November 24, 2023 - 4:20pm
As the race for the White House next year intensifies, Donald Trump appears to be further redefining his political strategy by decreasing his reliance on the Christian Right. Once a base that seemed indispensable to electoral success for Republicans, evangelicals have always been on the outside looking in when it came to Trump. Nevertheless, it was the former president who oversaw the confirmation of the three Supreme Court nominees needed to overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling, long the single most important issue for this bloc of voters.
This ongoing tension, highlighted in a new book by Tim Alberta — The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism — reveals a pugnacious Trump who disparaged evangelical supporters of his 2016 primary rival Ted Cruz as “so-called Christians” and “real pieces of shit”. This revelation coincides with Trump’s renewed focus on battleground states in the Rust Belt, South, and West, which are essential to securing his reelection bid and where some polls show he is currently outperforming Joe Biden.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump occasionally sought evangelical support, despite his perceived lack of a genuine religious grounding. His infamous “Two Corinthians” gaffe at Liberty University epitomised his awkward embrace of religious rhetoric, yet he still garnered support from second-generation evangelical leaders such as Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr. Although this alliance was seemingly more a marriage of convenience than a display of shared values, Trump delivered on his end of the bargain, ensuring that justices opposed to Roe were appointed to the Supreme Court.
This singular achievement has arguably reduced Trump’s need to actively court evangelical voters. He is now an independent power broker in the Republican Party, able to easily pick primary winners in other elections, and running well ahead of his closest rivals, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, in all the primary polling to date.
Trump’s current strong standing in the primary polls and his lead over Biden in battleground states suggest a strategy that focuses less on evangelical support and more on broader economic and social issues. Given that Trump knows the evangelicals will have nowhere else to go, since the Democratic Party is unwilling to offer them anything on issues like abortion and family-values policies, this pivot better aligns him with the needs and concerns of a wider voter base. These Americans are generally unhappy with Biden’s advanced age and the uneven distribution of economic success in the national economy.
Similarly, despite being labelled as the most Left-wing president in US history — and perhaps actually warranting the title — Biden has maintained a centrist position on many issues, such as an expansionist foreign policy that involves support for Israel and Ukraine, while keeping the far-Left elements of his party at arm’s length. These voters, too, will have no realistic place to go, even with third-party candidates like Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Cornel West, though it remains to be seen how many will go to the polls for Biden.
In the end, the key question for both candidates is who has alienated their respective base less. Evangelicals may despise Trump, but how can they question the overturning of Roe v. Wade — something that his predecessors Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush all failed to deliver? Trump can safely say, and often does, that he gets results regardless of his rhetoric.
The former president can benefit from positioning himself as a victim of political targeting — a figure every bit as maligned as Jesus, a man on the receiving end of scores of trumped-up charges. This analogy will surely resonate with at least some evangelicals, even if he doesn’t impress them all. As Christmas approaches, Trump can still present himself as a misunderstood messiah, only one election triumph away from taking America to the promised land. Biden, meanwhile, looks increasingly like an old man left to steer the ship of state without a GPS device, hoping to forestall a mutiny long enough to reach safe harbour.
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work
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SubscribeAs for why Evangelicals will hold their nose and vote for the guy. It pretty much comes down to five things.
1. They felt betrayed by Republican leaders who they saw as spineless
2. Trump offered a transactional relationship for their votes
3. He tried to fulfill many of the promises he made to them
4. Other culture war issues like pushing LGBT+ stuff on kids has become a higher priority for many than abortion
5. They have the same hated enemies
Trans issues in schools is a winner with both religious and mainstream voters.
Trump has been pretty quiet these last few weeks. I wonder whether he doesn’t want to get too far ahead in the polls and risk the Dems jettisoning Biden. Better to keep a low-ish profile.
Trump has the best political instincts, intuition and insight of any American politician in my lifetime. He knows when to ‘hold’em and fold’em’. Needless to say, 2024 will be fascinating.
On the minus side, he is a vindictive narcissist with no core principles whatsoever (beyond, “What’s good for me is Good by definition”).
Kennedy is adding another hard to calculate impact as well. Get the popcorn!
Sincerely wondering if the article author has ever actually spoken to an evangelical Christian if he thinks Trump is only just now appealing to them.
Everything this writer knows about anything he learned at Comic-Con.
I think evangelicals’ relationship to Trump is very similar to everyone else who votes for him… they see his manifold and obvious imperfections, but appreciate that he’s not scripted, that he speaks from the heart, and that his blunt, aggressive approach is sometimes effective. He’s not circumspect… but is that a good thing or a bad thing? Evangelicals are just as torn about that as his other voters are.
The range of opposition to Trump — the political caste and the deep state, the legacy media owned by the plutocratic left, most of social media, the academy and its output of ill-educated youth, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, etc — remain as powerful as before. Don’t sell them short.
And for sure all the groups you mention are not out to improve life for the masses….
He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy
Honest question. Are evangelicals a powerful voting block anywhere in the US?
Yes. They are very powerful in red states, especially in the southern states, and they are significant in the Midwest as well, which includes several battleground states which could go either way in an election. Keep in mind that the U.S. president is elected by winning states, not by winning more individual votes, so these battleground states are extremely important.
That’s kinda what I was thinking, but do you have stats – evangelicals represent X% of voters in this seat or this state? I’m skeptical of the narrative, but not dismissive and very open to seeing the data.
Who is wise? The one who foresees consequences.
The author’s primary point seems to be that each candidate’s base has no other plausible candidate to vote for, and hence the candidate can tack away from them.
But whether a candidate does better by rallying the base or by appealing to the center is a very old and very contested question. That’s a question that deserves analysis, but this article seems to ignore it.
I love it when Trump pretends to be all religious – it is so comically transparent!
And the breathtaking hypocrisy of the so-called Christians that support him is mind blowing. All organized religion is an exercise is lies and bullsh!t but these so-called evangelicals take it to a whole new level.
Yep. From the ones that read the bible literally to the prosperity gospel folks that believe the first century jew wanted them to be rich. We have them all. It’s depressing.
The Plonk Socialist is among us again, as persistant and annoying as bedbugs.
Trump doesn’t pretend to be religious. Moreover, the disrespect that The Left hold for people of all religions is intolerant, anti-intellectual and just plain mean. Since Truman walked this earth, there has never been a more pragmatic President.