Do You Think Trump Laughs At Evangelicals Out Loud?

See? Justin Amash isn't the only Republican standing up to Trump; he's just the only Republican in Congress standing up to Trump. Republicans For The Rule of Rule-- the 501 (c) (4) nonprofit group running that Fox TV ad above-- describes itself as "a group of life-long Republicans dedicated to defending the institutions of our republic and upholding the rule of law. We are fighting to make sure that the laws apply equally to everyone, from the average citizen to the president of the United States. We believe in fidelity to the Constitution, transparency, and the independence of prosecutors from politics."

But these "constitutionalist" types were never part of the Trump coalition. Trump doesn't give a hoot about them. His coalition are the least educated and least intelligent segment of the population-- the religionists who expect to be told what to do and couldn't begin to function without being told what to do. The evangelical vote is the Trump vote. Just yesterday, one of the top charlatans of that movement, Franklin Graham, told a right-wing website, the Western Journal, which pretends to by related to the Wall Street Journal that Trump "has honored his commitments to the faith-based community. He is pro-life, first president really in my lifetime that has been this vocal about life. I certainly appreciate that about him. He’s fulfilled his promise as it relates to conservative judges. He’s put two Supreme Court justices so far on the bench that are conservative. He’s appointed a number at lower courts. I hope that he’ll be able to do even more in that area, because that will have an impact on my childrens’ lives. If we have the right judges, it will benefit all of us." Franklin went on to repeat a whole litany of Trumpist lies the pretend "president" will run on: "I think he has done an excellent job getting people back to work, turning the economy around, defeating ISIS as a military power on the battlefield. He has done all of these things, and he’s done it very quickly... I think God was behind the last election."

And this brings us to a couple of NY Times-type conservatives, James Kirchick (a a really loathsome-- and self-loathing-- right-wing gay Jew who was a Republican-for-Hillary bigwig) and Peter Wehner, a puffed-up, self-proclaimed "expert" on religion and ethics who tries pretending God loves wars of aggression and who wrote speeches for Bill Bennett and George W. Bush. Among Christians, he's the foremost hater of the Sermon on the Mount, but is accepted by the NY Times crowd because of his disdain for Señor Trumpanzee. Before the last election he said he would never vote for Trump (nor, unlike Kirchick, Hillary) and was reviled by Trumpists for noting that their hero is "Trump is "characterized by indifference to objective truth (there are no facts, only interpretations), the repudiation of Christian concern for the poor and the weak, and disdain for the powerless... it is fair to say that there existed in the Republican Party repulsive elements, people who were attracted to racial and ethnic politics and moved by resentment and intolerance rather than a vision of the good. This group was larger than I ever imagined, and at important moments the Republican Party either overlooked them or played to them. Some may have been hoping to appeal to these elements while also containing and moderating them, to sand off the rough edges, to keep them within the coalition but not allow them to become dominant. But the opposite happened. The party guests took over the party."

Wehner has a new book out, The Death of Politics-- How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump that was reviewed yesterday by Kirchick in a column titled A Man of Faith Wonders at How Evangelicals Can Support Trump. Kirchick is positively delighted to begin his review by pointing out that fellow conservative windbag is offended by the Trump presidency. "Wehner," he writes, "is horrified at the way the president uses words 'to murder the very idea of truth.' Trump, Wehner writes in The Death of Politics, his lament for the state of our civic discourse, "embodies a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one."

Up until the point he feigned religiosity to secure the votes of evangelical Christians, Trump would likely have agreed with this brutal character assessment. Which brings us to the other plane on which the current presidency represents an affront to Wehner: traditional morality. One of evangelical Christianity’s most thoughtful political communicators, Wehner is appalled at the way in which his coreligionists have so enthusiastically backed Trump, voting for a thrice-married, loutish beauty pageant producer in higher numbers than they did for Bush, a born-again Christian “who spoke easily and openly about his relationship with Christ.” The rise of Trump, and the slavish devotion he inspires among leading evangelicals, has forced Wehner to consider seriously something he had always deemed a secular slander: that “both politics and the Christian witness are now made worse by people of faith actively involving themselves in politics.”

Wehner attributes this degeneration to the adoption of an all-or-nothing mentality by his fellow evangelicals, for whom eight years of Barack Obama were apparently so catastrophic that a figure like Trump could emerge as the country’s improbable savior. Wehner excoriates this apocalyptic rationalization, naming and shaming a slew of evangelical personalities who have issued “defenses of Trump that range from rhapsodic to ridiculous.” He singles out the former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, who privately joked about murdering Pat Buchanan during the latter’s insurgent 1996 Republican presidential primary campaign against Bob Dole, and yet is today an important ally of a president who essentially ran on Buchanan’s platform of nativism, protectionism and racial resentment.

...Though his recognition of the evangelical right’s manifold hypocrisies and corruptions is welcome, one wonders what took Wehner so long. A clue can be found in his occasionally earnest tone, visible in the expression of sincere shock that a movement that propelled the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart would eventually throw in its lot with a pagan who embodies the seven deadly sins.

...Aside from appeals to our better angels, The Death of Politics doesn’t offer much in the way of practical solutions to the societal ills it analyzes. But the value of this book lies less in its proposals than its example. With conservatives increasingly scorning decency as a crutch for the weak, Wehner is a model of conscientious political engagement. For that reason alone, his book should be pressed upon both those on the left who believe that the only way to “resist” the current administration is by sinking to its level, and those on the right tempted to wallow there.