The religious right understood Trump perfectly. Now he’s delivering for them.
How could this man, with his libertine lifestyle and his laughably insincere declarations of faith, win them over when they had so many other genuinely religious primary candidates to choose from? And why did they stick with him so fervently in the general election, giving him a remarkable 81 percent of white evangelical votes, more than any other presidential candidate since that question has been asked in exit polls?
.. Donald Trump is delivering for the religious right — more than they could have hoped for. In other words, when everyone questioned their judgment, they knew just what they were doing. And they turned out to be right.
Many of them cited the Supreme Court as the key to their reasoning. Nothing was more important than keeping the Court in Republican hands, so that Roe v. Wade might be overturned and other rulings friendly to conservative Christians will continue to be handed down.
.. The draft order seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act.
.. They weren’t fooled into thinking his faith was sincere. But I suspect they caught something else in his rhetoric: The willingness to state clearly that he was on the side not just of some abstract “religious freedom,” but for Christians specifically. For Trump, it’s all about Us and Them. Christians are Us, and everybody else (particularly Muslims) is Them.
.. The substance and implications of the issues aren’t important to Trump, which made him the perfect candidate for the religious right. They didn’t need a person of sincere faith. They needed someone with tribal instincts and an appetite for smashing established norms.
.. Last January, Trump went to Liberty University and cited a passage from “Two Corinthians” (instead of “Second Corinthians”) to much mockery. Look at how phony and insincere he is!, people said. But the most important thing he said came right after he read the verse. “Is that the one?” he asked. “Is that the one you like? I think that’s the one you like.”
.. In his usual unadorned way, Trump was proclaiming his willingness to pander as shamelessly as necessary, and give the religious right whatever they wanted. They got the message. And now they’re getting their reward.