This NY Times piece about why conservative Evangelicals love Trump is well worth reading. It does provide some insight. Ultimately, it confirms that they believe Donald Trump gives them power and that is apparently all they care about. The question is what that power is used for. And it’s not a mystery.
Here’s one woman’s explanation:
“I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all,” she said. “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”
She explained what she meant. “If you are a hard-working Caucasian-American, your rights are being limited because you are seen as against all the races or against women,” she said. “Or there are people who think that because we have conservative values and we value the family and I value submitting to my husband, I must be against women’s rights.”
Her voice grew strong. “I would say it takes a stronger woman to submit to a man than to want to rule over him. And I would argue that point to the death,” she said.
She felt freer as she spoke. “Mike Pence is a wonderful gentleman,” she said. “This is probably a very bad analogy, but I’d say he is like the very supportive, submissive wife to Trump. He does the hard work, and the husband gets the glory.”
[…]
Here is the more polite version:
It is deep into summer now. The pandemic has killed 160,000 people nationwide. Thousands have taken to the streets to protest the police killings of Black people. In Sioux Center, where the Black population is less than 1 percent, feelings about Mr. Trump remain largely unchanged.
Only three people in the county are reported to have died of the coronavirus. There was an outbreak of cases at the pork processing plant. Churches have mostly reopened. The closest thing to a protest was a walk for justice in Orange City.
“People in my circles, you don’t really hear about racism, so I guess I don’t know too much about it,” Mr. Driesen said of the protests. “When I see the pictures, I thought they all should be at work, being productive citizens.”
“I still think he is going to blow Biden away,” he said of Mr. Trump.
Ms. Schouten remembered a song she taught her children, called “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” She quoted the lyrics, which have been sung in churches for generations but would be considered racially insensitive today: “Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight.”
“We are making this huge issue of white versus Black, Black Lives Matter. All lives matter,” she said. “There are more deaths from abortion than there are from corona, but we are not fighting that battle.”
“We are picking and choosing who matters and who doesn’t,” she said. “They say they are being picked on, when we are all being picked on in one shape or form.”
These are the ideas that animate the evangelical right. I think is pretty easy to see why they would look at Donald Trump as a great leader for them. He is openly racist and sexist which is their primary political concern. And he is a fraud in every way which makes him one of them much more than any adherence to religious belief could do. After all, their ostenatious piety is obviously phony too.
They understand each other.
The fervent conservative evangelical support for Donald Trump has finally and completely exposed their political involvement for what it is. There will never be any occasion that Americans have to take their phony moralizing seriously again.