Trump-loving evangelicals don't want Mike Pence as president because he has too much 'decency': WaPo columnist

Washington Post columnist Elizabeth Bruenig this week talked with Ana Marie Cox on her "With Friends Like These" podcast about how evangelical Christians have an almost apocalyptic fervor for supporting President Donald Trump.

Bruenig, who is herself a practicing Catholic, earlier this year traveled to her home state of Texas to get a sense of how evangelicals were feeling about politics headed into 2020.

What she found, she told Cox, was a group of Christian conservatives who are even more devoted to the president than they were just three years ago when they helped power his electoral college victory.

One of the most interesting things that Bruenig found during her trip was why evangelicals said they now prefer Trump as president to Vice President Mike Pence, whose evangelical faith and firm commitment to socially conservative causes would seem to make him a better fit.

"The majority of people I talked to knew that Trump wasn't an evangelical and, in some sense, felt like it made him a better fit for the job," Bruenig told Cox. "Pence, for example, wouldn't be as good Trump for evangelicals precisely because he has restraint, he has decency, he has those evangelical virtues. And Trump doesn't have those, so in some ways he's even better."

Cox found herself flabbergasted that evangelicals rejected Pence as a leader because he was too "Christ-like."

Listen to the full podcast below.