Kevin Drum marvels today at evangelical support for Donald Trump, pointing toward this exchange with David Brody.
David Brody asks Donald Trump, “Who is God to you?…You’ve contemplated this before, or have you contemplated this?” Here’s his reply:
Here we are on the Pacific Ocean. How did I ever own this? I bought it fifteen years ago. I made one of the great deals they say ever. I have no more mortgage on it as I will certify and represent to you. And I was able to buy this and make a great deal. That’s what I want to do for the country. Make great deals. We have to, we have to bring it back….
Wait. A question about God produces a stock speech about what a great dealmaker Trump is? Yep. Then this:
….but God is the ultimate. I mean God created this [points to his golf course and nature surrounding it], and here’s the Pacific Ocean right behind us. So nobody, no thing, no there’s nothing like God.
Drum adds:
Brody defends Trump’s lack of a “biblically thorough answer” and says that Trump may well appeal anyway to the “I’m Sick and Tired” evangelical voter. That’s good to know. I had no idea that it was so easy to appeal to evangelical voters.
The Atlantic puzzled over the same curious fact last week:
Donald Trump is immodest, arrogant, foul-mouthed, money-obsessed, thrice-married, and until recently, pro-choice. By conventional standards, evangelical Christians should despise him. Yet somehow, the Manhattan billionaire has attracted their support.
According to the most recent polls, Trump is one of the top picks for president among evangelical Christians. One Washington Post poll even had him as the group’s favorite by a margin of six points.
<< SIGH >> That this is a puzzle evidences how poorly most Americans — or, at least, most journos — actually understand evangelical Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche explained it more than 125-years ago. The Jesus Movement of 1st-century Palestine was a reaction of the underclass against their betters, and their sacred New Testament texts are the texts of a despised subterranean cult born in the underclass. Never mind 2000-years of marketing; Christianity was founded on envy and malice, and those impulses shape their responses today to the prevailing zeitgeist.
H.L. Mencken ‘got it’, too.
Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
Now comes … THE DONALD!, carrying in each hand a slopping, overflowing bucket of trash-talk. It’s like — Dare I say it? — a match made in Heaven; of course they adore him. He gives a voice to otherwise incoherent malice. It is as simple, and squalid, as that.