Nobody is worse than Trump
by digby
He is a violent, cretinous narcissist and his cabinet is filled with Goldman Sachs greedheads and government slashing zealots. His foreign policy is incoherent and national security is totally in the hands of generals. And then there are the theocrats who are getting every last thing they want from their beloved pussy grabbing, sexual predator.
Peter Montgomery surveys the success of the Religious Right under Trump:
Amid the stream of outrage about President Donald Trump that dominates my Facebook feed, one friend desperately sought a silver lining: “Well, at least we don’t have the theocrat Pence as President.” It reminded me that I, like some of my LGBTQ friends, thought during the Republican primary that we would prefer Trump to someone like Ted Cruz, whose unshakeable religious-right ideology and matching policy agenda was clear.
We were wrong. My Facebook friend is wrong. Not only is Trump a reckless and divisive president who shows contempt for anyone who crosses him and who has energized a white nationalist movement that could wreak havoc on American political and social culture for a long time to come—he’s also the best thing that’s ever happened to the religious right.
To be fair, there was a logical foundation for believing that Trump would be less of a culture warrior than a president who is a conservative evangelical. Pence has a long anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ record. And there is a basis for the argument that Trump is so incompetent that a Mike Pence or a Ted Cruz might have been more successful dealing with Congress.
But it is hard to imagine the religious right doing any better under a President Pence or President Cruz than they are with President Trump. But because the president is the crass, amoral, prideful, and dishonest huckster Trump, rather than a faith-on-their-sleeve true believer like Pence or Cruz, the religious right has been able to have to wield an outsized influence on national policy while avoiding the kind of scrutiny that would come if they were working with one of their own in the White House.
During his campaign, Trump offered conservative evangelicals a deal: help him take the White House and he would make them more politically powerful than ever before. They took the deal, urged voters to overlook his glaring character flaws, and helped put him in office. Trump’s conservative Christian cheerleaders have told him repeatedly that he is on a divine mission and that God intervened in the election. Religious right leaders upheld their end of the deal and delivered an overwhelming majority of white evangelical votes to Trump. Now he’s upholding his end by giving them more than they might have expected even from a President Pence.
Read on for the details. The banning and purge of trangender people from the military is just the tip of the iceberg. It is truly alarming.
Religious right leaders have a hard time believing their good fortune. They talk about how often they’re at the White House. The Christian Broadcasting Network rivals Fox in its adulation of Trump. Trump’s silence during LGBTQ Pride month did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. On the rare issues on which Christian conservatives been disappointed—decisions not to immediately relocate the American Embassy to Jerusalem or pursue broad religious exemptions from laws protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination, the president has told them to be more patient.
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out who’s using religion more cynically, Trump or his right-wing religious boosters. Trump’s evangelical advisers have been sticking with him even as corporate CEOs started walking away after Trump gave political cover to white nationalists. As long as President Trump is giving them what they want, the religious right continues to explain away his dishonesty, cruelty, and recklessness, and even portrays his political opponents as enemies of God. “Values voters,” indeed.
If Trump leaves office before the end of his term and Pence become president it will be terrible because all Republicans are terrible. But it would be a mistake to think that the White House would be any more theocratically powerful than it is under this deviant libertine.
Trump has no moral compass so he’s just as fine with letting them do whatever they want, just as he is with the KKK and Nazis, the NRA and rogue police. Pence will be tainted with Trump regardless so if he becomes president, while the media will happily sing his hosannas as “a grownup,” at this point he’s so tainted by his association that he will have diminished power and would be unlikely to win election on his own.
But what’s most important about this is the complete breakdown of any pretense that these “Values Voters” have any moral core or are in any way sincere in their beliefs. They are nothing more than a political faction looking for power and they are willing to use any means necessary to achieve it. Let’s not ever be confused again or allow the media to use them as some kind of symbol of morality in our politics.
They are beyond hypocrites. They are simply frauds.
Look at this disgusting show of cloying obsequiousness from Friday. It’s enough to make me lose my lunch:
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