Trump Press Sec’s Vile New Effort to Exploit Mormon Shooting Backfires

THE DAILY BLAST with Greg Sargent

The New Republic

News, Politics

4.4 • 800 Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Investigators are still examining the motives driving Thomas Jacob Sanford, who opened fire on a Mormon church in Michigan, killing four people. Yet White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt quickly link the killing to an alleged rash of anti-Christian violence. “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians,” Leavitt insisted, amplifying a similar claim by President Trump. Yet this is backfiring: Evidence quickly emerged that the shooter may well be a Trump supporter motivated by anti-Mormon bigotry in particular. While it’s of course possible for someone to be a Trump supporter and also target Christians, Leavitt was plainly trying to turn this to the political advantage of Trump and the MAGA movement, and that’s gone awry. We talked to Sarah Posner, author of good books about the religious right, who explains how this all sheds light on a bigger story that we saw at play after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, too. It’s that Trump-MAGA relentlessly inculcate a sense of persecution among their armies of Evangelical supporters, to rally them for religious war against the Democratic, liberal, secular enemy within. Thus far, in this case, the facts aren’t cooperating. Looking for More from the DSR Network? Click Here: https://linktr.ee/deepstateradio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:01.3	Investigators are still trying to piece together the motives driving Thomas Jacob Sanford,
1:06.7	who drove a truck into a Mormon church on Sunday morning and opened fire, killing four people.
1:12.3	Yet even though little is known about this man, Trump and his press secretary are already linking the killing to what they describe as a much broader outbreak of anti-Christian violence.
1:17.4	Trump is clearly trying to weaponize this horror in a similar way to how the right seized on
1:23.0	the assassination of Charlie Kirk to mobilize right-wing religious passions in a highly damaging way.
1:29.4	If you were better at explaining this type of thing than Sarah Posner, author of several books on the
1:34.5	religious right and the Christian nationalist underpinnings of MAGA.
1:38.2	Sarah, great to have you back on.
1:39.8	Thanks for having me again.
1:41.7	So what we know about Thomas Jacobs-Sanford so far is that he was an Iraq war veteran.
1:46.9	He had a camouflage Trump campaign T-shirt from 2020.
1:50.7	Seems to have had a Trump Pence sign on his backyard fence as late as June.
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