Despite his chequered past, evangelicals stick to Trump
HE HAS been indicted over hush money payments to a porn star and found liable in a sexual abuse lawsuit in a tumultuous start to his re-election campaign – but America’s evangelicals just can’t quit Donald Trump.
The 45th president of the United States – vying to be the 47th – has spent years mired in legal and ethical scandals, from accusations that he abused his office and tried to subvert a free-and-fair election to alleged affairs.
Yet the 77-year-old Republican remains as popular as ever on the Christian right, his appeal abundantly evident at Road to Majority, a weekend gathering of 3 000 evangelicals from the Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington.
“Together we’re warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, the atheists, the globalists and the Marxists,” Trump said in his keynote address at the closing gala to rapt applause. “We will restore our Republic as one nation under God.”
It took some persuasion for white evangelicals to come around to Trump when he announced he was running for president in 2015. But once they were in, they were all-in.
Non-Hispanic white Republicans who attend church regularly backed him by 81% in 2016 and 76% in 2020 – statistics that astonish those who question the former reality TV star’s religious credentials.
“It’s the difference between a representative and a leader,” Suzzanne Monk, 50, a political activist in explaining Trump’s enduring popularity. “Donald J Trump looks at situations and tries to rectify the situation.”
Trump’s famously devout vice-president Mike Pence, who is running a distant third in the race for the 2024 nomination, would seem the more obvious fit for evangelicals. But he was booed at the 2021 Road to Majority over his refusal to help Trump overturn his election defeat and received largely polite applause this year.
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the only speaker to explicitly criticise Trump, was roundly booed for saying the Republican leader had let the country down.
The conference was being staged on the one-year anniversary of the US Supreme Court ending the nationwide right to abortion and Trump has voiced disquiet about some of the more restrictive curbs being pushed in conservative states.
He also sparked fury among some leaders on the Christian right when he blamed harsh restrictions on abortion for Republican underperformance in the 2022 midterm election – and he has refused to commit to a federal ban during the 2024 campaign.
Yet Trump was the star of the show. “I consider it a great badge of courage. I’m being indicted for you and I believe the ‘you’ is more than 200 million people,” he told the cheering crowd.
Enzo Alcindor, who manages a real estate office in south Florida, said he would be four-square behind Trump in 2024.
“The other (candidates) do not have the melons to defend us against the machine,” says Alcindor, 50, who came to the US from Haiti in 1986. “So there is only one candidate for me – Donald Trump.”