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January 28, 2023
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Religious conservatives need “to get off the sidelines” to support Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in wresting evangelical support from Donald Trump, a political strategist urged Saturday in the Religious News Service.
“Despite a penchant for blunders in his campaign’s soft-launch rollout, DeSantis has a great opportunity to snatch away the religious right from Trump,” wrote Jacob Lupfer, a self-described “political reformer” who advised Gov. William Weld in a 2020 primary challenge to Trump.
“Perhaps foolishly, I believe that there are enough pastors and other leaders who still harbor a hope that the Republican Party, with the help of Christians of conscience, can be a force for good if they can work themselves out of the Trumpian knot and their own badly damaged moral credibility,” Lupfer wrote.
But Lupfer worried aloud about the failure of evangelical Christians to make a choice against Trump. And he cites the phrase “it’s time for choosing” that Trump uttered in announcing he’d blackball any campaign professional who worked for DeSantis.
“Why are evangelicals holding back on choosing? Faith leaders (or Republican operatives) who still cling to notions about integrity and decency may determine that DeSantis can only get the nomination if he outdoes Trump in sheer ugliness, not by pointing to a better, more honorable way,” writes Lupfer.
In that regard, the commentary damns DeSantis with faint praise: “DeSantis wages war on trans people and demonizes anyone who advocates for LGBTQ people. Trump has a record of catering to gay Republicans. Trump may have appointed conservative judges, but DeSantis directly and maximally exerts his will through expanded appointive powers to shape the ideology of Florida’s state offices and institutions. Trump whines about the media; DeSantis shuts out mainstream outlets, humiliates their reporters and gives unprecedented access to worshipful right-wing bloggers.”
Still, DeSantis is presented as an antidote to Trump, who the author, who described Trump’s recent Waco rally as “disturbing and quasi-religious even by the bizarre standards of Trumpist rallies” And he said it “underscored the extent of DeSantis’ problem. He has to in effect dislodge a cult leader.”
And he added this: “Trump may not prevail even with evangelicals on his side. He is consumed with legal trouble. At points it’s hard to watch his campaign without the creeping suspicion that it’s little more than a money racket, or a vanity project for a man as self-obsessed as ever.”
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'Imperfect vessel': White Christian evangelicals won't dump Trump despite indictment: experts
April 01, 2023
Evangelical Christians whose support was vital to Donald Trump’s 2006 election victory are expected to continue standing by their “imperfect vessel" despite him becoming the first U.S. president indicted on criminal charges, experts said.
The Guardian reported Saturday that the hugely influential voting bloc stuck by Trump in the past because it compared him to King Cyrus, an '"imperfect vessel" who "in the biblical telling liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity, despite himself being a Persian ruler who did not believe in the god of Israel.”
They believed God was using Trump for the greater good – to hand power in the U.S. back to white conservative Christians, the Guardian reported.
And, despite the allegations that he made illegal hush money payments to a porn actress to cover up an extramarital affair, that support is unlikely to waiver.
“The evidence from the public opinion data suggests that it will not make much difference,” Robert Jones, the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute and author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, told the news website.
“When we look back at his favorability over time, you know, I think there have been any number of these bright lines, where people thought: ‘Oh, this will be the thing that causes white evangelicals to abandon this candidate.’ But we just don’t see that much movement.”
Trump’s support among the group remained strong despite accusations of his sexually assaulting women, his failing to denounce white supremacists and the emergence of hush money allegations in 2018, the Guardian reported. In the 2020 presidential election, 75% of white evangelicals voted Trump.
“At every rally he was talking about ‘build the wall’ to keep Mexican immigrants out of the US. He was going to ban travel from Muslim-majority countries. I think it was those kinds of appeals that communicated this worldview that the country was rightfully owned by white Christians, and he was going to protect that view of the country.”
“You would think, you know, that paying hush money to a porn star might rile some white evangelicals,” John Fea, author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump and a professor of American history at Messiah College, told the Guardian.
“They clearly see this as a witch-hunt. They see this as a politically motivated prosecution. Almost to a man and a woman that’s how they’re interpreting this.”
“Make America Great Again, to white evangelicals, means: ‘Make America Christian Again,'" Fea added.
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The indignant response of Donald Trump and his GOP allies to his indictment by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg last week has a fundamental flaw, the Washington Post observed Saturday.
“Trump ceded the moral high ground long ago” on indicting former presidents, a WAPO analysis notes. That destroys the argument that Trump and company are advancing now that’s he the one being indicted.
“Sometimes it’s explicitly stated, and sometimes it’s more implicit: Indicting a former president and a candidate in the next election is beyond the pale,” the Post characterized the Trump position. “It’s even election “interference” or the stuff of banana republics.”
Inconveniently for Trump, the Post cited a long trail of evidence from Trump's own mouth pointing to the contrary.
“He has advocated for the prosecutions of each of the last four Democratic presidential nominees — every single one since 2004. In two cases, he did it during the campaign, even suggesting they should be ineligible to run.
"And that’s to say nothing of the many other political opponents he has suggested should be prosecuted. He even, in some cases, actually agitated for that outcome when he held sway over the Justice Department.”
The Post also pointed to the most glaring example.
“The “lock her up” chant leveled at Hillary Clinton is the most well-known entry in this long succession. Trump at times merely goaded his 2016 rally audiences to go down that road, but at other times he endorsed it. He said late in the 2016 campaign, 'Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail,' and he even told Clinton to her face at a debate that if he were president, 'You’d be in jail.' He added at a later debate that 'she shouldn’t be allowed to run.'
"And Trump didn’t stop calling for prosecutions of top political figures even after a blizzard of accusations rained down upon him in his one-term presidency.
"By 2020, Trump gave a similar treatment to both his predecessor as president, Barack Obama, and his then-opponent, Joe Biden.
"A month before the election, Trump tweeted, 'Where are all of the arrests?”' He added: 'BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN - GOT CAUGHT!!!'
“'But these people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country — and that includes Obama and it includes Biden,' Trump added during an interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network the next day. 'These are people that spied on my campaign.'
“Trump even indicated that he had made that case directly to his attorney general, William P. Barr: 'And I say, Bill, we’ve got plenty, you don’t need any more' to indict.”
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