Evangelical leader: Donald Trump gets a ‘mulligan’ on the Stormy Daniels affair
January 23, 2018Donald Trump is a racist, a misogynist, a moron, a serial sexual assailant and a serial sexual harasser. He is in bed with dictators and despots. He hates poor people. He’s on his third marriage and he’s cheated on every wife. He sexualizes his favorite daughter constantly. He let’s Mother’s Husband dictate the administration’s policies on LGBTQ people. Donald Trump is trash. He is a garbage person. He is also adored and accepted by Evangelicals, because this is our world. I live in a very churchy, Evangelical area of Virginia and let me tell you: these people are ride-or-die for Trump. They loathed Barack Obama, a family man on his first marriage, because he trusted women to make their own reproductive choices, and because he wanted people to have affordable health care. But those same people are all for everything Donald Trump does and says.
In the wake of the Stormy Daniels revelations – in which we all learned that Trump had an affair with a porn star and paid her off to keep her mouth shut – Politico asked Family Research Council president Tony Perkins what he and other Evangelicals think about Trump. His answer was unsurprising. Donald Trump is still the answer to many conservative evangelical leaders’ prayers. Or at least to their continuing grievances. They embrace Trump the policymaker, says Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, despite being uneasy about Trump as a man.
Perkins knows about Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who claimed, in a 2011 interview, that in 2006 she had sex with Trump four months after his wife Melania gave birth to their son Barron. He knows of the reports that she was paid off to keep the affair quiet in the waning weeks of the 2016 election. He knows about the cursing, the lewdness and the litany of questionable behavior over the past year of Trump’s life or the 70 that came before it.
“We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Perkins told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. Weigh a paid-off porn star against being the first president to address the March for Life, and a lot of evangelical leaders insist they can still walk away happy.
Evangelical Christians, says Perkins, “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”
What happened to turning the other cheek?, I ask. “You know, you only have two cheeks,” Perkins says. “Look, Christianity is not all about being a welcome mat which people can just stomp their feet on.”
According to Perkins, evangelical leaders have no illusions about the nature of their relationship with Trump. “I don’t think this president is using evangelicals … I think he genuinely enjoys the relationship that had developed. He has found, I think—and he’s a very transactional president. Trust is important to him. Loyalty is important to him, and I think in this transaction, he realizes, ‘hey, these are people I can count on, because they don’t blow with the political winds,’” he says. “It’s a developing relationship, but I’ll have to say this: from a policy standpoint, he has delivered more than any other president in my lifetime.”
Later, Perkins adds, “I think the president is providing the leadership we need at this time, in our country and in our culture.”
As a moral leader? I ask. “As a leader,” Perkins replies.
Imagine the sort of mental gymnastics you have to do to say these words, to believe what he believes, to explain what he’s explaining. All this time, the Evangelical movement was as deep as a puddle – they never cared about adultery, sin, abuse, the poor, immigrants, health care, race or racism. They don’t give a sh-t. It was all for show. The Evangelicals are just one political wing of a decrepit GOP who only care about the “R” beside someone’s name. If there’s an R, that person gets all the mulligans.
Photos courtesy of Getty.