MILWAUKEE — Donald Trump’s “big tent” convention includes the ringleader of the right’s most notorious circus. Rolling Stone ran into Clay Clark, the organizer of the conspiratorial, Christian nationalist road show known as ReAwaken America Tour, eating lunch near the security perimeter for the RNC convention.
Clark — whose roving road show has platformed pardoned-felon Michael Flynn, and hosted a variety of dubious christian “prophets” like Julie Green — has forged ties with the Trump family. Eric Trump has spoken on tour stops, and ReAwaken America even held an event at the Trump Doral resort in Miami, where things got weird, like demon mermaid weird.
The ReAwaken America roadshow has played a significant role in keeping the Trump base mobilized and active in the years since the 2020 election. For better or worse, few Americans have a better finger on the pulse of the often bizarre and baseless ideas and ideologies that motivate the ultra-MAGA set than Clark.
While most right-wingers in Milwaukee are sounding triumphant amid Trump’s many turns of good fortune, Clark is morbid. “I think I just watched the funeral for the Republican Party,” he says, reflecting on the RNC convention.
Clark, who hails from Tulsa, Oklahoma, is deeply religious, and he’s angry that the GOP platform has stripped its usual boilerplate about limiting marriage to heterosexual couples, and softened, slightly, its language on abortion, which Clark describes as a move “away from a pro-life stance.” Clark turns serious: “I think we’re asking for judgment from God.”
The ReAwaken leader also believes that the GOP’s “unity” message is a dire mistake: “Jesus, in the Bible, says he didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword.” Clark says he is “pro-Jesus at all times,” and describes Christ an unpopular figure for “laying hands on the sick, and casting out devils and teaching the Word of God, which was a divisive idea.”
Clark is most troubled by Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his vice presidential candidate. “J.D. Vance was made relevant through the endorsement and funding of Peter Thiel,” Clark says, referring to the Facebook investor and PayPal co-founder who brought Vance into his venture capital firm and later invested millions into Vance’s campaign for Senate.
For Clark, this is a problem that transcends money and politics. In Clark’s conspiratorial worldview, a nefarious group of “globalists” are involved in a dark plot to push what he describes as “a one-world government, the Great Reset, and transhumanism,” a scheme he says also includes “central bank digital currencies, surveillance under the skin, and RNAmodifying nanotechnology.”
Clark also believes that the secretive international Biderberg Group is a key player in the plot of the globalists. And he notes, conspiratorially, that Thiel is listed among the leadership of the organization. “Peter Thiel is part of the steering committee for the Bilderberg Group — and he’s the one steering J.D. Vance.” Feigning enthusiasm Clark adds: “It’s gonna be exciting to have Peter Thiel as Vice President.”
Clark also tells Rolling Stone he’s planning to wind down the ReAwaken tour. “I’ll do one, final one in October,” he says, “just so that people can learn about the Great Reset — and contrast that versus what I would call biblical worldviews.”
He’s had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak on his tour, but don’t expect Clark to cast his ballot for the independent candidate in November. Despite his disappointment, he says he’s still riding the MAGA train, insisting: “I will vote for President Trump.”
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.