Kirchick: Trump playing the religious right for rubes
James Kirchick at the Daily Beast points out what should be obvious.
…a bevy of religious right personalities have declared their support for Trump, a remarkable development when one considers the vast gulf separating their purported principles and those of the sybaritic former reality television show host. Nor is it just evangelical leaders who have endorsed Trump; according to a July Pew poll, 78 percent of white evangelicals have expressed support for him, compared to just 73 percent who backed Mitt Romney at the same time in 2012. The very voices who once bemoaned “the death of outrage” over Americans’ opposition to criminalizing Bill Clinton’s sex life now want us to believe that Donald J. Trump is morally fit to occupy the Oval Office.
[su_center_b]
… Trump is a living repudiation of everything religious conservatives claim to believe in. A thrice-married, epically greedy, congenitally dishonest serial adulterer who brags about his sexual conquests and exalts the rich and powerful while heaping scorn upon the weak and vulnerable, Trump is the villain of Sunday school parables made real. He worships not the Lord but material wealth. His entire life is a rejection of the Judeo-Christian nostrum that God put us on this Earth to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Watching social conservative leaders line up to endorse this man’s presidential candidacy has the aura of religious allegory, a pageant of disingenuously virtuous fraudsters selling their souls for riches and power with Trump occupying the part of wealthy nobleman who purchases indulgences to absolve himself of worldly sin.
…Trump appears to have concluded that the religious right is largely composed of hypocritical, power-hungry rubes. They’ve done nothing to prove him wrong.
[su_revcontent]
[su_facebook]
