Shortly before Christmas, at the Turning Point USA convention in Phoenix, I spoke to a young conservative Christian about Israel’s war in Gaza. As I reported in UnHerd, he described how it had undermined his confidence in the MAGA agenda. Since Zoomers like him were getting so much of their news from TikTok and Instagram, he told me, they were seeing the carnage of the Palestinian population unfiltered. The atrocities they saw on their screen stood in tortured juxtaposition to the speeches they heard from politicians about the fundamental goodness of the state of Israel. That contradiction, in turn, appeared as a naked repudiation of the America First principles many of those politicians purported to uphold.

The sentiment echoed what Tucker Carlson had said on stage the night before. Carlson had spoken without equivocation about the immorality of “killing tens of thousands of children,” and how wrong the U.S. government was to support the army that had done it. Carlson, like most of the convention’s attendees, is Christian. The matter is as ethically straightforward to him as Jesus’ teachings in the Beatitudes. The chaotic history of the region, the dueling religious claims, the geopolitics of the Middle East, and the vilification of Palestinians could not obscure this plain moral fact. “Killing people who committed no crime is immoral,” he said, “and you are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise.”

Carlson isn’t the only former Trump cheerleader to see it this way. “I’m not for their foreign wars. I won’t say, ‘Kill everybody in Gaza,’” Marjorie Taylor Greene told a New York Times reporter for a recent story on her break with Trump. Greene has called Israel’s war a genocide.

Like Carlson, Greene is a Christian. The world, to her, is fundamentally a battleground of good and evil. Green’s falling out with the President has largely been over issues with the most basic fault lines between right and wrong, the kinds a child could recognize: genocide, the corrupting influence of tech oligarchs, and the cover-up of an international sex trafficking ring of minors.

Millions of Christian conservatives supported Trump because he was the tool available to them to enact their policy agenda, especially around abortion. They did not mistake him for one of their own. During his first term, liberals regarded the political movement around Trump as a cult of personality, just as conservatives had viewed the movement around Obama before him. But it was never so simple in either case. The coalition around Trump was forged in resentment of liberal elitism, distrust of the political establishment, conventional Republican politicking, the transactional support of corporate lobbies, and other factors. It held together as long as the President delivered for those various constituencies.

But Trump has never been a coalition-builder. He’s a political opportunist with sharp instincts for demagoguery. It should surprise no one that he has failed to juggle the competing demands of his variegated base. He doesn’t care to, because he regards their loyalty as his entitlement rather than something he’s obliged to earn. But their love is not unconditional.

Trump has done almost nothing to fulfill his promises to American workers. His tariffs have inflicted economic pain on Americans without any obvious reward. His policy toward the only major economic engine in the country, Artificial Intelligence, has been to let the tech oligarchs have everything they ask for and to try to constrain states from implementing regulations that could mitigate its job-destroying potential. Even his draconian deportation policy has been watered down by concessions to favored industries like tech, such as his proposal to sell H1-B visas for $100,000 apiece.

Likewise, his populist pretenses have been spectacularly belied by his attention to such concerns as building a White House ballroom and installing marble armrests at a Kennedy Center newly renamed after himself. His callousness has approached Marie Antoinette levels. Even after making the conscious decision to refocus attention on the economic struggles of Americans, he couldn’t stop himself from declaring the issue of affordability a Democratic hoax.

A more calculating politician could perhaps have compensated for this abandonment of key parts of his base with the political benefits derived from the powerful new allies he sold them out for. Obama’s presidency, which saw his transformation from a pitchfork-wielding rabble rouser to celebrity darling of the cultural establishment, was a master class in just such an exchange. But Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen and David Sacks and Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey are not popular figures even among elites, and the economic value they create, while dazzling, does not feel as indispensable to the workings of the real American economy as, for instance, financial services do. Politically, they have little more to offer Trump than money.

Whatever moral advantage Trump once enjoyed over his rivals was a function of his brazen rejection of their pieties and his gift for exposing them as hypocrites. But as progressives have lost their hegemonic grasp on both our politics and our culture, the catharsis he once provided by humiliating them has diminished accordingly. Where he was once a moral anti-hero, he has become a conventional villain. He speaks for no one but himself and the interests he serves are boring and profane. He inspires little more excitement than the politicians like Mitt Romney whom he once lampooned. But Romney at least had the earnestness of his faith to offset his drab corporate slavishness. Trump lacks even that. He can summon nothing to demonstrate that his political horizons extend beyond his personal resentments, his appetite for self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement, and his horniness for power.

Men used to worship figures like Trump — deities who were, among other things, petty, mischievous, devious and self-interested. These were the Greek and Roman gods of a pre-Christian era. They dwelled in the muck of politics and intrigue, they served parochial interests, and they commanded obedience through the force of fear, not example. They were powerful for a time, but the civilizations they ruled over eventually became disenchanted with them. They were supplanted by a Judeo-Christian God who spoke in the language of moral principle and divided the universe into right and wrong. People learned to have a code, and to assess their leaders against it. From thence forward, the most powerful kings in the world had at least to pretend to submit themselves to that code. Their legitimacy depended on it.

Trump is a pagan hero in a Christian world. He has no authority to differentiate between what is right or wrong, only between what serves his purposes and what stands in their way. A figure like this can achieve a great deal, but in time even his most devoted followers see through him. He can create no greater meaning in their lives. He stands for less and less and eventually for nothing. There is no ground beneath his feet. There is only empty space.