The king of the birthers says leaders shouldn’t question a man’s faith. Seriously?
by digby
Not that this will hurt him, of course:
Pope Francis suggested on Thursday that Donald Trump is “not Christian” because of the Republican presidential candidate’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican border.
Trump fired off a statement in response almost immediately that ripped the pope’s comments as “disgraceful” and said the pope will think differently about the billionaire after the Vatican is attacked by the Islamic State.
“If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President,” Trump’s statement began.
Trump continued: “I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now, with our current President. No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith.”
This from a guy who proposes to ban people of an entire faith from entering the country.
If social media is any example, Trump’s supporters believe the Pope is out of line and that Trump is the man who is best positioned to say who is a real Christian and who isn’t.
For instance:
With Ted Cruz surging in Iowa and some national polls, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump took a jab at the Texas Senator’s faith, saying, “not a lot of Evangelicals come out of Cuba.”
[…]
In late October, Trump questioned fellow candidate Ben Carson’s Christian faith when Carson was tied with him in Iowa polls, suggesting that his Presbyterian faith is more mainstream than Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist denomination.Presbyterian is “down the middle of the road folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about,” he said.
And there’s this:
Does Madonna know something we all don’t about Barack? At a concert she said “we have a black Muslim in the White House.”— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2012
Four years ago, Trump mounted a campaign to pressure Obama to release his long-form birth certificate, even saying he would send investigators to Hawaii to find out the truth. The effort helped fuel the so-called “birther” conspiracy theory that held that Obama was born in Kenya — and Trump also floated the idea that Obama’s birth documents may label him a Muslim.
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim,” Trump told Fox News in 2011. “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that.”
His accusations reached such a high decibel level that in April 2011, Obama appeared in the White House briefing room to denounce Trump and release the long-form version of his birth certificate.
And in case you were wondering:
A majority of Trump’s supporters also believe Obama is secretly harboring faith in Islam, according to a CNN/ORC poll conducted earlier this month. That poll found that 54% of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim. Among Republicans nationwide, the poll showed, 43% of Republicans think Obama is Muslim, as do 29% of Americans as a whole.
Trump was anointed by God, unlike the Pope. So he has a perfect right to question people’s faith. I’m just pointing out that he has done it.
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