In the 2020s, as the United States is being taken over by a literal dangerous cult (the white Christian nationalist movement centering around Donald J. Trump)

I mean, I'd go so far as to argue the US has always been a government of, by, and for religious extremists of one strip or another. Occasionally, those extremists break in a favorable way (abolitionism, environmentalism, anti-war movements). But by and large, its been the 30 Years War for nearly 250 years around here.

Trump is the latest incarnation of Christian Radicalism. But you can find guys just like Trump echoing through every banana republic governorship and tin-pot mayoralty going back to the Mayflower landing. The flip side of the coin is just Obama's Moderate Rebels - the Black Baptists and Unitarians and Reform Jews and Liberal Catholics - who think Trumpism on paper is fine (immigrants bad, LGBTQ weird, education not sufficiently privatized, young people music makes me angry, brown foreigners are an existential threat), he just took things too far / executed them too sloppily.

This all stems from the font of infinite money - the big banks and the federal treasury - ultimately resting in the hands of religious leadership. Big Protestant/Catholic run banks like Blackrock and JP Morgan and Bank of America earmark billions toward their religious institutions and bankroll a host of sectarian social services to create a patronage network of millions.

Meanwhile, actual elected officials are all products of their religious communities. Mitt Romney is literally a Mormon Bishop, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis are inducted members into Opus Dei, big chunks of the House are ranking members in their local Christian mystery cults, even the "good ones" like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are ultimately just proxies for their local mosques.