Have You Ever Felt Embarrassed To Be A White Man?

 

In her exhaustive essay for the NY Times this week, Win or Lose, It’s Donald Trump’s Republican Party, Elaina Plott writes a lot about how down-ballot Republicans in red districts are abandoning most of what their party has traditionally stood for to send one over-arching message: "I stand for Trump-- a vote for me is a vote for Señor T." These candidates say they think that what makes Trump different from other Republicans is that he's willing "to go to extremes" to pursue and defend what he believes in. One candidate for commissioner in Manatee County, Florida used this image on his Facebook page, adding "2020 IS NO LONGER REPUBLICAN VS. DEMOCRAT. IT’S FREEDOM VERSUS TYRANNY." He doesn't even have an opponent. (Ironically, many Democrats agree with his assessment of what the 2020 election is all about.)

"The panic and excitement attending Donald Trump," wrote Plott, "have always shared an assumption: that his election marked a profound break with the American politics that came before it. During his inaugural address, as he surveyed the national landscape of 'American carnage,' Trump himself invoked the advent of 'a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.' In the years and events that followed-- the endless soap opera of the White House, the forceful separation of children from their families at the border, the pandemic, Trump’s refusal to permit even a passing interest in a peaceful transfer of power-- it seemed increasingly clear that the world never had.

But for all the attention paid to what Trump represents in American politics, the most salient feature of his ascent within the Republican Party might be what he doesn’t represent... Trump’s takeover... has been as one-dimensional as it has been total. In the space of one term, the president has co-opted virtually every power center in the Republican Party, from its congressional caucuses to its state parties, its think tanks to its political action committees. But though he has disassembled much of the old order, he has built very little in its place. 'You end up with this weird paradox where he stands to haunt the G.O.P. for many years to come, but on the substance it’s like he was never even there,' said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist."

A self-absorbed Trump has brought the crazies and proud racists and sociopaths out into the open. He has made it ok to be an open bigot and hate-monger.

During Trump’s presidency, his party has become host to new species of fringe figures. Laura Loomer, a self-identified #ProudIslamophobe and erstwhile Infowars contributor who has been banned from Twitter and Facebook, earned presidential praise-- and a campaign-trail cameo from Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump-- for winning her Florida congressional district’s Republican primary in August. There is also Marjorie Taylor Greene, the party’s current nominee in the race for Georgia’s 14th district, whose embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theory and litany of racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic statements didn’t dissuade Trump from calling her a “future Republican star,” or Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republicans’ leader in the House, from pledging to give her committee assignments should she win in November.

But Trump’s influence is also reflected, in a more pedestrian but equally revealing way... [transposing] Trumplike signifiers onto otherwise utterly conventional suburban Republican platforms. Republican voters are essentially the same people who voted Republican before Trump; the party’s politicians are still mostly the same people, hiring mostly the same strategists. But their relationships to the party now flow through a single man, one who has never offered a clear vision for his political program beyond his immediate aggrandizement. Whether Trump wins or loses in November, no one else in the party’s official ranks seems to have one, either.

...As it turned out, Trump wasn’t especially interested in running on Ryan’s “bold conservative policy agenda.” “Put a Stop to Executive Overreach” may have been a Better Way, but Trump believed the people-- his people-- would be more galvanized by a ban on all Muslim travel to the United States, which he first proposed the month before. (“Offensive and unconstitutional,” Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, tweeted of the ban at the time.) “It’s the party’s party,” Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman, nevertheless repeatedly insisted through the summer of 2016. “The party defines the party.”

It was as though Priebus and others believed the G.O.P. to be some cosmic body animated by a logic undisclosed to humankind, rather than a collection of overgrown college politicos who worked in a building opposite a restaurant called Tortilla Coast and who had lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections-- in other words, an institution ripe for hijacking. Paul Ryan announced his retirement 15 months into Trump’s presidency (“We are with you Paul!” Trump tweeted shortly thereafter). Kevin McCarthy, then the House majority leader, told reporters about how his wife gave him an autographed copy of “The Art of the Deal” in the late 1980s while they were dating. Priebus went to the White House with Trump as the new president’s chief of staff, only to learn via Twitter six months into the job that he had been replaced. (“We accomplished a lot together and I am proud of him!” Trump said.) The R.N.C. is now run by Ronna Romney McDaniel, Mitt Romney’s niece, who dropped the “Romney” from her name in apparent deference to Trump. As the newly inaugurated vice president, Mike Pence applauded Trump’s early executive order banning half the world’s Shiite Muslims from entering the country.

This June, as Trump prepared for his second convention as the Republican presidential nominee, the party’s leaders decided to dispense with the fuss of a new platform altogether and simply readopted the 2016 platform. Never mind that the document contained some three dozen condemnations of the “current president” and “current administration” and “current occupant” of the White House; and never mind that it expressed full support for Puerto Rico’s statehood, which Trump had called an “absolute no.” Officials did, however, manage to draft a new preface: “The Republican Party,” it proclaimed, “has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda.” In Priebus’s parlance, the party had defined the party.

[Note: the Democratic Party establishment takes the exact same position-- it's their party-- and has sued to uphold the concept when grassroots Democrats have challenged at the ballot box.]

That this is no longer Paul Ryan’s party is clear. What Trump has turned it into, though, is less so. Republican lawmakers and officials now reflexively tout their proximity to Trump-- like the “100 percent Trump voting record” that Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia claims in a recent ad. They reference “Trumpism” casually and constantly and accede that it will in some way dictate the future of the party. But they can’t seem to agree on what it actually is. “The party right now is just Trump, right?” said one senior Senate G.O.P. aide. “So when you take him out of it, what do we have left?”

...“It’s national populism and identity-politics Republicanism,” Representative Justin Amash told me, and “it’s here to stay for a while.” It was early October, and Amash, who has represented Michigan in Congress since 2011, was sitting-- maskless, but across the room-- in his Capitol Hill office. Amash was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative Republican hard-liners, most of whom identified with the Tea Party movement, who came together out of frustration with the party’s congressional leadership boxing out the rank-and-file during the legislative process. The caucus became a right-wing media darling after one of its members, a backbencher from North Carolina named Mark Meadows, filed a motion to oust Boehner from the speakership in the summer of 2015. The vote on that motion never happened; Boehner announced his retirement that fall. But by then, the group had built out its ranks enough to thwart any piece of legislation in the Republican-led House.

“The main purpose of the Freedom Caucus was to open up the process and ensure all voices could be heard,” Amash told me. But its members were best known as trenchant conservative ideologues, preaching austerity and refusing to cede ground on social issues. During the 2016 presidential primary, its members were broadly, if obliquely, critical of Trump: “We need someone who will restore greatness to America, not as a talking point or a punchline, but someone who wants to restore constitutional values,” Representative Andy Harris of Maryland said after he endorsed Ben Carson. Others blamed the G.O.P. establishment for not doing more to stop Trump’s rise.

While the establishment transitioned with relative ease to the onset of Trump’s presidency, the Freedom Caucus, for a time, seemed to represent a potential thorn in its side. Many of the new administration’s policy ambitions-- trade protectionism, a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill-- were direct affronts to the stated values of the Tea Party crowd. “The conservatives are going to go crazy,” Stephen K. Bannon, chief executive of Trump’s campaign and an incoming White House adviser, crowed in a postelection interview.

It was common in the Freedom Caucus’s weekly meetings for members to mock Trump; “I can’t believe he’s only been bankrupt that many times,” one of its members quipped, according to Amash. In March 2017, the group’s unwillingness to fall behind Ryan’s first stab at an Obamacare replacement-- which they rejected both for its substance and the closed-door process by which it was written-- prompted Trump to excoriate its members on Twitter. “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast,” the president raged. “We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”

Mo Brooks, a Freedom Caucus member from Alabama, was among Trump’s harshest critics during the primary, castigating Trump as a “notorious flip-flopper” with “huge character flaws” whose presidency would ultimately make his base regret voting for him. Brooks had cast his own ballot for Trump grudgingly: “You have to decide who is the lesser of the two evils,” he told a group of Duke University students at the time,“and then vote accordingly.”

There was still plenty to be unhappy about in Trump’s first year, like the health care debacle and Trump’s publicly excoriating-- “waterboarding,” in Brooks’s words-- Brooks’s fellow Alabamian Jeff Sessions, then Trump’s attorney general, for his recusal from the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. But Brooks found there was a lot more to like. “On border security, the president has been spot on,” he told me. He went on: “The president showed he would take the public-policy stances that, by and large, are supported by conservatives, and those who believe in the foundational principles that have combined to make America the greatest nation in world history.”

Brooks’s transformation is instructive insofar as he doesn’t see it as a transformation at all. The true conservatives hadn’t changed, Brooks insisted; Trump just surprised everyone by governing a lot like one. By 2018, Bannon was out, and by November the party’s leaders had major tax cuts and a slew of new conservative judges to show for their acquiescence. On the “moral value side of the coin,” Brooks said, “President Trump has been strongly pro-life.” On the economy, Trump “has fought hard for free enterprise, which is premised on freedom and liberty, and against socialism.” And after years of railing against the constitutional abomination of Barack Obama’s governing by pen, the Freedom Caucus members found that executive orders weren’t so bad when you liked what was in them, such as regulatory relief for companies in defiance of Obamacare’s contraception mandate. “I am fine with executive orders that do the right thing,” Brooks told me.

“I wish we had done better with deficit and debt,” Brooks allowed. But when pressed on this and other ways Trump had fallen short on either his own promises or longstanding conservative priorities in general, he invoked the same villains he might have in the Freedom Caucus’s heyday: special-interest groups and irresponsible party leaders. He’d been in meetings, he said, where he heard the president “expressing dissatisfaction with these huge deficits,” which, under Trump, have achieved record proportions. (And in any event, the former Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan insisted to me recently, Trump is “going to focus on that in his second term.”) As for health care, Trump backed “Paul Ryan’s proposal to expand socialized medicine” only because he received “bad advice” from the “liberal wing” of the party (by which he meant Ryan and McCarthy). “Fortunately, Donald Trump, after listening to our conservative arguments, was persuaded that we were right, and our liberal wing was wrong,” he said. “That’s the mark of leadership. As you get information, you should change as that information requires. And President Trump did.”

Trump’s resolve to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in October 2018, Amash says, dulled the remaining criticisms of the president in the Freedom Caucus-- and the midterm elections a month later all but extinguished them. The Democrats’ rout of the Republicans in the 2018 House races was unequivocally tied to Trump’s unpopularity-- according to exit polls, 90 percent of voters who disapproved of him voted for the other party in their local House race. But that fate fell upon pro- and anti-Trump Republicans alike.

At the same time, Republican primary voters’ devotion to Trump was such that even in the Senate, candidates who had criticized or otherwise distanced themselves from the president, like Dean Heller of Nevada, struggled to make it to the general election, backpedaling their criticisms and holding their breath until Trump’s blessing finally came via Twitter. Raúl Labrador, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, had all but nabbed Trump’s endorsement in the Republican primary for governor of Idaho when supporters of his main opponent, Brad Little, packaged together clips of Labrador bashing Trump in 2016 and delivered them to the West Wing. Today Labrador is back in the private sector. Little is now governor of Idaho.

All told, 26 congressional Republicans-- some moderates, others facing stiff odds in the general election-- decided to retire from politics in 2018, the party’s second-highest number in more than 40 years. “Republicans tried to steer clear of Donald Trump a little bit in that election,” Amash said. “They tried to avoid him as a topic. And they weren’t successful. And Donald Trump came back after that and said, ‘I told you so.’”

Some caucus members, meanwhile, seemed entranced by the proximity to power that loyalty afforded them. Mark Meadows, who became the Freedom Caucus chairman in January 2017, liked making a show of his ever-more-frequent phone calls with the president and liked ensconcing himself on weeknights in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel, the favored Washington haunt of Trump’s coterie of advisers and hangers-on. And as Trump proved ever more willing to attack his colleagues in the Freedom Caucus, Meadows seemed ever more willing to let him.

In 2018, Representative Mark Sanford, a Freedom Caucus member from South Carolina and a vocal Trump critic, lost a primary in which Trump endorsed his opponent. Later, Trump visited a House Republican conference meeting and proceeded to ridicule Sanford. Meadows did not come to his colleague’s defense. “It was a betrayal and an abandonment of someone who is part of our family,” Amash said. It was the only moment during our interview that he betrayed a sense of anger over the past four years. (Meadows declined to comment for this article.)

It was shortly after that that Amash gave his final speech to the group he helped start. “At some point, I didn’t feel like the Freedom Caucus was really producing what we had founded it for-- precisely to push back on things like Donald Trump taking full control of government, you know, using the executive branch as a legislative branch, or Congress not doing its job as an oversight body,” he said. The caucus’s about face, he argues, is a useful way to grasp the extent of Trump’s takeover of the party. Such a takeover was not inevitable, he insists; the Freedom Caucus’s early willingness to stand up to Trump seemed to offer the hope of maintaining healthy debate and disagreement among Republicans under his presidency. “I was not even the fiercest critic, compared to some of the others,” he recalled of those early days.

In 2019, Amash left the G.O.P. to become an Independent. Earlier this year, he switched his party affiliation again to become the first Libertarian member of Congress, and after briefly considering and rejecting a third-party presidential candidacy this spring, he decided not to run for re-election. “Everything is about personalities now,” he told me. Trump didn’t start that trend, he pointed out, but he certainly accelerated it. “You can see changes in some of the senators, too-- the way they are now trolling people on Twitter. This sort of disparaging of the left is different; it’s materially different from what we saw before Donald Trump."





Congressional Republicans who have left the fold in the Trump years invariably attest to the private discomfort of their friends and former colleagues on Capitol Hill who remain in good standing with the president. “A healthy percentage of them want Trump to lose,” Jeff Flake, the former senator and congressman from Arizona and one of the 2018 cycle’s many Republican retirees, told me. “There are no illusions about where the party is going under Trumpism. This is a dead end. This is a demographic cul-de-sac. My colleagues know it. And they had higher aspirations, nearly all of them, than to approve the president’s executive calendar.” The fact that these private expressions of despair have stayed private cannot be pinned on rabid primary voters alone. Ultimately, a great many in the party have quite enjoyed their time on the Trump train-- as Mark Meadows, who is now Trump’s chief of staff, could attest. Yet for all the attention paid to loyalty as an ordering principle in today’s Republican Party, it’s not entirely clear what dividends it will pay in Trump’s absence.

...The idea that conventional Republicans like Pence and Haley can repackage themselves through Trump loyalty fails to reckon with the desire of many Trump voters to genuinely overturn the party’s status quo.

...On an evening in October, I drove to Johnstown, Pa., for one of the final rallies of Trump’s re-election campaign. On the edge of a parking lot outside a fire station a mile or so from the rally venue, I found dozens of people, huddled under blankets and Gap hoodies, holding their phones aloft. They were almost all white, many of them men and women in their 50s and 60s, others young families with children. A minute or two later, Air Force One sliced through the black sky. Its drone muffled the whoops and hollers that followed. These weren’t rallygoers, it turned out: They just wanted to see the plane.

“He has his base so energized,” Jeff Link, 65, told me, his cheeks flushed from the cold. “Look, we came just to get a mile away from him!”

Link and three friends had driven from a couple of towns over for this moment. What did Trumpism mean to them? I asked. “It means for the people,” Susan Datsko said. “We are for the people.”

“America first, absolutely,” Charlotte McFadden echoed. A retired nurse and lifelong Republican, she went on to describe the us-versus-them posture that Trump, to her, so revolutionarily embodied: “We have got to stop trying to save everybody in the world. Americans are very, very generous people. But we’re getting crushed. We just want people to come the right way; we welcome them just like our ancestors were welcomed. And we can’t help anybody if we can’t even help our own people. You have to help yourself before you can help others.”

Maybe others in the party before believed this, too; what made Trump special to them was his willingness to say it. “Not to be rude,” Rick Datsko said, “but the past Republicans never had any balls. They never stood up for Republicans. Look at Romney: Obama chewed him up.”

“We all understand he’s a little crude,” Link said.

“But crude is OK!” Datsko interjected.

Link went on: “We knew that he had no halo on his head,” he said. “We’re all like that a little bit. So we kind of identified with that. We understood.”

They struggled to articulate precisely what they wanted from the party whenever the post-Trump era commenced. Just more of this. “The same thing,” Datsko said.

“To continue along the same lines,” McFadden agreed. To perpetuate the euphoria coursing through still more parking lots nearby, the merchandise truck catering to “THE SILENT MAJORITY,” the expletive-laden T-shirts, the dozens of Trump flags whipping in the wind.

Still, an inchoate anxiety lurked behind the mania, a fleeting cognizance that for all their demands of more, nothing could ever match this. Even the thought of four more years brought its own strange layer of distress. Because if Trump wins, as Mark Matney explained to me, he can never run for president again. What happens, then, when it’s all over?

“My scary thought,” Matney said, “is where do we find another one like him?”

In his NY Times column Monday, Trump’s army of angry white men, Charles Blow boiled down this election to a simple question: "How did this country elect Donald Trump and does it have the collective constitution to admit the error and reverse it?" He wrote about an ugly truth most people would rather not focus on: "Trump is the president of the United States because a majority of white people in this country wanted him to be. Perhaps some supported him despite his obvious flaws, but others undoubtedly saw those flaws as laudable attributes. For the latter, Trump’s racism was welcome in the coven... [W]hite men prefer Trump over Biden 57% to 36%. Most white women support Biden, which is a reversal from the last election, when a plurality voted for Trump. The white racist, sexist, xenophobic patriarchy and all those who benefit from or aspire to it are in a battle with the rest of us, for not only the present in this country but also the future of it. The Republican Party, which is now without question the Party of Trump, has become a structural reflection of him. They see their majorities slipping and the country turning brown with a quickness, and they are becoming more tribal, more rash, more devious, just like him."

Trump’s base of mostly white men, mostly without a college degree, see him as the ambassador of their anger, one who ministers to their fear, consoles their losses and champions their victimhood. Trump is the angry white man leading the battle charge for angry white men.

The most optimistic among us see the Trump era as some sort of momentary insanity, half of the nation under the spell of a conjurer. They believe that the country can be reunited and this period forgotten.

I am not one of those people. I believe what political scientist Thomas Schaller told Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkinson in 2018: “I think we’re at the beginning of a soft civil war.” If 2018 was the beginning of it, it is now well underway.

Trump is building an army of the aggrieved in plain sight.

It is an army with its own mercenaries, people Trump doesn’t have to personally direct, but ones he has absolutely refused to condemn.

When it comes to the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the young neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville and the far-right fight club the Proud Boys, Trump finds a way to avoid a full-throated condemnation, often feigning ignorance.

“I don’t know anything about David Duke,” Trump said when he ran in 2016. That of course was a lie. In fact, Trump is heir to Duke’s legacy.

In 1991, when Duke ran unsuccessfully to be governor of Louisiana but received a majority of the white vote in the state, Trump told CNN’s Larry King, “I hate seeing what it represents, but I guess it just shows there’s a lot of hostility in this country. There’s a tremendous amount of hostility in the United States.”

King responded, “Anger?”

Then Trump explained: “It’s anger. I mean, that’s an anger vote. People are angry about what’s happened. People are angry about the jobs.”

It is that very anger that Trump harnessed to win the presidency: anger over racial displacement disguised as economic anxiety.

Trump has bottled defiance and sold the serum to his acolytes and henchmen. He is fighting for white power and white heritage-- he mourns the loss of “beautiful” monuments to racists while attacking racial sensitivity training. He is fighting to keep out foreigners, unless they are from countries like Norway, an overwhelmingly white country. He is fighting for people to be foolish, like not wearing a mask in the middle of a global pandemic caused by an airborne virus.

Trump is fighting for these people and they will continue to fight for him. Trump knows that. And he keeps them angry because he needs them angry. There is a strong chance that Trump won’t win the coming election, but there is also a strong chance that he will win a majority of white men.

The question then is how an angry Trump and those angry men will react to defeat and humiliation.

Is God Using Trump To Teach Evangelicals A Lesson? Do These Poor Lost Souls Have The Capacity To Learn A Lesson

In a recent post, If He Wins Again, on his blog, Stuff That Needs To Be Said, John Pavlovitz wrote that "If he wins, we’re going to do everything we’re doing today: we’re going to speak clearly and advocate for vulnerable people and loudly demand truth, and we’re going to leverage our lives and our platforms and our influence for equality, justice, and decency-- because if he wins again, these things will be far more threatened than they are right now. If he wins again, good people committed to our shared humanity will be more necessary than ever-- and we’re going to need to be present."

But John was less sanguine when he got home and thought about it, knowing full well, as he wrote, that "If he wins again, bigots will be more emboldened and racists more empowered; their escalating violence commonplace. If he wins again, more cockroaches will stream from the shadows and into the light of day with more disfigured hatred than we can imagine, because they will feel a kindred spirit with totally unchecked power. If he wins again, We The People will be left without the protection of impartial judges or the luxury of unpolluted waters or the security of untainted agencies. If he wins again, Christianity will be exponentially weaponized to control women and to ratify prejudice against LGBTQ people and to perpetuate white supremacy and to legislate theology. If he wins again, we can forget about fair elections or freedom from direct foreign influence in our Government, or about any of the protections and liberties promised by our Constitution. These will be permanent relics of the distant past. If he wins again, it will be the greatest defeat for goodness and truth, a day of mourning over the nation we will have lost forever."

I don't know who his audience is, who reads John's blog. But he's an author and well respected pastor whose blog got him fired from a Charlotte, North Carolina megachurch where he was the youth minister. And I see he has almost 200,000 Twitter followers so I'm guessing many of them are Christians who don't worship the golden pig the way most evangelicals do. Evangelicals who have given up Jesus for Trump. Bad choice! Pavlovitz speaks to the other Christians, the ones who take Jesus' message seriously.

Yesterday, writing for Rolling Stone, Alex Morris explored why there are any Christians who worship the golden pig. They and, basically, they alone, are propping him up in office. "[W]ithout the evangelical voting bloc, no Republican candidate could hope to have a path to the presidency. Evangelicals-- a term that today refers to people who believe that Jesus died for their sins, that the Bible is the word of God, that every believer has a 'born again' or salvation moment, and that the good news of Jesus should be widely disseminated-- make up as much as a quarter of the country, or close to 80 million people. Around 60 percent vote, more than any other demographic, and among white evangelical voters, more than three-quarters tend to go to Republicans, thanks to wedge issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights. Trump was exactly the type of character you would expect 'values voters' to summarily reject-- even before the famed 'grab 'em by the pussy' tape, the optics weren’t great. He never gained a majority of Christian votes in the primary. Even after he secured the nomination and named Mike Pence to be his VP, a survey of Protestant pastors conducted by Christian polling group LifeWay Research that summer found that only 39 percent of evangelical pastors planned to vote for him."

But he tried to move the needle, to convince the religious right that their vision for America was one he shared. Robert Jeffress, the head of 14,000-member megachurch First Baptist Dallas, a contributor to Fox News, and one of the earliest evangelical leaders to support Trump: "I usually stand when he comes in the room as a way of showing respect." Trump knows how to be unctuous and kiss ass when he has to. Trying to get their backing, he fed a roomful of right-wing evangelical ministers before the election his typical bullshit: "What a group of people! This is serious power. Fantastic. I don’t even know if I’ve ever seen this."

Over the next hour, the message was that theirs was a power Trump would heed-- and heed more than any other president. He would end the contraception mandate of Obamacare (“We’re getting rid of Obamacare anyway”); he would select only anti-choice judges (“And this president could choose, I mean, it could be five”); he would do away with the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits tax-exempt entities from endorsing politicians (“Wouldn’t it be nice if you could actually go and say, ‘I want Donald Trump’?”); he would support prayer in school (“I saw the other day a coach was giving a prayer before a football game, and they want to fire the coach now!”); he would oppose any bill that pulled funding from Christian schools that were charged with discrimination (“I can only tell you that if I’m president, it will be vetoed, OK?”); he would keep transgender people from using the “wrong” bathrooms and locker rooms (“We’ll get it straightened out”); and he would protect Israel, following the biblical pronouncement that nations that do so would be blessed (“[Obama’s] been the worst thing that’s happened to Israel; I was with Bibi Netanyahu the other day, and he said he can’t even believe it”). In other words, when it came to religious liberty as the attendees defined it, he would make sure that America was on the right side of God.

The meeting was chummy, solicitous. None of the points mentioned were likely to be ones that Steve Bannon would have let escape Trump’s attention, but the gathering allowed him to demonstrate not just his allegiance but also his attention. “[Romney] made no outreach like you’re doing,” Jeffress pointed out. “Bush didn’t do it. McCain didn’t do it. You’re the only candidate who’s asked people to come and share.” As the leaders went around the table, Trump got talking points, things to say on the trail that would-- like a dog whistle-- signal something meaningful to a massive group of voters. In turn, the leaders got the promise of a bully pulpit, someone willing to be their mouthpiece on the American political stage that the whole world was watching. “You go out on the campaign trail,” said Turek, “and every news organization is going to cover what you say.”

...Throughout it all, Trump was not positioning himself as a true believer-- “You know, I went to Sunday school,” he said with a shrug-- but rather as a strongman, the likes of which the religious right had never seen. “Liberals are being the bullies here,” the Heritage Foundation’s Anderson told him at one point. “If there is a culture war in the United States, conservatives aren’t the aggressors, liberals are waging a culture war. They are trying to impose their liberal values.” Trump assured the group that, in his presidency, liberal oppression would end. “Many of these things, I would say 80 percent of them, will be done immediately,” he promised. “I can tell you, you have my support.”

...The meeting and other events like it, spread the word, sending radio talk-show hosts and pastors and educators out into the world to preach the gospel of Donald Trump. On Election Day, close to 81 percent of white evangelicals cast their ballots for him, turning out to vote in greater numbers than they had for Mitt Romney and George W. Bush. And their faithfulness paid off. From naming Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, to transgender military bans and Muslim bans, to defunding Planned Parenthood and creating a division of Religious Freedom, Trump has followed through on the promises he made to powerfully push back on liberal aggression.

Today, 82 percent of white evangelicals would cast their ballots for Trump. Two-thirds believe that he has not damaged the decency of the presidency, 55 percent agree with Sarah Huckabee Sanders that “God wanted him to be president,” and 99 percent oppose impeachment.

Politics is a transactional game, and presidents don’t need to be moral to be effective. While much has been made of the hypocrisy of Trump’s Christian supporters, these “values voters” who’d once gone apoplectic over Bill Clinton’s indiscretions and now capitulated to the most immoral president in living memory, the meeting at Trump Tower shows the logical framing of the argument that would lead a certain type of Christian to vote for Trump. “I don’t think Trump changed after that meeting,” Jeffress tells Rolling Stone. “But I know some of those in the room did. Never, never have evangelicals had the access to the president that they have under President Trump.”

What transactions don’t account for, however, is how white evangelicals seem alarmingly keen to not just vote for Trump but to also claim him as one of their own, to pronounce-- as did Focus on the Family founder James Dobson-- that Trump is a “baby Christian,” deserving of ample benefit of the doubt as he learns the ways of righteousness. Or suggest that it “may be immoral” not to support him, as did Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. Or insinuate that the Stormy Daniels payment was fake news, as did Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham. Or to go on national television and protest that removing Trump from office would lead to a “Civil War-like fracture . . . from which this country will never heal,” as did Jeffress.

The fervent embrace of Trump seemed not just expedient, but something more insidious. If Donald Trump was to be its standard-bearer, was something in American Christianity profoundly broken? The answer to that question mattered profoundly to me.

...The wedge issues created during the culture wars of the Eighties and Nineties were thus not matters of equality and social justice or anything that might evoke the liberalism of the Social Gospel (though Jesus spoke on such matters abundantly). Rather they were divisive, pushing the Republican Party further to the right and exacerbating Christians’ sense of being a people apart.

By the time Trump came along, the gulf was so wide that criticizing Trump’s behavior seemed beside the point. There was now a scorched-earth policy, and any leader who tackled the wedge issues with Trumpian ferocity was on the side of righteousness. Which also happened to be where the money was. “I had a huge donor that was the puppet master behind the whole Trump campaign,” says Thornbury, who was also president of the King’s College, a small Christian school, from 2013 until 2017. “Rebekah Mercer was funding Breitbart. Who is an evangelical college president going to talk to, to raise $10 million a year? Right-wing crazy people.”

And as Jesus himself pointed out, money tends to shut down moral inquiry. “It’s all about money,” Thornbury argues. “All these people were told, ‘Don’t say anything about Trump or we’re going to stop giving to your thing.’ All of the money that is behind these evangelical institutions is being given by Trump supporters.”

Not everyone capitulated. There were still those who balked at the idea of stumping for a man who famously referred to the biblical book Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians,” and who once opined that he had never had the need to ask God for forgiveness. In a much-debated blog post titled “Decency for President,” Christian author Max Lucado wrote, “If a public personality calls on Christ one day and calls someone a ‘bimbo’ the next, is something not awry?” Likewise, pastor Tim Keller worried in The New Yorker about the damage Trump had done to the very word “evangelical”; and Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, referred to Trump as “an arrogant huckster” and called the support evangelical leaders offered him “a disgrace.”

Moore was quickly chastised. More than 100 churches threatened to cut funding to the SBC, and some left the denomination altogether. “Immediately after the election, all of the big Southern Baptist megachurch pastors called [Moore] up and said, ‘You are to shut up about Donald Trump, or you’re out of a job,’ ” says Thornbury. “And from that point on, Russ has not said pee-diddly-who. His wings were clipped. Occasionally, he’ll pop his head up above the parapet like he did when he talked about the crisis at the border. And what happened?” Jerry Falwell Jr., perhaps not incidentally accused of hiring Michael Cohen to help him deal with some compromising “personal photos,” condemned Moore, saying the pastor was part of an “SBC deep-state regime.” Thornbury knows Moore, and watched it all transpire. “There’s now this mob,” he says with a sigh. “If you criticize Trump, they will come after you.”

...[F]or the God-fearing evangelical, gay marriage, abortion, and the evils of socialism-- as opposed to racial injustice, family separation, or income inequality-- put America squarely in the path of the wrath of God. “Parts of the Old and New Testaments imply very strongly that there’s not just a judgment of individuals, but there’s a judgment of nations,” says historian Diana Butler Bass. “People who sin are keeping the nation away from a moral goodness that needs to be present, because they think that God’s coming back and is going to destroy everything, and they want America to be on the right side of that equation. They want to stand before God and say, ‘We did your will. We created a godly nation, and we’re the remnant. We’re your true people.’”

For an outsider, this may seem extreme, even unhinged, but it’s what televangelist Pat Robertson was talking about when he blamed 9/11 on abortion, or Hurricane Sandy on gay marriage. “When Christians get all worked up about religious liberty, it’s usually because it’s some law or cultural practice that impinges on what they think it would mean to be a godly nation,” Bass continues. “If you have to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, then what happens in the minds of the people who are living inside of this worldview is that you’re contributing to evil. It’s way more than a wedding cake. It’s participation in sin.”

In that sense, the victimization certain Christians feel is very real. “I believe that Christians are being targeted by the gay and lesbian movement,” Franklin Graham tells me. “We’re not targeting them. I’m not targeting them.” Metaxas, the radio host who was at the September 29th meeting, agrees. “With Roe v. Wade,” he says, “and Obergefell”-- the same-sex-marriage case-- “the real issue was never: Should people be allowed to do something that they want to do? The issue was: Once they have that legal right, are they then going to use that to bludgeon people and say, ‘You must approve of what I’m doing’? The government has no right to coerce an American citizen to do something that goes against his ideology.”

Especially, the argument goes, when America was founded on that ideology-- and blessed because of it. In his promises to Christians and his overt nationalism, Trump uniquely equated American salvation with American exceptionalism, asserting that to be great “again,” America had to come down on the right side of those very wedge issues that the religious right felt would be their reckoning. Even more, he affirmed and evangelized the belief that it is not only acceptable but actually advisable to grant cultural dominance to one particular religious group. “The white nationalism of fundamentalism was sleeping there like a latent gene, and it just came roaring back with a vengeance,” says Thornbury. In Trump’s America, “ ‘religious liberty’ is code for protection of white, Western cultural heritage.”

By creating a narrative of an evil “deep state” and casting himself-- a powerful white man of immense generational wealth-- as a victim in his own right, Trump not only tapped into the religious right’s familiar feeling of persecution, but he also cast himself as its savior, a man of flesh who would fight the holy war on its behalf. “There’s been a real determined effort by the left to try to separate Trump from his evangelical base by shaming them into, ‘How can you support a guy like this?’ ” Jeffress tells me. “Nobody’s confused. People don’t care really about the personality of a warrior; they want him to win the fight.” And Trump’s coming to that fight with a firebrand’s feeling, turning the political stage into an ecstatic experience-- a conversion moment of sorts-- and the average white evangelical into an acolyte, someone who would attend rallies with the fever of revivals, listen to speeches as if they were sermons, display their faithfulness with MAGA hats, send in money as if tithing, and metaphorically bow down, again and again, at the altar of Donald Trump, who delivers the nation from its transgressions.

This and all the art on this page was done by Nancy Ohanian

How Great Would It Be To See Trump Debating Bernie About Healthcare Instead Of Trump Debating Biden About Who Has The Most Corrupt Family?

Let's take a few minutes away from impeachment, Ukraine and China-- although I do want to mention the reporting did for the Wall Street Journal, about how Trump lied to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) when Johnson confronted him about the illegal pressure he was putting on Ukraine, a quid pro quo to get Ukraine to help Trump steal the 2020 election, the way he stole the 2020 election. When Johnson asked Señor T, the illegitimate fake president said, "Muthafucker, no way. I would never do that. Who told you that?"

Let the people
have the power
to redeem
the work of fools
upon the meek

Instead, let's move along to how the Trumpist Regime plans to destroy Medicare, while persuading Trump's 2-digit IQ moron supporters that he's saving it. During his speech to the old, slow-witted and generally feeble residents of the Villages in Florida this week, he mentioned that the impeachment thing might have been set up by the pharmaceutical industry since he's "taking them on." By taking them on, he means letting them run wild and raise prices with impunity. He attacked Bernie's plan to actually improve Medicare and lower drug prices as putting "everyone into a single socialist government-run program that would end private insurance."

Kaiser Heather News reminded it's readers that Trump once again "said he and Republicans are committed to protecting people who have preexisting conditions-- a claim that PolitiFact and Kaiser Health News previously rated False, because of his administration’s policies.

Trump told his audience that “Democrats are draining your health care to finance the open borders.”

We asked the White House for the basis of this remark and never got a specific answer. But there are various issues to examine.

In August, the president argued that Democrats “support giving illegal immigrants free healthcare at our expense.” But that isn’t accurate. The statement, part of a Trump 2020 television advertisement, was rated Mostly False.

That claim examined Democratic candidates who had said during one of the televised debates that their health care plans would provide coverage to undocumented immigrants. But the question posed by a debate host didn’t ask whether coverage would be free. In fact, multiple candidates said coverage for undocumented people would not be free. Some, meanwhile, include copays and deductibles in their health care proposals. Plus, if any Medicare for All plan was financed through, for instance, payroll taxes, undocumented immigrants would also be subject to paying those.

Trump argued that Democratic proposals for universal health care “would totally obliterate Medicare”-- adding that “whether it’s single-payer or the so-called public option … they want to raid Medicare to fund a thing called socialism.”

The argument here is nuanced but, fundamentally, Trump’s characterization misses the mark and is misleading.

The “single-payer” bill he refers to is the Medicare for All proposal pushed by Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. The bill would put all Americans-- including the seniors currently covered by Medicare-- into a single health plan. It would share Medicare’s name but look dramatically different: Unlike the existing program, the proposal envisions covering virtually all medical services and eliminating cost sharing. It would not be administered by private, for-profit contractors.

Predicting what this looks like is difficult since it’s grounded in hypotheticals. And one could argue that using the term “obliterates” is not completely off base because Medicare in its current form would no longer exist. But that misses the broader impact. Under the proposal as it’s written, seniors would be insured through a program at least as generous-- if not more-- than what they currently receive.

As for “public option” proposals put forth by candidates such as former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, they would leave Medicare more or less as it is, while also creating a public health plan uninsured people could buy into.

Describing Medicare for All, Trump said the plan would “reduce Americans’ household income by $17,000 a year.”

We contacted the White House to find out the source of this number. The administration acknowledged receipt but never sent an answer.

That said, it’s unclear where this number comes from, because the evidence simply doesn’t exist to make such a precise claim. After all, many details about Medicare for All are still being worked out. That makes it exceptionally difficult to figure out how much such a system would cost-- let alone how an individual household’s finances might change under such a system. (This ambiguity is why the Congressional Budget Office has declined to estimate single-payer’s fiscal impact.)

And different households would likely make out differently under Medicare for All. Some might end up paying more. But others would likely pay more in taxes while still seeing their health care costs go down-- meaning they could ultimately save money.

Trump said, “the Democrat plans for socialized medicine will not just put doctors and hospitals out of business, they will also deny your treatment and everything that you need.”

This statement relies on a talking point that’s been widely debunked.

We focused on the first part of this claim. Both conservatives and moderate Democrats have argued that single-payer health care, in particular, would drive hospitals and doctors to shutter en masse. (Conservatives have made this argument about a public option as well.) In a past related fact check, we rated this as False.

The argument springs from the way Medicare currently reimburses hospitals, at 87 cents for every dollar spent on health care. But the Sanders bill does not set a reimbursement rate, and instead would charge the federal government with devising an appropriate rate.

Some hospitals might struggle under a new system-- but others, health care economists have previously told us, would likely do better.

“It really depends on which hospitals you’re talking about,” Gerard Anderson, a health policy professor at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in hospital pricing, told Kaiser Health News in July.

The L.A. Times' Michael Hiltzik didn't beat around the bush: Trump’s plan to ‘save’ Medicare would actually destroy it. "Trump," he wrote, "portrayed himself Thursday as the nation’s foremost defender of Medicare against what he termed the 'socialist' Medicare for All proposals being offered by Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail. 'As long as I’m president, no one will lay a hand on your Medicare benefits,' Trump told an audience at a big Florida retirement community. During the day, he signed an executive order purportedly designed to 'protect and improve' the program. Here’s the truth of the matter: Trump’s executive order is a stealth attack on the very program he’s swearing to protect. Buried within the order is a provision that would destroy Medicare by driving its costs to an unsustainable level. At the same time, Trump is proposing to turn more of the program over to commercial insurers. Put simply, he’s proposing to privatize Medicare... The victims will be the 60 million seniors who depend on Medicare for their healthcare. Their costs would go up, and their access to benefits shrink."





Biden can't defend his swampy family of lobbyists, drug addicts and swindlers. Instead his desperation has caused his campaign to run this bullshit ad (below) in Iowa , New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, pretending that Trump wants anyone but Biden instead of what Trump really wants: Biden, Biden, Biden. Trump knows full well that by attacking Biden in early primary states, unsophisticated and simple-minded Democratic primary voters will want to thwart him and vote for Biden-- Trump's strategy for not having to debate a more substantive candidate-- Bernie or Elizabeth-- on policy. He wants Biden so the whole campaign is about who is the worst liar, who is the more senile and whose family is more disgusting-- i.e., a pure lesser of two evils race, the only kind of race Trump knows how to win.

Why Did College Student Voter Participation DOUBLE In 2018? Was It More Than Just Hatred Of Trump?

Thursday, we discussed New Mexico's plan to fully fund tuition in public colleges and universities for all its students. That's delivering-- something Pelosi and her pathetic leadership team doesn't understand in any way shape or form. Yesterday, Tufts University released a report about student participation in the 2018 election cycle. It doubled-- and it helped Democrats recapture the House and elect does of new members. Pelosi and her team need to understand that these woke students did not vote to further the career trajectories of a bunch of corrupt establishment Democrats. And if they don't start delivering, these students will not become part of any lasting Democratic Party coalition.

In a discussion of the Israeli elections I had today with one progressive congressman, he noted that "the standard liberal platform of better healthcare, lower housing costs, higher pension payments, better relations with the Palestinians, etc. (Labor/Meretz) went absolutely nowhere" and that "the socialist parties in Europe are getting absolutely clobbered." When I asked him why, he said, among other things, that "when the socialist parties actually are in power, they don’t do shit for people, the most recent case being France under Hollande, whose approval rating ended at 22%."

I reminded him of how some members of Congress, himself included, do pass legislation of great value to working families. I asked if it is reasonable to expect candidates running on platforms that will make peoples' live tangibly better to follow through. He said Bernie's record-- having passed more legislation that any other member when he was in the House is a good sign he and reminded me that Elizabeth Warren-- albeit before she was a senator-- created the CFPB and got it through Congress and signed by the president and "in the Senate, she made her mark by creating, thoughtful, sound legislation that was never going to go anywhere, but still represented what the Democrats ought to do when they return to power."

In her introduction to the Tufts report, Nancy Thomas, Director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, wrote that "In the 2018 midterm elections, the average student voting rate at U.S. colleges and universities more than doubled from the last midterm elections, jumping from 19% in 2014 to 40% in 2018. The fact that student voting rates increased is no surprise since, according to the U.S. Election Project’s analysis, voting rates among all Americans increased 13.6 percentage points. What is surprising is that college and university student voting rose a remarkable 21 percentage points. Perhaps now is a good time to stop focusing on why college students don’t vote and start understanding why they do vote."

The Climate Crisis is driving a great deal of student activism and electoral participation-- as are proposals for debt-free and tuition-free college. I asked some of the congressional candidates what they are finding when they are out talking with younger voters. "Looking back over our history," said Jason Butler, the progressive Democrat running against George Holding (R) in northeast North Carolina, "young adults have always been critical in pushing political dialogue but now I sense an even deeper urgency. As I talk to high school and college students I am struck with the passion in their voice and their willingness to act. Specifically, the top two issues I consistently hear are climate change and an assault weapons ban. And this makes sense as these are issues that affect them directly. It is a common saying that “all politics is local” and this is ever-the-case with young adults when it comes to these two issues. They are living through mass shootings and must regularly endure “active shooter drills.” And furthermore, they realize that they have the most at stake when it comes to climate change. Yes, we need to listen to them and be willing to be led by them because they are not afraid to blaze a new pathway in our political discourse. From the Climate Strike this Friday to the March for Our Lives Movement - young adults are changing politics for the good. I will continue to support their leadership and vision for a better society."

Kara Eastman's daughter just went off to college and Kara, running for Congress in a blue-trending Omaha district talks to college students out on the hustings all the time. They are likely to help her replace backward Republican Donald J. Bacon, a complete Trump patsy. "College-age students tell me they are excited to vote for someone who does not talk down to them and who speaks about the things they care about," Kara told me today. "I recently attended a University of Nebraska Omaha and Creighton University collaborative event where I talked to many students. They voiced their concerns for the environment with a particular focus on pollution. A few also said they were happy to see that I was not taking corporate PAC donations as they are tired of the corrupt political system. As a campaign, we include college students as interns, volunteers, advisors and staff because we know that their voices are so important to the rising electorate."

Progressive congressional candidate Kathy Ellis was in L.A. for a wedding yesterday and we sat down for dinner. She told me that young people in southeast Missouri "are fed up with the current situation, and rightfully so. They graduate college with enormous amounts of debt and dwindling opportunities for well-paying jobs. For young people in my district, the situation is even more dire: with the shrinking of our local job market, young people who can attend school are forced to move elsewhere to pay off their debt. They want debt-free college; a living wage; better, more affordable healthcare; and opportunities to move forward in society. I couldn't agree with them more, and I proud to be building a campaign team of almost entirely young people."

Art Deserves To Be Preserved-- Lost Patti Smith Tape Surfaces... Make America Great Again

The Billboard Top 10 didn't look even vaguely familiar to me this week. "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus is #1. Post Malone has the #2 and #3 song, #3 with Swae Lee. Ariana Grande has the #4 slot with "7 Rings." Halsey's "Without Me" is #5. The Jonas Brothers was basically a commercial concoction of Disney's for little children in 2005 and are now grown adults with little children of their own-- and a big hit, "Sucker" (#6). "Dancing With A Stranger" by Sam Smith and Normani is #7; and... remember Halsey back at #5? She's featured by BTS on "Boy With Luv" at #8, new on the charts. Billie Eilish has a hit with "Bad Guy" and she's from my neighborhood and just made a big splash at Coachella so I heard her music before. And #10 is Cardi B and Bruno Mars ("Please Me") and both of their celebrity has crossed over from the music world into the greater cultural/news world, so I know who they are. I guess you could argue that they-- as well as Billie Eilish-- capture some of the spirit of rock'n'roll but the point I was trying to make was that there's no rock music on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Well, I thought, that was always more a pop chart than a rock chart anyway. So I found a rock chart and there were some real rock bands on it-- even big ones that sell out arenas, like Panic! At The Disco (with songs at #1 and #4) and Imagine Dragons (with songs at #3 and #5). Tame Impala has two songs in the Top 20 too. I guess there are fewer bands now so you can have more than one song in the charts the same week without that being that big a deal.

Fewer bands because kids don't write songs and learn how to play instruments? They just imagine being dis at Coachella making beats. OK. My friend Daisy-- who's still in the business in a way-- puts it like this-- "Rock is in an assisted living facility; it's not dead but it's not vibrant." Yeah, that's what I was thinking too: it's kind of moribund. It's not going to die, I don't think. But it's resting. On hiatus.

When it comes back I suspect it will come back the way it started-- the way it is on a small scale now-- mostly driven by expressive creative impulse. That's when it's bets anyway. Then guys figure out girls like it and they can get laid and more people start bands. OK, still OK. It's when people realize you can get rich and famous-- kind of a corollary to getting laid in a way, a sick way, really-- that it peaks and starts declining. That happens. I kind of think it'll happen again.

During the week, my old amigo, Andy Paley, e-mailed me that lost Patti Smith tape up top, from 1976, in Brussels. Andy's playing bass. I couldn't wait to hear the cover of Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again," which I don't remember having ever heard them do before. But it was at the end and I'm respectful enough and curious enough to to skip ahead. Thank God. The versions of "Gloria" and then "Land" (where she introduces Andy, probably why he sent it to me 'cause I always got such a kick out of the other time she introduced him in a song years later).

The interview parts are as good as the music parts. So listen to them hole thing and be happy you read DWT. God, she looks so young and sounds so young. She was wrong about something though; she forgot to mention jazz.

Speaking as an artist she mentioned that rock'n'roll is like, for me, the most integrated form of art because I can use my body, which is a great tool, I can use my mind, I can use my throat... all the elements that I use in separate art I'm able to use all at once in rock'n'roll... Being an American there's a lot to be ashamed of. There's lot to be proud of, but... Americans are middle class and very materialistic and all but we did do one good thing: we created rock'n'roll. It's to me the one thing that made America great... Rock'n'roll doesn't belong to America; it's belongs to the universe; it belongs to the world. Rock'n'roll is the first real American art. We did abstract expressionism. We had Jackson Pollock; Willem de Kooning but it was still a European energy. At last-- rock'n'roll; we did something. Finally we won our place in cultural history. Now it belongs to everyone."

The next segment... well go listen to it yourself. It's like a course you shouldn't miss. She says she doesn't think history "can deny Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison; they're not going to be able to wipe that out of peoples' memories... As long as I'm alive and as long as I'm working no one is going to be able to push rock'n'roll down into Hollywood or theater or make it, like, passé or make it like a fad or something. It's art... Art deserves to be preserved." Chubby Checker.

Republican Religion Leaves Out Jesus Entirely

As I've mentioned a couple of times, a month or so ago Ted Lieu and I had a meeting with the leaders of VoteCommonGood, an evangelical group eager to help Democrats take back Congress in November. Their goal is to help put a check on Trump who they feel is immensely dangerous. We've been helping them plan out a national bus tour during which they hope to introduce Democratic candidates to evangelical communities from Bangor to San Diego-- with a big emphasis in Texas.

An old pal, Frank Schaeffer, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back is the one who introduced Rep. Lieu and I to VoteCommonGood. He's very excited about their mission to, in his words, "convince enough Christian Republican voters that Trump and the Republicans have crossed a line into clearly anti-Jesus territory to help augment the blue wave on the way in 2018-2020. As the son of the 20th century's most famous evangelical intellectual (Francis Schaeffe' of opposition to Trump. This isn't about politics for those of us who try to follow Jesus, it is about the duty to save our country from danger. The media who have written off all white evangelicals as forever Republicans are in for a surprise in Nov 2018. We won't change all minds but we'll change a few... and that will make a difference. So please-- Democrats-- wake up to the fact that we anti-Trump evangelicals and former evangelicals are out there and working to elect progressives as candidates to curb Trump's God-hating inhumanity. And this may sound strange to many Democrats but we are fighting Trump and his ilk in the name of Jesus."

Yesterday, one of the pastors we met with sent me an essay from last spring by Michael Coren in The Walrus, Conservatives Don’t Own Jesus. The subtitle from this former right-winger is "By teaming up with Christians, progressives can reclaim the political agenda." Trump, he reminded his readers, primarily in Canada, "is an adulterer, a liar, and a bully. He is divisive and dangerous and an appalling role model for those around him. No matter: 81 percent of white born-again or evangelical Christians and 60 percent of white Roman Catholics voted for him, and a majority of white evangelical Protestants still back him. He is held up by numerous Christian leaders as a protector of the faith. Among his supporters is Franklin Graham, multi-millionaire son of the recently deceased Reverend Billy Graham, who wants Muslims banned from the United States because Islam is 'very evil and wicked' and who has demanded that LGBTQ people be barred from churches because Satan 'wants to devour our homes'. It’s no surprise that many progressives believe that organized Christianity stands in direct opposition to the aspirations of social democracy... Progressives may want to ignore the church, to reject it, even to despise it. But they shouldn’t. If the progressive movement seeks to shape this county, then it needs to influence the levers of power, such as culture, media, politics, and-- yes-- faith." His argument is that "reconciling progressive ideas and Christ’s teachings isn’t just possible, it’s absolutely inevitable."

There are those on the left who see religion as a distraction from the genuine challenges of poverty, echoing the Marxian notion of faith as the “opiate of the people.” Having watched Christian groups try to restrict the rights and freedoms of lLGBTQ people, they are angry at religious leaders who support and defend arch-conservative administrations. In return, I offer the vision of a joint enterprise based on the moral agenda we share: a dedication to the social values that liberate the very people to whom Jesus devoted his work and teachings. He came for everybody but certainly seemed to prefer the poor and needy. He came to provoke the complacent and empower the vulnerable. He was never a figure of the status quo.

...[A] majority on both sides of the issue would like abortion rates to decline, and the way to achieve that is entirely liberal and, yes, entirely Christian: by making contraceptives readily available, by insisting on modern sex education, by reducing poverty, by funding public daycare, and by generally empowering women. And yet Catholics insist on opposing “artificial contraceptives” and, alongside their conservative Protestant allies, lead the campaign against modern sex education. As for abortion itself, most on the Christian right want it defunded and ultimately banned and criminalized.

The Catholic nun Sister Joan Chittister has done an effective job of explaining the gap, the difference, between care for life and opposition to abortion: “I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.” Christian conservatives appear to care for people just before they’re born and just before they die. In between, not so much. That’s not the rebel Jesus, that’s not the stinging demand for social change and justice that the Gospel insists upon.

Economics and financial power? “In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.” This is not gentle compromise, this is downright revolutionary! Then there is, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Here is the rebel Jesus, who embraces the redistribution of wealth and power. “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me.” When a wealthy young man asks what he must do to obtain eternal life, Jesus’s reply is simple: sell everything you have and give the money to the poor. This is socialism-- pristine, exquisite socialism.

When Jesus speaks of war and peace, he uses words that, in the ancient Greek version, are not passive and liberal but aggressively interventionist, strident against violence, and militant in bringing about peace. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God”; this is, at its heart, telling listeners that if they make war, or even allow war to take place without doing all in their power to prevent it, they don’t know God. Jesus is less a pacifist-- witness the attack on the money men in the temple-- than a committed objector to war. No selling arms, no military-industrial complex, no profit in other people’s misery.

Much to the frustration of the political right, which embraces individualism, the secular left holds high the idea of the collective. This is where the coalition between progressives and Christians is at its most evident. At the heart of the Christian rebellion are the lyrical absolutes of community and fraternity. “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” And this extends far beyond one’s own people or culture. When Jesus tells his followers, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me,” he is echoing the command initiated millennia earlier in the Old Testament: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”

So Jesus didn’t mention abortion, contraceptives, or euthanasia, but he did expose and condemn hypocrisy, selfishness, and the dangers of wealth, anger, and inequality. He didn’t speak of the free market, but he did reject those who transformed a place of worship into a market of profit. He didn’t obsess about sex, but he did welcome and embrace those accused of sexual sin. He didn’t build walls and fences, but he did insist that we rip down all that might separate and divide us. He didn’t call for war and aggression but did demand we throw away weapons and all that might hurt or kill our brothers and sisters. That is the rebel Jesus: cutting through the pain and the suffering and the confusion of this broken planet and pulling back the curtain to show the splendid truth of the world’s possibilities.

He turns the world upside down, challenges the comfortable, sides with the outcast and the prisoner, has no regard for earthly power and worldly ambition. The rebellion of Christianity isn’t safe and was never supposed to be. The rebellion of Christianity is dangerous.

Yet conservatives have transformed a faith that should revel in saying yes into a religion that cries no. Its founder died so that we would change the world, but many of his followers link Jesus to military force and dismiss those who campaign for social change as radical and even godless. So many conservatives have manipulated Christianity into a cult of the bunker, seeing persecution around every corner and retreating into literalism and small-mindedness.

This is all nostalgia rather than the rebel Jesus. It’s as though the cosmetics of the Gospel, the veneer of the message, has become more important than its core and its central meaning. Jesus spoke less about the end times than the time to end injustice, less about whom we should love than about how we should love everyone. The pain of another is personal pain, we are our neighbour, we exist and live in a collective of grace, and to exclude any other person is to exclude God. It’s a message that should positively bleed from our very soul. We must extend the circle of love rather than stand at the corners of a square and repel outsiders.

It was the rebel Jesus who shaped Martin Luther King’s struggle against racism, William Wilberforce’s campaign against slavery, and Lord Ashley’s work against child labour. It was the rebel Jesus who led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to give his life to resisting Nazism and sustained Tommy Douglas as he struggled to save countless lives in this country through socialized medicine.

So, what should we conclude, either as secular progressives or as committed followers of Christ? That the Gospel doesn’t simply ask for change, doesn’t just plead for reform, doesn’t sing for a better society. It roars that we make the world a better, kinder, and more socialistic place. That’s the shock and awe of real Christianity; that’s the rebel Jesus.

Doug Pagitt is a pastor in Minneapolis, as well as a writer, radio host and the executive director of Vote Common Good. This morning he told me that "it is shocking that it is shocking to make the claim that conservative Christians don’t maintain a monopoly on Jesus. To see that conservative Christians choose to support a President who daily lies, brags about grabbing woman by the genitals, is un-repentant in regard to his own marital unfaithfulness, and, as we heard in the recording with his lawyer Michael Cohen, is brazen in seeking to use pastors and religious leaders as part of his cover-up of an affair with a playmate is enough to show the 'Jesus-brankrupt-ness' of their faith.

I am thoughtful of the “what would Jesus do?” phrase that was popular in the 90’s.

While it was the 1990’s that brought about the WWJD bracelets that many conservative Christians embraced, it was actually the 1890’s when the phrase was first used and carried serious meaning.

It came from the title of Charles M. Sheldon’s novel, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?

As an evangelical Christian minister and writer this phrase was asking the question for not only personal life but for societal structure.

This notion of organizing the Christian life and our commitments to the Common Good for society on how Jesus would love and care was the motivation for the Social Gospel expression of the early 20th century.

The conservative expression of Christianity has not for more than a hundred years in this country held the ownership of the message of Jesus.

A Jesus oriented perspective always seeks to include, to expand, to be gracious, to be truthful and to be about the Common Good. That is what sits at the heart of the “Good News” that is indeed good for all.