Trump Covers Newsweek: "Does God Believe In Trump?"

Very interesting cover story in this week's Newsweek exploring just how and when Donald Trump, who wasn't very known for his "deeply held religious beliefs," came to be so warmly embraced by white evangelicals.

From spotlighting Trump's relationship with televangelist Paula White, to a 2011 meeting with religious leaders exploring a possible run for president, to the actual birth of the "Moral Majority" movement, the author connects the dots between white evangelicals and their king, Donald Trump.

An excerpt:

It’s now obvious that Trump got an extraordinary return on investment when he cozied up to evangelicals in 2011, but what did they see in him? His biography until quite late in life would seem to be antithetical to everything they believe. (Robert) Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, thinks the answer lies in the 2015 Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. “Local Democrats and progressives wildly underestimated the nuclear event that the same-sex marriage decision was for conservative white Christians,” he says. “It was so at the heart of their political engagement. They had pushed all their resources into the fight, and they lost decisively in courts and in public opinion.”

Among the many miracles Trump performed during his campaign was exploiting white conservative Christian fear. White Christians really are losing demographic ground, if not power. America won’t be theirs for much longer because they are a shrinking portion of the electorate. But, as Trump showed to astonishing effect, they still turn out to vote at higher rates than other, larger demographic groups. And that gives their views greater weight. In 2008, white evangelicals were 21 percent of the population but made up 26 percent of the vote, Jones says. In 2016, white evangelicals had slipped to 17 percent of the total population, but they still constituted 26 percent of voters. Jones calls the 2016 election their “time machine,” Christian fundamentalists’ chance to resurrect the public opinion of 2008, when just 40 percent of Americans supported gay marriage, not the 60 percent who do now.

America’s white Protestant fundamentalist Christians are dwindling like the dinosaurs God put on Earth alongside humans 6,000 years ago before he mysteriously decided to take them away. (And who cut them out of Genesis?) “Our best estimate is that 2024 will be the first election where we have an electorate that is less than majority white and Christian,” Jones says.

I highly recommend reading the full piece over at Newsweek.