In Indiana, the MAGA Revolution Eats Its Own

The Indiana governor’s race should not, under normal circumstances, be remotely competitive. In 2020, Donald Trump won the state by 16 percentage points, and the current governor, Eric Holcomb, a Republican, won by more than 20. All the state’s leading officials are Republicans, and the party has supermajorities in both legislative chambers.

But after the Republican convention this weekend, the influential conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr. wrote, in a confidential memo obtained by Politico’s Adam Wren, that there’s a “serious threat” to the party’s nominee for governor, Senator Mike Braun.

That threat is Micah Beckwith, a Pentecostal pastor, podcaster and self-described Christian nationalist who was just chosen, despite Braun’s wishes, to be his running mate. Ordinarily, The Indianapolis Star reports, convention delegates rubber-stamp their candidate’s choice of lieutenant. But this year, they rebelled, rejecting Braun’s selection, a state representative named Julie McGuire, for Beckwith, who embodies the combative spiritual fervor ascendant among the party’s grass roots. As a result, wrote Bopp, “Democrats have a real opportunity to launch a serious campaign in the fall because of Beckwith’s nomination, and it has already begun.”

Democrats will have plenty of material to work with. The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Beckwith said that God had told him: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” He’s said that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana” and promised that if he wins, he’ll be a thorn in the side of the governor.

Before his victory this weekend, Beckwith was probably best known for leading a campaign to purge the young-adult shelves at the Hamilton East Public Library, where he was a board member until January. (He resigned after a policy he promoted, which removed books that included sex, violence or repeated profanity from a section for teenagers, was reversed.) Braun, wrote Bopp, will be “made to answer” for every statement Beckwith has ever made.

Beckwith’s elevation is the latest sign of a conflict splitting Republican parties nationwide, as G.O.P. activists demand ever greater levels of purity and belligerence from their leaders. I’ve written about this in Minnesota, where delegates to the state convention endorsed the Alex Jones acolyte Royce White for Senate, and in Colorado, where the state party recently called for the burning of Pride flags. Cadres of true believers inspired by Trump and by the religious movement that sees him as divinely ordained are seizing the party from the bottom up, much to the consternation of more traditional Republicans who thought they could indulge the MAGA movement without being overtaken by it.

At times, the forces Trump has helped unleash can be even more powerful than Trump himself. At Braun’s request, the ex-president gave a last-minute endorsement to McGuire, but convention delegates seem not to have taken it seriously. Beckwith supporters “largely saw the Trump endorsement as a last-ditch attempt to influence the race rather than genuine support from the former president, who likely has little notion of the lieutenant governor race in Indiana,” reported The Indianapolis Star. It quoted one delegate saying, of Trump, “This is not something I think he actually vetted.” Trump’s followers want candidates who ape his transgressive style, even if they don’t have his explicit blessing.

The divide within the Republican Party, in Indiana as elsewhere, isn’t really between moderates and conservatives, because almost everyone involved is very right wing. It is, rather, between people who know how to work within the existing system and outsiders who want to overturn it. Bopp, for example, is no RINO squish; he’s the general counsel for National Right to Life and an election denier who in 2020 filed lawsuits challenging election results in four states won by President Biden. If he’s worried, it’s not because Beckwith is an extremist but because he’s an extremist who might threaten Republican power.

In other words, Beckwith’s nomination is an example of the MAGA revolution eating its own. On the podcast he co-hosts, “Jesus, Sex and Politics,” he explained why he doesn’t feel bound by what Ronald Reagan called his “11th commandment”: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican. “Remember,” Beckwith said, “Republicans back then weren’t champions of Communism.”

A Republican Party in disarray is obviously good news for Democrats, whose candidate for governor, an ex-Republican named Jennifer McCormick, is already using Beckwith to raise money. Mike Schmuhl, the chair of the Indiana Democratic Party, said that Braun’s inability to get his preferred running mate elected by his own party undermines his branding as a can-do businessman. “I think it makes him look weak,” Schmuhl said. “I think it makes the Republicans look splintered.”

But even if you like watching the craven Republican establishment squirm, the growing political power of figures like Beckwith is still ominous. After all, even if Democrats now have an opening, Braun and Beckwith are still the favorites.

And many of Beckwith’s views are thoroughly mainstream among Republicans. According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2023 American Values Atlas, 55 percent of Trump supporters are Christian nationalists, as measured by their agreement with statements like “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” The Christian right increasingly sees American politics as zero sum, meaning it is going to either triumph or face subjugation. As Justice Samuel Alito was recorded saying, “One side or the other is going to win.”

So Beckwith is channeling something widespread in his party when he presents politics as a Manichaean battle in which compromise is impossible. “We are in a season of war right now,” he said on a right-wing Christian podcast called “For the King.” “People need to wake up, or else this mental and heart battle that we find ourselves in culturally, it will lead to bullets and bombs. It’s just a matter of time.”

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