The religious right is counting on him to keep a chief executive with a history of crotch-grabbing on the straight and narrow when it comes to their agenda. And Republicans in Congress realize he’s the only member of the top team who could get through a phone conversation with the prime minister of Australia without causing an international crisis.
.. On Friday, he was directing the government to liberate our financial industry from the heavy boot of regulation that left the nation’s bankers and hedge fund managers living on rice and beans during the Obama era.
.. One of the goals is to get rid of a pending rule requiring brokers to act in their clients’ “best interests” when they’re giving advice about retirement investments. Obviously, this would be really, really hard on our nation’s forgotten financial consultants. And you know how much the beleaguered working class hates the gloom of transparency in their I.R.A.s. But liberation is on the way.
A Return to National Greatness
And so along come men like Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon with a countermyth. Their myth is an alien myth, frankly a Russian myth. It holds, as Russian reactionaries hold, that deep in the heartland are the pure folk who embody the pure soul of the country — who endure the suffering and make the bread. But the pure peasant soul is threatened. It is threatened by the cosmopolitan elites and by the corruption of foreign influence.
.. The Trump and Bannon anschluss has exposed the hollowness of our patriotism. It has exposed how attenuated our vision of national greatness has become and how easy it was for Trump and Bannon to replace a youthful vision of American greatness with a reactionary, alien one.
We are in the midst of a great war of national identity. We thought we were in an ideological battle against radical Islam, but we are really fighting the national myths spread by Trump, Bannon, Putin, Le Pen and Farage.
.. Are we still the purpose-driven experiment Lincoln described and Emma Lazarus wrote about: assigned by providence to spread democracy and prosperity; to welcome the stranger; to be brother and sister to the whole human race; and to look after one another because we are all important in this common project?
Or are we just another nation, hunkered down in a fearful world?
Donald the Menace
But it also reflected a cold view of the incentives the new administration would face: as working-class voters began to realize that candidate Trump’s promises about jobs and health care were insincere, foreign distractions would look increasingly attractive.
.. But the war with China will, it seems, have to wait. First comes Australia. And Mexico. And Iran. And the European Union. (But never Russia.)
.. There was also a curious contrast between the response to Iran and the response to another, more serious provocation: Russia’s escalation of its proxy war in Ukraine. Senator John McCain called on the president to help Ukraine. Strangely, however, the White House said nothing at all about Russia’s actions until Nikki Haley, the United Nations ambassador, issued a condemnation late Thursday night to the Security Council. This is getting a bit obvious, isn’t it?
.. Peter Navarro, head of Mr. Trump’s new National Trade Council, accused Germany of exploiting the United States with an undervalued currency. There’s an interesting economics discussion to be had here, but government officials aren’t supposed to make that sort of accusation unless they’re prepared to fight a trade war. Are they?
.. No, what we’re hearing sounds like a man who is out of his depth and out of control, who can’t even pretend to master his feelings of personal insecurity. His first two weeks in office have been utter chaos, and things just keep getting worse — perhaps because he responds to each debacle with a desperate attempt to change the subject that only leads to a fresh debacle.
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.