Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:42:30 +1000WeeblyFri, 31 Jul 2020 04:24:40 GMThttp://www.stevebishop.net/trump-still-has-god-guns-and-guile-on-his-side/trump-still-has-god-guns-and-guile-on-his-sideWill the insanity and absurdity of American presidential elections enable Donald Trump to repeat his 2016 victory which he achieved despite one poll giving Hillary Clinton a lead of 15% a month before the election?


Insane? Eight of the 10 poorest counties and nine out of the 10 poorest states in the USA voted in 2016 against Obama’s free health care for the poor.


And they voted for a change in taxation which independent analysis warned would give the top 0.1 per cent more tax relief that the bottom 60% of taxpayers combined.


Absurd? Just 0.1 per cent of the129 million votes cast nationally were enough to gain Trump 46 (17%) of the 270 college votes needed to put the presidency out of Clinton’s reach.


The 46 college votes were earned with miniscule majorities in three “rust” states captured from the Democrats (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) totalling 77,744 votes.


A country which has touted itself as a model of democracy and involved itself in effecting regime change in other nations voted for a racist, lying, draft-dodging, self-confessed sex assaulter with six bankruptcies to be its president.


So just how was America Trumped? And can it happen again?


Well, his troops are massing behind him. Support for him to be the Republican candidate for 2020 increased among Republicans and sympathisers from 59% in October 2017, to 66% in October 2018, and to 72% in mid-September 2019, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).


Opinion polls continue to show Trump well behind (as in 2016) but there are other indicators showing growing support for him in some sectors. 


How can this be?


Put a date to this quote: “Many evangelicals are disillusioned by what they see as [a] failure to actively oppose legalized abortion…and…express almost apocalyptic concern about the decline in the US economy and military prestige abroad.” 


A clue: just over four months after this appraisal, two-thirds of white evangelical voters closed their minds to the fact that the Republican candidate, a former second-rate celebrity, was divorced, alienated from his children and almost never attended church and put him in the White House.


What made the voting all the more remarkable was that the first-term president who was turfed out was committed Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter.


The quote is from the June 25 1980 edition of The Christian Science Monitor.


Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy was a watershed moment in presidential voting patterns which not only involved the politicisation of the evangelical movement but also marked the first time the National Rifle Association had endorsed a presidential candidate.


It marked the start of an unholy and illogical alliance of fervid opposites which has been influential ever since - pro-lifers and supporters of an industry that kills nearly 40,000 Americans every year.


In the beginning was the word of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, proprietor of a megachurch with collections of $50 million a year and a full-time staff of 1,000, and the word was bigotry – pro-segregation, anti-equal rights, anti-homosexuality, anti-abortion and anti-humanism. A desire to dictate how others live in the name of his god.


Not so much God’s will but god swill.


President Carter had drawn the ire of Falwell in 1978 when he legislated to deny southern white Christian schools tax-exempt status on the basis of their de facto segregation and through a failure to distance himself from the Democrats’ generally pro-choice platform on abortion.


Evangelicals had avoided taking part in political issues but in June 1979 Falwell decided they needed to try to effect change and created Moral Majority as a political force.


By the election Moral Majority claimed it had 400,000 members and had registered three million new evangelical voters. Abortion now topped Falwell’s listing of the five “sins of America,” followed by homosexuality, pornography, humanism, and the fractured family. “There can be no doubt that the sin of America is severe,” Falwell wrote in his manifesto, Listen, America! “We are literally approaching the brink of national disaster.”


According to Jimmy Carter, in the weeks before the 1980 election “a group headed by Jerry Falwell purchased $10 million in commercials on southern radio and TV to brand me as a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian." 


That’s the equivalent of more than $30 million today.


Reagan had signed an abortion rights bill as California governor but he later assured potential supporters that he was now firmly pro-life. “You cannot interrupt a pregnancy without taking a human life.”


“I know that you can’t endorse me,” Reagan told an evangelical conference in the 1980 campaign, “but I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorse you.”


White evangelism embraced the GOP despite, or because of, Reagan’s despicable act in choosing to launch his campaign in the remote Mississippi town where in the 60s three civil rights workers had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan with the aid of the sheriff. The dog whistle to the Deep South, which had voted unanimously for Carter in 1976, was that he supported states’ rights – a phrase from the days of slavery and used for decades by segregationists in fighting federal efforts to integrate schools.


Behind the National Rifle Association’s move into politics was what became known as the Cincinnati Coup in 1977 when hardliners led by Harlon B Carter gained control of the movement at its annual meeting.


Harlon Carter had served two years of a three-year sentence for murdering a 15-year-old Mexican with a shotgun when he was 17. By 1980 he had transformed a largely apolitical hunting and sporting organisation into a far right political force opposed to all forms of gun control designed to save lives and which lobbies aggressively for gun owners' rights.


Having turned the Deep South red, President Reagan installed evangelical leaders in the White House and the policy-making apparatus of the Republican Party.


And in1983 Reagan became the first sitting president to address the NRA. He appeared alongside Harlon Carter on the cover of its magazine with the headline: “President Reagan voices his support for NRA’s objectives’”


Televangelist and millionaire Pat Robertson stood for president in 1988 but such was George H W Bush’s overt episcopalian faith that Moral Majority backed him.


The National Association of Evangelicals says: “By the end of the 1980s, evangelical voters had become an essential part of the Republican base. Republican candidates and party leaders actively sought evangelical voters, crafting issue appeals to win their support.” 


In fact, the entire Bible Belt has tended to favour the GoP since 1980 – unanimously so in 2016.


And in the same period the NRA has endorsed Republican presidential candidates while vigorously attacking political opponents.


What makes white evangelical and NRA support important is their passion, which is so strong that in a country where only 49 to 58% of the adult population has voted in recent presidential elections, they do turn out en masse. 


According to Robert P Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, while white Christians composed only 43% of the population in 2016, they constituted an estimated 55% of voters. And although white evangelical Protestants comprised only 17% of the public in 2016, they amounted to 26% of voters. 


They were urged to go out and vote by evangelical leaders such as Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham: “When you see how quickly our country is deteriorating …especially under [the Obama] administration, we have seen that it has just taken a nosedive off of the moral diving board into the cesspool of humanity,” he said. 


The 2016 National Election Pool Exit Survey had Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton among white evangelicals by 79% to 16% - a major impact when a Gallup poll estimates 38% of white, non-hispanic Americans identify themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians.
 
The NRA now claims five million paying members and the Pew Research Centre has found about 14 million more identify with it. In 2016 it contributed $31 million to Trump’s campaign.


Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and author of the 2011 book “Gunfight,” says: “NRA members are politically engaged and politically active. They call and write elected officials, they show up to vote, and they vote based on the gun issue.” 


In the last 40 years only Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been able to break this nexus, Clinton after George HW Bush breaking an election promise of no new taxes, together with a recession, and Obama after the 2008 financial crash.


Can Trump be toppled?


Biden is a Catholic but does not oppose abortion so the vast majority of the evangelical vote is likely to stay with Trump.


Trump has been shoring up his credentials with evangelicals.


He followed the Reagan example of appointing evangelical leaders to crucial government positions (including education) and there is even a weekly White House Cabinet Bible Study Group led by televangelist Ralph Drollinger. 


Trump appointed televangelist Paula White as his personal pastor and he’s being aided by a nationwide internet push by church leaders to mobilise churchgoers into voting. 


In March Trump, who appears to have broken at least five of the 10 commandments (keeping sabbath, blasphemy, adultery, stealing and coveting), told hundreds of pastors on a phone hook up that the election would be “one of the biggest dates in the history of religion, as far as I’m concerned.” 


A Pew Research survey in June this year found that if the 2020 presidential election was held immediately, 82% of white evangelical Protestant registered voters would vote for Trump or lean toward voting for him – 5% more than the number Pew found had voted for Trump in 2016.


More than half of white Protestants who did not identify as evangelical (56%) said they approved of the job Trump was doing, as did 54% of white Catholics – and roughly 60% of voters in these groups said they would vote for him if the election was held immediately. 


Biden has a “plan to end our gun violence epidemic” so the NRA vote will stay with Trump.


Like Reagan, Trump has appeared on the front cover of the NRA’s magazine American Rifleman with a message in large type: “That’s not just Wayne LaPierre seated next to the President, it’s you and 15 million NRA members.” LaPierre is NRA CEO.


(By coincidence neither man raised a gun in the Vietnam War, both being given medical deferments.) 


And $100 million evangelical entrepreneur Jerry Falwell Jr, a fervent Trump supporter, spreads both a pro-life and pro-guns message, even urging students at his Liberty University to carry handguns.


Media reports of Trump’s failures and 20,000 lies will probably be dismissed by many Republicans as fake news.


The distrust of mainstream media has become embedded in millions of American minds for more than a generation and Trump tuned in to this with his mantra that any criticism is fake news.


It was in 2008 during a California driving holiday that I first saw professionally produced bumper stickers proclaiming “I don’t believe the Liberal media”.


The earliest reference I could find for the sticker was a South Florida Sentinel article from May 1993. 


And this is from the March 1998 American Journalism Review: “Many Regent (Christian University) students have grown up attending Christian schools, listening to Christian radio, dancing to contemporary Christian music, and driving in cars emblazoned with "I Don't Believe the Liberal Media" bumper stickers.”


A Monmouth University poll found that belief in the spread of "fake news" by major news outlets among Republicans was 89 per cent and independents 82 per cent.


Trump adopted the ruse of labelling stories critical of him as fake news in January 2017.


To this refusal to believe mainstream media can be added the impact of Fox News.


Pew Research found: “Around two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (65%) say they trust Fox News for political and election news. No more than a third of Republicans say they trust any of the other news organizations asked about in the survey.


“Fox News consumers tend to have an especially positive view of the president, which may not be a surprise given that 93% of those who name the network as their main source of political news identify as Republicans or lean to the party..


“In a March 2020 survey, 63% of those whose main source of political and election news is Fox News said Trump is doing an excellent job responding to the outbreak.”


Why did the slogan “Make America Great Again” resonate so much in 2016 when surveys showed that, to misquote Harold Macmillan, Americans had never had it so good? And can “Make America Great Again Again” work?


Before the 2016 election the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Better Life Index reported the United States ranked at the top in housing. and above average in income and wealth, health status, jobs and earnings, education and skills, personal security, subjective well-being, environmental quality, social connections, and civic engagement. Americans were more satisfied with their lives than the OECD average. 


The federal government’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2017 reported 74 per cent of adults said they were either doing okay or living comfortably – up by more than10% since 2013


But Trump tuned in to angst felt by many of the 42% of white males without degrees who on average earn far less than those with degrees. Exit polls show that 66% of them voted for Trump.


And while 58% of college-educated whites said in 2018 America had improved since 1950, 57% of non-college-educated whites said it had become worse. 


They’re harking back to an age of segregation before civil rights started being enforced.


Trump is shoring up this base (in every sense of the word) with his strong stance against the black lives matter movement. 


His guile on wooing white supremacists includes a plan which harks back to the 1950s when a small Virginian town hit the headlines by closing its segregated schools to avoid orders to integrate. It then provided white children with vouchers for private schools.


He and his evangelical Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have pledged to provide federal funding for private school voucher systems, which would divert millions of taxpayer dollars out of public schools and into unaccountable private schools.


And this tweet: “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood….Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”


AFFH is Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, an Obama scheme to reduce racial segregation.


More guile. Those Queenslanders who lived through the Bjelke-Petersen years will be familiar with Trump’s ploy of sending “federal agents” into cities to deal with protestors. Joh virtually banned street marches, which led to people marching against the bans which led to police crackdowns on the “lefties” who blocked streets, which led to him being seen by those on the right as being tough on law and order. He never lost an election.


“I am your president of law and order,” he trumpets.


Fewer than a third of registered Republicans nationwide say climate change is caused mostly by human activities.


Trump has therefore appointed former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to continue the business of removing environmental safeguards.  The Union of Concerned Scientists has compiled a list of 80 Trump administration attacks on science.


But why would you need to take action on climate change when Ralph Dollinger, who leads the Cabinet Bible class, says: “To think that man can alter the earth’s ecosystem when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind [means] we can all rest assured and wholly rely on God’s aforementioned promises pertaining to His ability and willingness to sustain our world’s ecosystem.”


But, intriguingly, in south Florida which Trump needs to hold in November, people can see the effects of the rising sea level and more than half of Republicans there agree that climate change is happening.
























While 89% of Democrats believe that the country is on the wrong track, 74% of Republicans say the country is going in the right direction, according to PRRI.


There are mixed messages emanating from the three states which, essentially, gave Trump the presidency. 


In Michigan the third biggest county, working-class Macomb, which is 82% white and with only 23% of adults having a degree, switched from having recorded 208,016 votes for Obama in 2012 to 224,589 for Trump in 2016, with Clinton slumping to 176,238.


That massive swing clinched the state for Trump.


But pollster Stan Greenberg, who has been studying Macomb voters for decades, is on the record saying: “His (Trump’s) strong economy does not produce jobs, does not produce wage increases for them. They don’t see any wage increases. So I think they see a president who governs for the rich, not for working people.”


Spry Strategies has produced the only poll with Trump ahead in Michigan, 50-45 on July 21.


In Pennsylvania Trump’s slim majority was aided by three counties flipping from Blue to red – Erie, Northampton and Luzerne, the largest of the three with a 25-point swing.


By April this year the Republicans in Luzerne say they had registered 10,754 new members while the Democrats had lost 443.


Most polls in Pennsylvania have Biden ahead but on July 21 Spry Strategies had Trump leading 49-48.


In Wisconsin 22 counties switched to Trump in 2016 but now all polls in Wisconsin have Biden ahead. 


Trump’s appalling behaviour as president has led to cracks in support from evangelical leaders.


Jerry Falwell Junior has tweeted how Donald Trump “has single-handedly changed the definition of what behavior is ‘presidential’ from phony, failed & rehearsed to authentic, successful & down to earth”. 


But Michael Gerson, speech writer for George W Bush and a lifelong evangelist, says: “Falwell, Graham, and others are providing religious cover for moral squalor…”


And prominent evangelical pastor Tim Keller said in 2018: “’Evangelical’ used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with hypocrite.”


If Trump does lose, will the loss reverberate among other democracies and send a message to parties tempted to choose short term expediency in selecting a populist who can win a looming election rather than someone who can lead a country?


Brazil and the UK made the same short-sighted decisions. In Australia we can at lest be thankful that the Liberal Party did the decent thing in disendorsing  Pauline Hanson who went on to win 11 seats with more than 22% of the vote in the 1998 Queensland election by appealing to the sort of voters who elected Trump.


Nevertheless, we’ve still ended up with a coal-loving PM surrounded by fossil fuel-industry advisors at a time of climate crisis when the majority of the population wants stronger action on climate change.


Meanwhile, Trump, with God, guns and guile, could yet win a second term.  

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