the heart of Scott Jensen's candidacy is a jarring contradiction: a medical doctor at odds with the science of a deadly pandemic. And yet Jensen's self-abnegation captures something essential about the nature of today's Republican Party, its voters and its candidates. Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, is a former journalist who never misses an opportunity to attack the "corrupt, rotten media" that wants to "brainwash" Americans. And there are lawyers like Matthew DePerno, the Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general, who have centered their campaigns on the baseless claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that President Joe Biden is therefore an illegitimate president — in other words, lawyers who are campaigning against the rule of law itself.

It is possible to see Jensen, Lake, DePerno and their ilk as simply pandering to the MAGA base. But their appeal runs deeper than that. They have tapped into an archetype that's almost as old as humanity itself: the apostate. The history of American politics is littered with such figures who left one party or faction for another and who profess to have a righteous knowledge that was a product of their transformation.

Watching Jensen's swift rise from a backbencher to party figurehead and seeing so many other apostates like him on the ballot in 2022, I wanted to know why voters respond so adoringly to them. What about this political moment makes these modern apostates so compelling? Can their rise help explain how the Republican Party has ended up at this dark moment in its history — and where it might be headed next?

The apostate evokes images of a distinctly religious variety. The fourth-century Roman emperor Julian, who pushed to abandon Christianity and return to paganism. Freethinkers tortured and burned at the stake for daring to question the official orthodoxy of their era. And yet for as long as the word apostate has existed, it has possessed a certain allure.

To become one requires undertaking a journey of the mind, if not the soul, a wrenching transformation that eventually leads one to reject what was once believed to be true, certain, sacred. That journey not only requires a conversion of the mind and soul, resulting in glorious righteousness. They've experienced an awakening that few others have, suffered for their awakening, and now believe they see the world for what it is.

You can trace the birth of the modern Republican Party to just such a conversion. Before he was a conservative icon and an evangelist for small government, before he so memorably told the American people that "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem," Ronald Reagan was a "near-hopeless hemophilic liberal," as he would later write in his autobiography. As a young man and an up-and-coming actor, Reagan was a loyal Democrat who could recite Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous "fireside chats" from memory. He embraced FDR's New Deal, the most ambitious social-works program in American history. He campaigned for Richard Nixon's Democratic opponent in a 1950 Senate race. Two years after that, he urged Dwight Eisenhower to run for president on the Democratic ticket.

Yet by the time Reagan embarked on his own political career, he had renounced his liberal past. In his telling, he had no choice but to disavow the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy. "I didn't leave the Democratic Party," Reagan liked to say, "the Democratic Party left me."

This was a clever bit of sloganeering by the future president. It was also the testimony of an apostate.

Reagan's ascent transformed the set of beliefs that underpinned the Republican Party. Lower taxes, limited government, less federal spending: These principles animated the party from Reagan onward; they were canon, inviolate. Stray from them — as George H.W. Bush famously did, raising tax rates after his infamous "read my lips" quip — and the voters cast you out.

After four decades of Reaganism, a new apostate emerged. Like Reagan, Donald Trump had spent much of his life as a Democrat, only to slough off that association and seek elected office as a freshly minted Republican. But what made Trump an apostate was not the mere fact of his switch from one party to the other, a move borne out of convenience and opportunism and not any ideological rebirth in the spirit of Reagan.

Instead, Trump's sacrilege was his willingness to challenge the fundamental premise of America's greatness. Pre-Trump, it was just about mandatory for any Republican (or, for that matter, Democratic) candidate for office to invoke tired clichés about "American exceptionalism" and the "city upon a hill," the paeans to a military that was nothing less than the "finest fighting force" the world had ever seen, and so on.

Trump's trademark slogan — Make America Great Again — put forward the notion that this rah-rah, chest-beating patriotism was wrong. The way he saw it, the country had fallen on hard times, its stature in the world diminished. "We don't win anymore, whether it's ISIS or whether it's China with our trade agreements," he said in early 2015 as he prepared to run for president. "No matter what it is, we don't seem to have it."

No major party had nominated a candidate for the presidency in living memory who had described America in such terms. There was the real possibility that such a dark view might backfire. Yet Trump successfully tapped into the distrust, resentment and grievance that so many Americans had come to feel. This grim mood had its roots in real events: Sept. 11, the grinding war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the housing meltdown and 2008 financial crash, stagnant wages, vast income inequality. Anyone could look around and see a country in trouble. And in the Republican Party especially, fear of a changing country where the white Christian population was no longer the majority and the church no longer central in American life left so many people feeling, as the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild put it, like "strangers in their own land." Little wonder many people responded to a candidate who broke from every other politician and defied so many norms and traditions by speaking directly to that grievance and fear.

Perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise what happened next: As president, Trump did little to fix the problems or allay the fears he'd tapped into as a candidate. Instead, he governed by stoking them. He presented himself as the one and only leader of his political party, the keeper of truth. His opponents — mainly Democrats — were "un-American" and "evil." Court decisions he opposed were a "disgrace" and judges who ruled against him were "putting our country in great danger."

By doing so, he accelerated a rupture already underway within the Republican Party. The principles and ideas that had fueled the party for decades — low taxes, small government, free markets — fell away. In their place, Trump projected his own version of identity politics: He was the party. He was the country. The central organizing force of his presidency was fear of the other. Who better to foment that fear than someone who'd renounced his old ties with that enemy? His success and standing mattered above all else. If democracy didn't deliver what Trump wanted, then democracy was the problem.

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In April, a lawyer named Matthew DePerno appeared before Michigan's Court of Appeals for his latest hearing in a long-running and quixotic legal battle involving the 2020 election result in Antrim County, a tiny community in the northern part of the state.

Antrim had become a rallying cry among Trump supporters who believed human error on election night was in fact evidence of a widespread conspiracy to rig the election for Joe Biden. (The county was initially called for Biden, but after a clerical mistake was caught and corrected, Trump won the county handily.) There was no evidence to support this wild theory, but DePerno refused to give up the fight, spending approximately the past year and a half pushing for that audit.

A judge had dismissed DePerno's suit in a lower court. Now, standing before the appeals court, DePerno argued that the state Constitution gave every citizen of Michigan the right to demand a statewide audit of any election. A lawyer with the Michigan attorney general's office replied that such a theory could mean as many as 8 million audits every election. It would "mean that no election results would ever be final." (The court dismissed DePerno's suit, saying he had "merely raised a series of questions about the election without making any specific factual allegations as required.")

DePerno's argument is extreme. What makes it chilling is that DePerno is the state Republican Party's nominee to be attorney general in the 2022 midterms. As a lawyer, he is one of the most vocal and active figures in the movement to find (nonexistent) evidence of rampant illegality or vote-rigging in the 2020 election. If he wins his election this November, he could play a key role in enforcing — or not — his state's election laws.

A lawyer undermining the fundamental premise of democracy — in a bygone era, such a contradiction might have disqualified a candidate from the outset. But in a Republican Party still in thrall to the former president, DePerno's legal background only enhances his credibility. "He is a killer," Trump said of DePerno, whom he has endorsed. "We need a killer. And he's a killer in honesty. He's an honest, hard-working guy who is feared up here."

Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, has also won Trump's praise with her insistence that Biden is not the lawful president. Lake, too, has drawn on her previous career as a local TV anchor to connect with voters even as she attacks the media's credibility. "I was in their homes for the good times and the bad times," she told the New York Times in an interview. "We've been together on the worst of days, and we've been together on the best of days." In one campaign ad, Lake wields a sledgehammer and smashes a stack of TVs playing cable news. "The media isn't just corrupt," she says in another spot. "They are anti-American."

As for Jensen in Minnesota, despite his lack of evidence, his COVID theories spread widely in a country grasping for solid information about the risk of the coronavirus. He opposed the sitting governor's public-health policies and endorsed unproven treatments such as ivermectin. Jensen has said he has not been vaccinated (he claimed he would get the vaccine if he did not already have antibodies from a minor case of COVID-19 even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's guidelines recommend the vaccine in such cases). He also added his name to a lawsuit filed by a group of vaccine-skeptic doctors seeking to block 12- to 15-year-olds from receiving the shots. Those stances elevated him from an obscure family physician to a sought-after voice in a budding movement.

Soon, the idea of an inflated death or case count had become gospel on the far right. Trump retweeted a QAnon supporter who argued that only 6% of COVID-related deaths counted by the CDC were due to the coronavirus itself. Trump also retweeted a popular conservative pundit who had asked: "Do you really think these lunatics wouldn't inflate the mortality rates by underreporting the infection rates in an attempt to steal the election?"

Jensen's popularity almost surely would not have been possible without the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of people were primed to distrust the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci. They didn't want to believe that locking down civil society was one of the best tools for slowing the spread of the virus and saving lives. When a doctor — one who sometimes wears a white lab coat in his public appearances — showed up on their television screens telling them that the medical establishment was lying to them, they had a strong motivation to believe him.

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Lake, DePerno, Jensen — what do these apostate candidates tell us? For one, the apostate's path usually brings a degree of suffering, a requisite for traveling the path from darkness to enlightenment. But these candidates have mostly avoided that fate, with the party faithful rewarding them for their political opportunism masquerading as bravery. While polls suggest that Jensen faces long odds to win in the general election, Lake is a competitive candidate with a strong chance of winning in Arizona, and DePerno has narrowed the gap in his race to unseat Michigan's attorney general, Dana Nessel.

The fact that these three politicians got as far as they did catches something about this political moment. The real danger posed by many of today's apostate candidates is that they don't want to start a debate about bigger or smaller government. They seemingly have no desire to battle over tax policy or environmental regulation. Trump and Trumpism caused a disruption in American politics — and this may be the 45th president's legacy — that made such clashes over ideology and policy electorally meaningless.

It's why Ivy League graduates like U.S. Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz play dumb and feed into election denialism. As Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant and former leader of the Lincoln Project, told me, Trumpism makes ignorance a virtue and rewards fealty as a principle. Fighting the right villains — the "Marxist" left, medical experts, woke corporations — matters more than any well-crafted policy. The Republican Party led by Trump and his loyal followers is now an organization that will reduce to rubble any institution that stands between it and the consolidation of power.

The election of these apostates could see this governing style, as it were, come into practice across the nation. Governors' mansions would be a new frontier, with potentially enormous consequences. A Gov. Jensen could, for example, pack his state's medical licensing board (which he says has investigated him five times) with his own nominees and refuse to implement any statewide public-health measures in the event of another COVID-19 outbreak. A Gov. Lake could approve new legislation to eliminate mail-in voting and the use of ballot-counting machines; come 2024, she could refuse to sign any paperwork certifying the results of the election to appease her party's most die-hard supporters. An Attorney General DePerno in Michigan, meanwhile, could open criminal investigations into sketchy, unproven claims of election fraud.

In the starkest of terms, the rise of these apostate politicians shows how the modern GOP has become more a countercultural movement than a political party of ideas, principles and policies. It reveals how deeply millions of Americans have grown suspicious of the institutions that have made this country the envy of the world — medicine, the rule of law, the Fourth Estate. It's "a rejection of modernity, rejection of social progress, rejection of social change," says Madrid, whose criticism of Trump and the MAGA movement turned him into an apostate himself.

There are few more powerful messages in human psychology than that of the apostate: Believe me. I used to be one of them. But the new apostates of the Republican Party have shown no interest in using their credibility to reimagine their party just as Reagan did all those years ago. Indeed, the Republican Party may be just another institution that totters and falls on account of these candidates. If Jensen, Lake and DePerno get into office and make good on their word, the crises facing the country will reach far beyond the Republican Party.

Andy Kroll is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of "A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy." This article first appeared in the New York Times.