Christian Nationalist Tries to Push Trump Prayer on Oklahoma Schools

Oklahoma’s state superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, wants every teacher in the state to show a video message from him to their classes which shows him praying for Donald Trump. 

Unfortunately for Walters, the state attorney general says that he can’t require students to watch the video, which also announces the creation of a new Department of Religious Freedom and Patriotism, and at least seven of Oklahoma’s school districts say they won’t show it. 

“There is no statutory authority for the state schools superintendent to require all students to watch a specific video,” Phil Bacharach, a spokesman for the Oklahoma attorney general’s office, told The Oklahoman. “Not only is this edict unenforceable, it is contrary to parents’ rights, local control and individual free-exercise rights.”

On Thursday night, Walters sent out an email to Oklahoma’s public school superintendents ordering them to show his one-minute-and-24-second video to students. The email contained several grammatical errors, with Walters writing, “We are in a dangerous time for this country. Student’s [sic] rights and freedoms regarding religious liberties are continuously under assault.”

Walters wrote in the email that the new department “will be working to thwart any attempts to disrupt our Oklahoma student’s [sic] fundamental freedoms.” The video closed with a prayer (which he said students did not have to participate in) where Walters asked for blessings on “President Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country.”

But the superintendents of the Edmond, Mustang, Moore, Norman, Owasso, Tulsa, and Midwest City–Del City public school districts said they would not be showing the video, rebuffing Walters.

On the same day, the state superintendent announced that 500 Bibles had been purchased for Oklahoma’s public schools for about $25,000, despite the fact that lawsuits have been filed over Walters’s attempts to integrate Bibles into school curriculum. Walters’s Bible specifications have also been attacked, as only one Bible seemed to fit the specific requirements: Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bible. 

Walters’s video and Bible purchases are only his latest attempts to push Christian nationalism in Oklahoma’s public schools, and like his other efforts, are legally questionable at best. After Trump’s election and the GOP’s takeover of Congress, though, Walters is probably feeling quite emboldened to ramp up his agenda.   

Ron DeSantis just can’t seem to drop the wannabe Trump routine. 

The Florida governor will stage an Apprentice-style “extensive vetting” process to determine a replacement for Senator Marco Rubio, who is expected to serve as Donald Trump’s secretary of state pending confirmation. 

“We have already received strong interest from several possible candidates … with a selection likely made by the beginning of January,” DeSantis wrote on X. “Florida deserves a Senator who will help President Trump deliver on his election mandate, be strong on immigration and border security, take on the entrenched bureaucracy and administrative state, reverse the nation’s fiscal decline, be animated by conservative principles, and has a proven record of results.”

DeSantis’s pick will serve until 2026.  Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez, Attorney General Ashley Moody, former Florida House Speaker Jose Oliva, and chief of staff James Uthmeier have all been floated as possible replacements for Rubio.

This is yet another example of DeSantis’s weak Trump impersonation, a futile attempt to sell himself to the MAGA base. He took the same position on Ukraine as Trump, has railed against critical race theory and transgender children, claimed that slavery was beneficial to personal development, and even tried standing like the president-elect. 

And yet DeSantis has received nothing for his mimicry, not even Cabinet position. The governor continues to fade into the GOP ether as conservatives continue to choose the real thing.

Donald Trump is going after Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, weeks after she published a preelection poll that found Kamala Harris had “leapfrogged” the former president 47 to 44 percent in Iowa.

“A totally Fake poll that caused great distrust and uncertainty at a very critical time. She knew exactly what she was doing,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Sunday.

“Thank you to the GREAT PEOPLE OF IOWA for giving me such a record breaking vote, despite possible ELECTION FRAUD by Ann Selzer and the now discredited ‘newspaper’ for which she works. An investigation is fully called for!”

Selzer’s poll had anticipated that Harris would lead Trump by three points in the state. In reality, he won Iowa by 13 points, making for a 16-point error. Until now, Selzer & Co. had been considered the gold standard of polling in the country.

Some have speculated that the Selzer poll’s failure to align with the actual results was because the poll had too many Democrats and college-educated voters. While Selzer’s philosophy of not correcting for these factors has worked in previous election years, this time it accounted for major differences from the outcome of the presidential election in the key swing state.

Trump shared a link to an op-ed Selzer wrote Sunday in The Des Moines Register, which had published her Iowa poll, announcing that she would be moving on from polling altogether.

“Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities,” Seltzer wrote. “Would I have liked to make this announcement after a final poll aligned with Election Day results? Of course.”

After Iowa was called for Trump, his campaign gloated about the win—and called out the pollster by name. “Starting on Day 1 President Trump and Vice President JD Vance will help to ease costs, secure the border, and protect Social Security for retirees like Ann Selzer,” the campaign said in a statement.

While Selzer’s poll wasn’t an accurate predictor of the outcome in that state, it’s far from illegal for a poll to be wrong, and the president-elect’s penchant for targeting those who publish unflattering things about him is cause for serious concern.

“Welcome to the authoritarian weaponization of the state and waste of taxpayer $ on vanity crusades: Anyone whose work seems to criticize the leader or produce results that he does not like must be investigated,” authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned on X.

An authoritarianism scholar sounded alarm bells that Donald Trump’s incoming Cabinet nominees will do far more than usher a new conservatism into the federal government. Instead, they’ll challenge the system to the point of rendering federal agencies practically ineffective and vulnerable to complete dismantling.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder insisted that Trump’s nominees to lead the executive branch aren’t just “poor choices in the traditional sense.”

“Each of them individually is historically bad,” said Snyder. “But taken together, these are not people who are going to be bad at their jobs in some sort of normal sense. Taken together, these appointments suggest an attempt to actually make the American government dysfunctional, to make it fall apart, to pervert it, to have it do things that it’s not supposed to do until it’s not capable of doing anything at all.”

For instance, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence, former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, regularly amplifies Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories. Her role would have her oversee 18 intelligence agencies, but critics—even in the House Intelligence Committee—have drawn attention to the danger of her nomination considering her particular affinity for foreign dictators such as Syrian President Bashar Al Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Responding to a clip of Gabbard from February 2022—shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine—in which the former Democrat claimed that Ukraine should “embrace the spirit of Aloha” and relinquish any military alliances with NATO or Russia, Snyder argued that “it’s not just that these people are not qualified enough.”

“It’s not just that they’re totally unqualified, it’s that they’re anti-qualified. They are qualified to do the opposite of the thing that they are supposed to do,” Snyder said.

“Tulsi Gabbard is talking about a moment when Russian forces are approaching the Ukrainian capital. When Russian assassination squads are attempting to kill the Ukrainian head of state, and she’s advising people that all we have to do is summon up a magic word, and in effect surrender all of Ukraine to Russia,” Snyder continued. “And it’s not naïve. It sounds naïve but it’s not. What it’s doing is trying to prepare the way for more Ukrainian suffering. It’s saying, he who invades is right.”

Donald Trump and his allies have characterized the 2024 election as an overwhelming victory—and a mandate for shock politics, mass deportations, and the transformation of the country’s foreign and domestic policy. There’s just one problem: They didn’t actually win by much. 

CNN’s Harry Enten reports that Trump is now under 50 percent for the popular vote, and his margin is the forty-fourth worst out of 51 presidential elections since 1824. Four Democrats won Senate seats in states that Trump won (Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada), compared to zero in the 2016 and 2020 elections. And while Republicans held onto their House majority, if results hold, their 221–214 margin will be the smallest majority in the 50-state era. 

Trump’s appointments are not going to help with the House’s Republican majority, with many of Trump’s choices being elected GOP members. These include Representatives Elise Stefanik as his U.N. ambassador, Mike Waltz as his national security adviser, and Matt Gaetz (who has already resigned) as his attorney general, among others. 

Republicans will point out that Trump in 2024 became the first GOP presidential candidate to win the popular vote since 2004 and the second since 1988, but he will arrive in office with a narrow majority in the Senate as well—just a three-seat majority if Democratic Senator Bob Casey loses his seat, which he looks likely to.  

Trump will have a hard time passing his legislative agenda in either house of Congress, although some on his team have signaled alternative means of getting what he wants, in the form of recess appointments. Trump’s dangerous plan for mass deportations wouldn’t even need congressional approval: He wants to involve the U.S. military by declaring a national emergency. And if Congress wants to stop him on this or any other action, it would take an overwhelming majority, which, no matter how weak his mandate, isn’t likely to happen.