As every news-junkie must know by now, Donald Trump is holding a closed-door meeting today with on the order of 1000-evangelical leaders. Somebody snuck into the hotel and managed to snap the agenda.
Most of the names on the program are probably familiar to all of us: Ralph Reed, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Franklin Graham — all people on the outskirts of public life, all figures of widespread and deserved ridicule.
Trump has already won the evangelical rank-and-file; they were the first group to move his way. Accordingly, their ‘leaders’ will almost certainly back Trump so that they can continue fleecing their sheep. Expect high praise for Trump when the meeting is over, along with some modest caveats about how “no candidate is perfect but he’s with us on the important stuff.”
This won’t do Trump much good. His campaign is broke, lacks rudimentary organization, and disintegrating into staff/family warfare, and sane, decent-minded adults don’t care a hoot what evangelical leaders think about anything, anyway — especially since the awful mass-killing in Orlando. For 8-years the Republican Party has single-mindedly devoted itself to making the government dysfunctional, and nobody in his right mind is going to reward them by installing their incandescently-crazy wrecking-ball candidate in the White House.