Many people find it very difficult to understand why Donald Trump has always been popular with White Evangelicals since he descended his escalator at his Tower in June 2015 with Trophy Wife Number Three.
He’s been divorced twice; bragged about flagrantly assaulting women; bankrupted several companies; and he was well known for being a Machiavellian Manipulator in New York real estate as well as being a racist landlord. Plus, nobody really likes him except for his white evangelical basis.
In today’s Times, there is a superb article by Elizabeth Dias about why, even now, Trump’s white evangelical base is unwavering in supporting him: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/us/evangelicals-trump-christianity.html?referringSource=articleShare
His highly improbable march to the White House took off in January 2016 when he went to a small, very conservative town in Iowa and made big big splashy headlines by telling his crowd at a small evangelical college that if he were to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody "I wouldn’t lose any voters."
But in the same one hour speech, he said “I will tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege, and yet we don’t exert the power that we should have. Christianity will have power. If I’m there [in the Whtie House] you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well.”
And in November 2016 he got no less than 81 percent of white evangelical voters nationwide, with help from Mike Pence and Jerry Falwell Jr. — by the way, did you see how Falwell was forced to take a leave of absence from Liberty University for having his picture taken with a scantilly clad young woman, with his hand on her shoulder, and his fly unzipped? Does Putin have a similar picture of Trump, only much more compromising, at one of Putin’s Moscow harems?
Dias explains his appeal: Trump is the protector of the marginalized evangelicals, “...the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing….An entire way of life [from the perspective of the white evangelicals] could be headed for extinction.”
So we consulted, as always, with our Chief Theological Correspondent, associate solitary reporter Jim Bob Hobarto, who was born and raised in the Bible Belt.
“SR,” Hobarto began in his typically portentous style, “Don’t you know anything? Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism are the greatest heresies of the Twentieth Century.”
Hobarto then droned mercilessly on for three hours on how Fundamentalism arose a hundred years ago as The Way for bewildered white folks to make sense of the Industrial Revolution, which caused them to move to large, impersonal cities when they could no longer make a living on their rustic farms. “They never got it about the Enlightenment, when Reason replaced Faith."
Next, remember how Trump went to Mount Rushmore at the invitation of South Dakota’s governor, Kristi Noem, and how she arranged for fireworks to be set off right next to a national forest?
Not only that, it was Noem’s idea to add Trump to Mount Rushmore, right next to FDR.
How could that be?
Seems Ms. Noem, who is young and better looking thatn Sarah Palin, has had her name prominently mentioned as one who could help Trump’s flagging campaign by replacing Mike Pence.
So, being a vaguely astute pol, she hopped on Air Force One after Trump’s July 3 stunt at Mount Rushmore and had a one on one meeting with Pence in his office (with Karen Pence in the room, of course) to assure him that the only thing she wants in life is to be Governor of a small red state that has only one Member of the House — which she was for three terms before she became her state’s first female gov.
But let’s not forget that there is a whole throng of Republican politicians who know that Trump’s going to be toast in November, and they all want to run against President Biden in 2024.
We feel sure that Kristi Noem is one of them, along with former South Carolina gov and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley — and Mike Pompeo — and Mike Pence.
And maybe Kanye West?