First things first: This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was recorded before the stunning news that President Donald Trump and his wife Melania tested positive for COVID-19.
As you would expect, Twitter was immediately jammed with thoughts (of all kinds), prayers and more than a few curses. Quite a bit of the friction was linked, of course, to Trump’s many connections with religious conservatives of various kinds.
As it turned out, host Todd Wilken and I had talked about a subject that is directly related to all of that. I am referring to the advocacy journalism blast at The Atlantic that ran with this double-decker headline:
Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters
Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.
This was the article that I received more email about during the previous week than any other. As a rather old guy — in terms of decades of exposure to coverage of religion and politics — this piece sounded so, so, so familiar.
The bottom line: Lots of country-club people at the top of the GOP food chain have always — behind closed doors — viewed religious conservatives with distain and distaste. That’s big news? Does it surprise anyone that Trump is even more raw in his humor about certain types of religious people (hold that thought, we’ll come back to it) than others in his New York City-South Florida social circles?
Here are two key chunks of this McKay Coppins essay:
The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. It’s a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barrett — a devout, conservative Catholic — to the Supreme Court.
Well, “conservative Christians” is a broad term.
This article contains evidence that lots of very different believers dwell under that vague umbrella term — but that fact plays next to zero role in the author’s acidic conclusions. Here’s another chunk of text:
From the outset of his brief political career, Trump has viewed right-wing evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed, conned, or bought off, former aides told me. Though he faced Republican primary opponents in 2016 with deeper religious roots — Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee — Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him.
“His view was ‘I’ve been talking to these people for years; I’ve let them stay at my hotels — they’re gonna endorse me. I played the game,’” said a former campaign adviser to Trump, who, like others quoted in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Ah, anonymous sources certainly do play a starring role in this piece. That raises another question: How many angry ex-Trump staff members from non-evangelical zip codes are there in the urban zones along the Acela Amtrak route? Can they be numbered in the hundreds or the thousands? Is anyone surprised that many want to share dirt of various forms on nasty contacts between their ex-boss and some star-struck religious folks from the Bible Belt?
In reality, it would appear that this political-desk mud pie is directly linked to book promotion efforts for that Michael Cohen opus entitled “Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.” Elite journalists generally considered Cohen to be a less-than-human low-life when he was a Trump-ster. Now, ever word he speaks is gold, when backed by similar reporters from other angry ex-Trump staff members.
As for me, I do not doubt that Trump said many or most of the things attributed to him in this piece. After years of reading other coverage, I think the odds are good that he respects some religious leaders on the right and, at the same time, considers others weak people whose strings are easy to pull.
Meanwhile, lots of religious conservatives know that this is the case. They know who and what Trump is. I imagine Coppins knows that, too. Here’s another key passage:
The Faustian nature of the religious right’s bargain with Trump has not always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than twice as likely as the average American to say that the president is a religious man. Some conservative pastors have described him as a “baby Christian,” and insist that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.
That one paragraph includes both a reference to the mythical white evangelical monolith of folks Who. Just. Love. Trump. and to the reality that “some evangelicals” know that Trump is a “baby Christian” — at best.
Truth is, the wider world of evangelicalism includes quite a few different camps of believers, when it comes to views of Trumps. Two years ago, I shared a typology of six different evangelical camps. I have tweaked it just a bit for clarity in this version:
(1) Many evangelicals supported Trump from the get-go. For them, Trump is great and everything is going GREAT.
(2) Other evangelicals may have supported Trump early on, but they have always seen him as a flawed leader — but the best available. They see him as complicated and evolving and are willing to keep their criticisms PRIVATE.
(3) There are evangelicals who moved into Trump's tent when it became obvious he would win the GOP nomination. They know that he is flawed, but they trust him to — at least — protect their interests, primarily on First Amendment issues, because it's in his political interest to do so.
(4) Then there are the lesser-of-two-evils Trump evangelicals who went his way in the general election, because they could not back Hillary Clinton under any circumstances. They have zero illusions about his character. They believe Trump's team has done some good, mixed with quite a bit of bad, especially on race and immigration. They think religious conservatives must be willing to criticize Trump — in public.
(5) There are evangelicals who never backed Trump and they never will. Many voted for third-party candidates. They welcome seeing what will happen when Trump team people are put under oath and asked hard questions. However, they are willing to admit that Trump has done some good, even if in their heart of hearts they'd rather be working with President Mike Pence.
(6) Folks on the evangelical left simply say, "No Trump, ever." Anything he touches is bad and must be rejected. Most voted for Clinton and may have yearned for Bernie Sanders.
Now, as you read the Atlantic piece, and listen to the podcast, see if you can figure out who Trump has allegedly been blasting. Evangelical folks in Camps 1 and 2, those who have clearly bought into his reality-TV show? At the same time, try to imagine the evangelicals in the other camps taking part in these mini-dramas without bitting their lips. They may be willing to work with the Trump team, especially on First Amendment issues and SCOTUS, but they have their eyes open.
Can you see that, reading between the lines of this simplistic Atlantic essay?
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