You can blame Donald Trump's decision to drop an f-bomb on live TV Tuesday morning on evangelical Christians who have him over a barrel because he needs their support for all of his policies.
That is the opinion of Salon columnist Amanda Marcotte who wrote on Wednesday that the president has no choice but to support Israel at the risk of plunging the U.S. into yet another war in the Middle East to placate evangelicals waiting on the "End Times."
Pressed by a reporter on Tuesday over negotiations between Iran and Israel to end what the president called at the NATO summit on Wednesday the "twelve-day war," a clearly frustrated Trump blurted, "We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f--- they’re doing.”
According to Salon's Marcotte, Trump's overly frank cursing when talking to reporters is a sign that he is being pushed over the edge by a very demanding segment of his base.
As she pointed out, there is a belief among many evangelicals that Trump is the chosen one sent to Earth "to usher in the end times, and that attacking Iran is necessary to bring about the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ."
The longtime political observer wrote Trump's outburst could be a sign that he has had enough of dealing with an issue he never wanted to take up in the first place.
Admitting the president is feeling a modicum of pressure from the anti-interventionist wing of his MAGA base, Marcotte wrote that evangelicals are not as easily mollified when it comes to meeting Jesus.
"The pressure from Trump’s evangelical base offers insight into why he is cracking," she suggested. "He almost certainly would like to leave his intervention in Iran behind. But he can’t say no to evangelicals, because he knows that he’s nothing without them."
"He should be worried," she added. "Even if hostilities in the Middle East die down, the excitement for Armageddon among his most loyal followers may not dissipate quickly."
Noting that this generation of evangelicals want to be the lucky ones to see "Jesus return to earth," she added, "... more importantly, the promise of the end times is useful for televangelists and other Christian right influencers. As long as dramatic talk of the apocalypse feeds them money and attention, the leaders will be reluctant to let go of their dream of a bigger war with Iran."
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