Before Taking the White House, Trump Due in Court Over Fraud

Then there are the lawsuits that the ever-litigious Trump has either threatened or launched himself. The president-elect is still embroiled in two separate breach-of-contract lawsuitswith restaurateurs Geoffrey Zakarian and Jose Andres, who pulled out of deals with Trump in the wake of comments the then-presidential hopeful made about Mexican immigrants. Trump has also threatened to sue nearly a dozen women who have come forward with allegations of sexual harassment and assault against the former reality-TV star over the past month—which could mushroom into multiple lawsuits as some of the women have threatened to countersue if Trump moves forward. He also warned that he intends to launch defamation and libel suits against a slew of media organizations for their coverage this election cycle, including The Washington Post and the New York Times.

How voters who heavily supported Obama switched over to Trump

“We need a change in everything, and I hope he can do it,” said Oldani, who’d retired after years as a machinist. “This guy’s a billionaire, so I’m thinking he can say, ‘Hey, let’s just get the job done. I don’t need your money.’ ”

The rebuttals started flying. What about the leaked tax forms that showed Trump’s writing off nearly a billion dollars?

“More power to him. He ain’t in jail, right?”

What about the Access Hollywood tape?

 “As far as these rumors with the girls, and all of that — if you do your job, who cares?”

The Evangelical Reckoning Over Donald Trump

White, conservative Christians voted for the Republican candidate by a huge margin, but this election revealed deep fractures among leaders and churches—especially along racial lines.

.. But for some evangelical leaders, and particularly women and people of color, this election was never about power jockeying or compromise. To them, Trump represents a bigoted, misogynistic worldview and an existential threat. More than all the nasty barbs exchanged the campaign and the months of divisive arguments, this is the greatest challenge evangelicals have to reckon with in the wake of the election. White, conservative Christians may have thought they were just casting a vote for president, but some of their brothers and sisters in the church see their choice as a direct and personal assault.

.. Moore, said Falwell, “doesn’t speak for the church members or the evangelical public any more than Louis Farrakhan speaks for all Muslims or I speak for all evangelicals. It’s just one person.”

This is one of the big questions about Christianity in the Trump era: Who really speaks for the “evangelical worldview”?
.. Some of them are effectively historical artifacts: Ralph Reed, who led the Christian Coalition during the ’90s, for example, has been a big Trump supporter and is often quoted in the press. But when I spoke with students at the evangelical Liberty University, many said they’d never heard of him.
.. “I don’t make the distinction between evangelicals who aligned themselves with Trump versus evangelicals who didn’t,” he said. “I instead think the division is over motive and mode of operation.”
.. Roughly 81 percent of white evangelicals supported Trump, but many seem to have low or mixed opinions of him. The divides are also racial: Only 60 percent of all people who identify as Protestants voted Republican. The gap between that number and the number of white evangelicals who voted for Trump reflect the views of evangelicals of color, along with some theologically liberal or mainline Protestants.
.. This election was not a race to the top on matters of personal integrity; as Al Mohler, the vocally anti-Trump president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said during the campaign, if he were to support Trump, he would have to apologize to Bill Clinton
.. “You’ve now hitched your wagon to the GOP and Mr. Trump in ways that just ruin moral credibility in the country,” said Thabiti Anyabwile, a theologically conservative Baptist pastor in D.C. “I don’t know how you recover from that.”
.. Some evangelical leaders who supported Trump dismissed the allegations of misogyny as a distraction.
.. But a few predicted that this election could permanently damage attempts to create unity among evangelicals.
.. Anyabwile anticipates that it will be harder to get people to engage with his church, which is in a heavily black area of D.C., and harder to get his congregants  to engage with evangelical culture more broadly. That could pose a huge demographic challenge for churches that are trying to engage with an increasingly racially diverse American population. “Evangelicals in this vote have created a pretty deadly and chilling effect on their witness to Christ and the gospel and the scriptures,” he said. “There’s not only a credibility problem in terms of the body politic. There’s also an evangelistic problem.”
.. Others say that Trump is a new man, that everything he’s said on the campaign trail—about women, Mexicans, Muslims, the “inner city,” and more—does not reflect who he truly is. “I’ve seen a lot of change in him in the last year or two. He’s a different man,” said Falwell Jr. “I believe everybody is redeemable, and I think Donald Trump has been positively influenced by the American public that he’s interacted with over the past year.”