At the end of the meeting, Trump released a long list of religious right leaders as his “Evangelical advisory committee” including Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, a man who has been scathing in his criticism of Trump. (
He torturously explained that he would agree to serve Hillary Clinton too because that’s what Jesus would do.)
Ralph Reed has been a political operative since the 80s when he and anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist and convicted K-Street felon Jack Abramoff were junior Reagan revolutionaries together so he knows the game. And this was the best he could come up with:
Number one, I know his children. And you don't raise children who are this phenomenal if you're a person of bad moral character. Secondly, you don't accomplish what he has accomplished in New York City and around the world by not judging people on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
But he’s all in with Trump. And James Dobson, who wrote that righteous screed about people no longer recognizing the face of evil back in 1998,
spoke with the aforementioned Michael Anthony on the radio and casually asserted that Trump has recently been born again:
Dobson: There are a lot of people ministering to him (Trump) personally…He did accept a relationship with Christ. I know the person who led him to Christ. And that’s fairly recent. I don’t know when it was, but it has not been long. I believe he really made a commitment, but he’s a baby Christian.”
That’s very convenient since it means Trump gets a do-over on all that awful behavior of his.
Not everyone is buying it.
This evangelical scholar suggests that the real believing evangelicals are being played:
What happened on Tuesday in New York was the theo-political equivalent of money laundering. Dobson and his gang are making Trump clean so that he is worthy of evangelical votes.
So, all those white working class types who identify as evangelical but don’t go to church are being seduced by Trump’s crude nationalism and nativism, largely as result of religious leaders politicizing religion and turning it into a vehicle for their own secular power. Now, after years of lectures about morality and personal rectitude in public life, they’ve sunk so low that they’re actually trying to convince the truly devout weekly church goers that this depraved demagogue is someone they should support.
These people are making the spineless establishment Republicans look like saints by comparison.