A toxic, racist, far-right response to Harmeet Dhillon’s Monday-night Sikh prayer at the Republican national convention is just one sign of the difficulties Donald Trump and Republicans have in selling a more diverse version of Trumpism to the party’s base.
Social media posts following Dhillon’s prayer indicated that some far-right Trumpists had been polarized by the sight of a non-Christian form of religious devotion on the convention stage in Milwaukee.
The barrage of hate she received from a segment of fellow Trump supporters may have been especially galling to Dhillon, whose earliest public prominence was as a civil rights lawyer defending turban-wearing Sikh men from post-9/11 racial profiling.
At the same time, Dhillon’s benediction showed how far the California lawyer and Republican national committeewoman has ascended in the Trump movement, where she is now a serious player.
In a decade, Dhillon has gone from a serial Bay Area political candidate to a well-remunerated member of Trump’s stable of top lawyers, an integral part of the post-Maga Republican party’s power structure, and a star of conservative media.
The case of Dhillon – whose firm has banked $8.25m from Maga Pacs for its assistance in Trump’s myriad legal battles – illustrates the tensions that may arise as Trump’s personal loyalties, and his attempts to expand his voter base, run up against the racial and religious prejudices of elements of his existing coalition.
The Guardian emailed Dhillon for comment on this reporting but received no response.
Prayer greeted with hate
Perhaps the earliest response to Dhillon’s prayer came from white nationalist and antisemitic activist Nick Fuentes, who said of the prayer in his live stream of the convention’s first night: “This is blasphemy. This is total blasphemy. Oh, fuck off. What a joke.”
In his post-stream summary, Fuentes, who leads the so-called “Groyper” movement under the slogan “Christ is King”, added that “Jesus Christ needs to be front and center,” and said: “Jesus saved Trump’s life on Saturday and no one wants to give him credit at this convention.”
Fuentes came to broader notoriety after he attended an infamous November 2022 dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club with his then-employer Ye, the singer formerly known as Kanye West.
Fuentes’s acolytes followed suit. As the prayer was ending, an X account associated with the Fuentes-aligned “America First” website posted: “RNC promotes blasphemy and Sikh idolatry moments after Lutheran benediction.”
The far-right podcaster and internet personality Stew Peters took a similar line on X, posting: “Day 1 of the RNC was complete with satanic chants and multiple prayers to FALSE GODS.”
Peters is known for his conspiracy theories on Covid and vaccines, outspoken Christian nationalism, and antisemitic rhetoric. On X and other platforms, Peters has freely advocated antisemitic narratives including Holocaust denial.
The Gab founder, antisemite and self-proclaimed “Christian nationalist” Andrew Torba posted a screenshot of a supportive reply to a Dhillon post on her prayer from a Jewish American with the line: “Your Judeo-GOP, sir.”
Lauren Witzke, meanwhile, posted video of a part of Dhillon’s speech with the caption, “How about you get deported instead, you pagan blasphemer,” adding: “God saves our president and the RNC mocks him with this witchcraft.”
Witzke is a far-right political activist and one-time Republican Senate candidate who has promoted anti-LGBTQ+ positions, the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, and various antisemitic tropes, including that Jews control government, academia and the media, and that they have a divided loyalty between America and Israel.
Others, members of the Republican hard right and conservative media stars were similarly unimpressed, though less direct in criticizing Dhillon.
Matt Walsh, the host of The Matt Walsh Show on Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire platform, is known for inflammatory expressions of traditionalist Christian positions on cultural, religious and political issues, especially in relation to LGBTQ rights.
On Tuesday, he complained: “Trump has never had more momentum or good will and the RNC decided to use that to push a message of diversity and inclusivity rather than using it to advance anything resembling a conservative agenda.”
The lawyer and Blaze Media host Daniel Horowitz, notable for his fixation on immigration at the southern border, called Monday a “night of endless racial and ethnic pandering, union communism not just populism, and a porn star. This is going to be a long haul.”
Other convention speakers included the Teamsters union president, Sean O’Brien, and Amber Rose Levonchuck, known professionally as Amber Rose, who has appeared in hip-hop videos.
Carol M Swain posted that “I’m just say … The God of Abraham, Issac [sic], and Jacob would oppose interfaith chapels and the blending of worship across deities,” followed by an extended Bible quote.
Swain is a former professor at Princeton and Vanderbilt Universities and remains a conservative public intellectual. Swain, who is African American, attracted student protests in the years leading up to her retirement in 2017 over publicly stated views on Islam (“an absolute danger to us and our children”) and Black Lives Matter (which she said was “misleading black people”).
Maga maven, Maga money
Dhillon’s appearance thus appeared to divide a Maga movement which had come to see her as one of its tribunes.
That status ultimately derived from her litigation on behalf of leading Trump movement figures, including Trump himself, and media savvy lawsuits targeting movement bugbears and defending rightwing activists.
Through her firm Dhillon Law and the non-profit Center for American Liberty, where she serves as chief executive, Dhillon has brought suit on behalf of rightwing internet personalities including Andy Ngo and Rogan O’Handley, known online as “DC Draino”.
During the Covid pandemic, Dhillon pushed back on lockdowns and mask mandates, launching a flotilla of suits in California that named leading Democrats including Governor Gavin Newsom as defendants.
She parlayed all of this into brand-building media appearances, and became a regular on Fox News programs hosted by Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, until the latter was dropped by the network.
About the time of Carlson’s exit, Dhillon went from being his regular guest to a go-to lawyer, reportedly acting for him in the discrimination case that led up to his ouster, in a 2023 dispute with Fox itself , and against a Pac proposing to draft the former host for the 2024 presidential election.
Dhillon has acted directly for Trump in several high-profile cases. Her firm, Dhillon Law, represented Trump and acolytes including Michael Flynn and Sebastian Gorka in their interactions with Congress’s January 6 committee, to which Trump refused to testify. Her firm also represented Trump at the supreme court in January after courts in Maine and Colorado struck him from the state’s presidential ballots in 2023.
Advocacy for Trumpist causes has won Dhillon the prominence that booked her spot on the convention stage, as well as millions of dollars for her firm.
The most recent Federal Election Commission figures indicate that Dhillon Law has received over $10.4m in legal fees to date from Republican campaign committees.
All of those payments came after 2019, and the bulk – some $8.1m – has been paid since 2023, the year of her campaign to displace Ronna McDaniel as RNC chair. That campaign failed to oust McDaniel, but endeared her further to Trumpist conservatives who blamed McDaniel for Trump’s loss in 2020 and the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterms.
A whopping $8.25m of the total has come from Trump-related Pacs, reportedly making Dhillon one of the highest-paid of Trump’s many lawyers.
Another big client is the Republican National Committee Dhillon sits on, which has paid the firm nearly $1.8m since 2019, despite Dhillon serving as RNC committeewoman for California since 2016, and has coincided with Dhillon’s ascent to national prominence and Trumpworld’s inner circle.
The culture-wars suits have also channeled money to Dhillon Law. The Guardian previously reported that the Center for American Liberty, where Dhillon is chief executive, had paid Dhillon Law $1.3m since its founding, making the firm its single biggest contractor.
At that time, Joan Harrington, a fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the Santa Clara University, called the arrangement a “conflict of interest”.
A filing subsequent to that reporting indicates that the non-profit paid Dhillon Law an additional $269.864 in 2022, bringing the total to over $1.5m.
Meanwhile, while the Monday night event tried to represent Trump supporters as more diverse than the largely white bloc who have hitherto voted for the president, the response to Dhillon’s prayer suggests that a swath of rightwing opinion will volubly resist that becoming a reality.
