Donald Trump, US President #47, US President #45, convicted felon, twice impeached, four times indicted, liable of rape, convicted for financial fraud, guilty of hiding hush money payments to porn actress in attempt to influence 2016 elections

In God’s country

Washington Post, By Elizabeth Bruenig

Evangelicals view Trump as their protector. Will they stand by him in 2020?

...Landing in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex feels like drifting down to reality; if everything is bigger in Texas, it’s also more intense... I had come to take stock of a spiritual situation tailor-made to emphasize every challenge in the contest of conscience between heaven and earth. How are evangelical Christians faring in the age of Trump, and will they elect him anew in 2020?

Evangelicals — typically activist, biblically focused Protestants with an emphasis on conversion, or being born again in Christ, as it’s often put — span several denominations, all races and plenty of American territory. In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that 31 percent of Texans consider themselves evangelical, forming the largest bloc of religious voters in the state of more than 28 million. A full 65 percent of those voters are white, 22 percent are Latino, and 8 percent are black.

Exit polls show that Trump carried 85 percent of evangelical voters here in 2016, a touch higher than the national white evangelical average of 81 percent. That in itself wasn’t surprising: For decades, evangelicals have been a reliable Republican constituency.

More intriguing was that a segment of white evangelicals had supported Trump all along — even during the Republican primaries, when more logical evangelical candidates, such as Texas’s own Sen. Ted Cruz, were still viable. At first, their numbers were relatively small and ill-represented among regular churchgoers. But since coalescing in 2016, evangelical support for Trump has remained consistently high — even among regular churchgoers, who started out skeptical but now approve of Trump at rates identical to or higher than less-regular attendees.

White evangelicals’ electoral drift toward Trump added an element of mystery to a story that was already startling. That the thrice-wed, dirty-talking, sex-scandal-plagued businessman actually managed to win the steadfast moral support of America’s values voters, as expressed in routinely high approval ratings, posed an even stranger question: What happened?

Theories about Trump’s connection with evangelical voters have long been dubiously elegant. The simplest, and perhaps most comfortable for Trump’s bewildered and furious opposition, is that evangelicals are and always were hypocrites, demanding moral rectitude from their enemies that they don’t expect from their friends. Others held that evangelicals must simply be ignorant, taken in by a campaign narrative that attempted to depict Trump as privately devoted to Christ, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Some argued that evangelicals just wanted an invincible champion to fight the culture wars, even if he didn’t share their vision of the good life. And then there was the transactional theory: Their votes were just about the Supreme Court.

...I wanted to ask evangelicals how they’re feeling about their alliance with the president and what their expectations are going into 2020.

Maundy Thursday

I met Robert Jeffress who regularly preaches to audiences of 4,000 or so (not to mention some 16,000 tuning in remotely)...

Jeffress, 63, has called himself Trump’s “most vocal and visible evangelical supporter”...

Jeffress was an early and ardent Trump adopter — “I was one of the earliest,” he told me, recalling a conversation he’d had with Trump in January 2016. “I said, ‘Mr. Trump, I believe you’re going to be the next president of the United States, and if that happens, it’s because God has a great plan for you and for our country.’ ” Trump pressed him, Jeffress said, to which the pastor replied: “Daniel 2 says God is the one who installs kings and establishes kings and removes kings.” For his faith and his loyalty (including an episode in which Jeffress’s gospel choir serenaded a Trump rally with an ode to his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan), Trump has richly rewarded Jeffress, tweeting positively about the pastor’s books and inviting him to numerous events, including an Inauguration Day prayer ceremony, a Christmas reception and a White House dinner honoring an executive-order signing.

Jeffress has a clear sense of how Trump fits into evangelicals’ political history. In particular, he felt that Trump couldn’t have come at any other time: that his success among evangelicals had, in large part, to do with the well-documented failure of evangelical politics to bring about change in the past 50 years.

...In 2011, Jeffress advised voters to shun Mormon Mitt Romney in favor of Jeffress’s preferred candidate, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in part due to Perry’s evangelical virtues. “Do we want a candidate who is a good, moral person,” Jeffress told attendees at the Values Voter Summit, referring to Romney, “or one who is a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?”

...Trump found an evangelical base still prepared to vote Republican, though soured by the failures of past leaders who had made much of their own personal virtue without accomplishing anything for their voters. Cynicism had set in, at least in Jeffress’s account, and Trump was especially well situated to speak to jaded disappointment.

Trump’s campaign was premised on the idea that only he could reveal and replace the secret weakness at the heart of everything — that because of his own personal riches, he could ostensibly fund his own campaign, freeing him from obedience to the wealthy interests that otherwise capture politicians.

..It was one of many ways in which Trump’s less-than-Christian behavior seemed, paradoxically, to make him a more appealing candidate to beleaguered, aggravated Christians. “I think conservatives for decades have felt bullied by the left, and the default response was to roll over and take it,” Jeffress said. But Trump enacted a practice of hitting back twice as hard whenever a critic takes him on — not exactly turning the other cheek, I pointed out. Jeffress chuckled. Trump’s “favorite verse in the Bible he says is ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth,’ ” the very maxim Christ was rebutting when he taught believers to return offense with peace.

Could it take a decidedly worldly man to reverse the fortunes of evangelicals who feel, for whatever host of reasons — social, racial, spiritual, political — that their earthly prospects have significantly dimmed?

Jeffress didn’t think so, but not for the reasons I would have guessed. “As a Christian, I believe that regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C., that the general trajectory of evangelicalism is going to be downward until Christ returns,” he explained. “If you read the scripture, it’s not: Things get better and better and more evangelical-friendly or Christian-friendly; it is, they get worse and more hostile as the culture does. . . . I think most Christians I know see the election of Donald Trump as maybe a respite, a pause in that. Perhaps to give Christians the ability and freedom more to share the gospel of Christ with people before the ultimate end occurs and the Lord returns.”

It was strange to think of Trump as a bulwark against precipitous moral decline. After all, he appears to have presided over a more rapid coarsening of news and discourse than the average candidate. Even if you count modern history as a story of dissolution and degeneracy, few, if any, other world leaders have launched as many headlines containing censored versions of the word “pussy.”

But Jeffress didn’t see Trump pausing the disintegration of evangelical fortunes by way of personal virtue — or even cultural transformation. He spoke instead of “accommodation,” perhaps alluding to the kind of protections announced only a few weeks after our talk by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, which safeguards the jobs of health-care workers who object to participating in certain procedures for religious reasons. Rather than renewing a culture in peril, in other words, Jeffress seemed to view Trump as someone who might carve out a temporary, provisional space for evangelicals to manage their affairs.

That sounded familiar to Lydia Bean, 38, a researcher who taught at Baylor University...

“Basically, it’s like a fortress mentality, where it’s like — the best we can do is lock up the gates and just pour boiling oil over the gates at the libs,”

...According to a Pew Research Center survey released this year, roughly 50 percent of Americans believe evangelicals face some or a lot of discrimination, including about a third of Democrat-leaning respondents.

Good Friday

The next day, my husband and I drove more than an hour northeast of Dallas to Farmersville, a town of fewer than 4,000, at the First Baptist Church of Farmersville...

A middle-aged man ... approached to welcome us, too. His name was Wesley Sisk, and when he learned we had come to talk about Trump, he was elated. “We think he’s doing a great job,” he enthused, “despite what some people think,” with a mischievous grin.

...After the service, I joined First Baptist’s pastor Bart Barber — along with several members of his flock for a dinner conversation that seemed to revolve around those long-standing points of contention, and their immediate incarnation in the figure of Trump.

For Barber, at least, warming up to Trump had taken some time. He wasn’t alone in that: An October 2016 poll by LifeWay Research, a Christian polling group, found that only 39 percent of evangelical pastors planned to vote for Trump. Barber himself voted for independent Evan McMullin, “and my congregation knew about that,” he added, “although almost no one agreed with me.”

...Dale Ivy came to align with Trump, he recalled, “because we needed change,” while Coleman ultimately decided that, “as flawed as Trump’s character is, it was a lot better than Hillary Clinton’s.”

...Bob Collins voiced concern that someone or something malign is behind the surge of migrants at the southern border. For them, Trump’s quest to build the wall and halt immigration from Latin America has come as a welcome check on these nefarious forces...

Meanwhile, others warmed up to Trump quickly. Trump, Bob Collins said, “has done something no other politician has done: He’s circumvented the press. The press has a problem now. … I wish he would not do the personal attacks, but he needs to get the message out, even if it’s a blunt, brute-force message.” For them, the message was a welcome one. “We’re deplorables,” the Collinses intoned in unison, when I asked them what messages they had heard from Democrats. “We cling to our religion and our guns,” Coleman said, mocking the famous Barack Obama remark from 2008. “I don’t think there’s much room in the Democratic Party for evangelicals like me,” Barber added. “Even though Donald Trump is different than me, the Donald Trump White House tries to move toward evangelicals like me.”

Barber now considers himself willing to vote for Trump, despite his concerns about the president’s temperament. First, there’s the abortion issue. “Trump might say some things that run against the basic ethos of evangelical Christianity,” Barber acknowledged, but he has also put in place two Supreme Court justices who are known to take antiabortion positions. It was abortion, too, that delivered Coleman — who considers himself an independent — to Trump in the first place

...With Trump delivering more than evangelical skeptics had expected and causing less damage than they had feared, Barber now feels more open to casting his vote for the incumbent in 2020.

But perhaps the most illuminating moment of the evening came when I asked whether any of them would be willing to vote for a more traditional evangelical challenger to Trump, should one hypothetically rise to oppose him in the primaries.

At first, there were murmurs about the possibility of Vice President Pence. But then Maria Ivy warned that Pence is soft compared with Trump, too decent and mannerly to take on the job. Bob Collins agreed: “The president is having to deal with a den of vipers,” he said. “I’m not sure Pence could do that.” “It’s spiritual warfare,” Dale Ivy added, emphasizing that Trump is the only man in the field who seems strong enough to confront it. “The Constitution allows us a space,” Bob Collins said, to live according to their faith, and Trump has provided that for them, in part through his Supreme Court nominations.

...By voting for Trump — even over more identifiably Christian candidates — evangelicals seem to have found a way to outsource their fears and instead reserve a strictly spiritual space for themselves inside politics without placing evangelical politicians themselves in power...

Holy Saturday

In Texas, as elsewhere, evangelicals take many forms. In 2000, Texas was 53 percent non-Hispanic white and 32 percent Hispanic; by 2016, it was 43 percent non-Hispanic white and 39 percent Hispanic, with the state’s black population holding steady over time. And while most of the rising Hispanic population is Catholic, a growing number are evangelical Protestants, a trend emerging elsewhere both at home and overseas. Meanwhile, the Pew Research Center identifies some 6 percent of Texans as belonging to historically black Protestant churches, which often share significant theological ground with white evangelical counterparts, despite vast social and cultural differences. Just as Texas is by no means the sole province of white evangelicalism, evangelical Christianity itself is by no means strictly white, or strictly conservative. Faith and politics in Texas swirl inside this multiracial, multifaith sphere.

A little before our trip to Farmersville, I met Lola Vinson and Wes Helm, members of a multiracial, progressive community organizing group called Faith in Texas, whose projects have included local criminal-justice reform, anti-police-brutality efforts, a living-wage campaign and agitation against predatory lending. Working with several faith groups in Texas, including evangelicals, is key to the organization’s mission...

“I’ve seen a lot of evangelicals making arguments that I cannot imagine them making two or three years ago,” Helm remarked, “like trying to play devil’s advocate on things like the immigration policy, or locking up kids.” Justifying Trump’s policies regardless of whether they fit into a Christian ethical framework is, in Helm’s reckoning, “very much a devil’s bargain of like — yes, he’s awful; yes, he does not represent our values; but he’s allowing us to pack the courts with justices who do.”

...On Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, I met Joe and Daniel Aguilar, both evangelical, 65 and 33, respectively, father and son. While age has increasingly defined political divisions nationwide — most notably inside the Democratic Party — research has revealed a surprising continuity between older and younger evangelicals. As professor Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University has found using survey data, while younger evangelicals show signs of parting from their elders when it comes to prioritizing issues such as immigration, young white evangelicals voted for Trump at roughly the same rate as their parents and grandparents. But a fraction — less than 20 percent — didn’t, and Daniel was among them.

...“You know,” Joe said, over chips, salsa and beer, “we created Trump. He’s a result of everything that happened before; it could have been someone else with that same kind of ridiculous, outlandish outbursts and thoughts and actions. I mean, we got what we deserved. I mean, I don’t like everything he says, but I’m going to vote for him again.”

...“Basically,Trump is everyone, without the filters. I’m sure at some time you’ve thought some horrible things, but you had a filter there to keep you from saying it.”...

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