Trump's biggest 'cheerleader'​ raging over broken promise — and set to strike him down: Religion expert

Evangelical voters who once worshiped President Donald Trump are quietly abandoning the conservative party, a religious expert with close ties to the White House told Raw Story.

Professor J. Derrick Lemons — author of the upcoming book “Trump and the Politics of Prayer: Inside the Spiritual World of His Faith Advisory Team” — told Raw Story that the religious community cannot forgive their president.

“It's not like the cheerleader years of yesteryear,” said the University of Georgia’s Religion department head. “The midterms are not looking good.”

Lemons has devoted his career to studying the influence of Christian pastors on American society, focusing in recent years on their complex and sometimes duplicitous relationship with Trump.

In his 2022 article “The Room Where It Happened: How Evangelical Leaders Used a Closed-Door Meeting to Change Sentiment for Donald J. Trump,” Lemons spoke with Trump's evangelical advisor Reverend Johnnie Moore about a 2016 meeting orchestrated to draw voters to Trump’s side.

"Organizers knew the questions that needed to be asked, and these questions were vetted with candidate Trump in advance,” Lemons wrote. "These staged questions allowed candidate Trump to provide correct answers to the key issues evangelicals cared about...The result is that millions of evangelicals who were on the fence about candidate Trump voted for him.”

And they voted in droves.

Evangelicals comprised a record 26 percent of the electorate in 2016 with more than 80 percent of white born-again voters throwing support behind Trump, according to Time.

Their support continued into 2020, as Lemons explores in his soon-to-be released book about Trump’s Faith Advisory Team's actions ahead of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021.

Those leaders framed Trump’s efforts to remain in the White House as a mandate to “re-Christianize” America — and this prepared them to present Trump’s 2024 return as a resurrection, Lemons argues.

In his interview with Raw Story, Lemons said faith leaders were able to make this pitch because Trump, in his first term, had bucked a political norm: he'd kept his promises to them.

“Trump really delivered some significant wins for evangelicals,” Lemons told Raw Story. “That explains a lot of excitement.”

That’s why, in 2024, roughly 80 percent of evangelical voters were once again willing to vote for a man convicted of fraud, found liable for sex abuse and accused of conspiring to steal an election, Lemons argued.

When Trump promised an isolationist policy — they believed him.

But as gas prices soar, evangelicals’ concerns have come to mirror those of Trump’s top critics, Lemons told Raw Story; that his Defense Department lacks an exit strategy and Iran has only been empowered by U.S. aggression.

“If anything, Iran discovered that they had more control than maybe they even thought they had,” Lemons said, summarizing evangelicals’ views. “What's the end game here?”

Recent polling from Reuters aligns with Lemons’ ear-to-the-ground perspective.

In a June poll, about 54 percent of evangelicals said the war was not in line with their Christian values — and Trump's approval rating among evangelicals stood at just 52.

“He really ran on ‘Isolationism of America’... the next thing you know, you're in a war,” Lemons said. Now, “There's anger in the evangelical community.”