Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers by John W. Dean & Bob Altemeyer

Author:John W. Dean & Bob Altemeyer [Dean, John W. & Altemeyer, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781612199054
Amazon: 1612199054
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2020-08-24T23:00:00+00:00

MANY WERE CALLED, LOOK WHO WAS CHOSEN

Trump pulled ahead of the pack without saying much about what he would do as president. Mostly he just attacked, almost everybody: Mexicans, Muslims, Chinese, Japanese, NATO allies, Democrats, and his Republican opponents. He was selling aggression, and the Republican rank and file, shucked of moderates, was buying. One cannot tell from the polls how religious Republicans per se responded to Trump, but the surveys show that Cruz and the other religious candidates lost as much ground as anyone else while Trump climbed over them, which means some evangelicals were falling for his spiel and under his spell early on. And ascend he did during the runup to the primaries. Aided by a surprise endorsement by Jerry Falwell Jr., Trump finished a respectable second to Cruz in the leadoff Iowa primary on February 1, 2016.13 Eight days later Trump won the New Hampshire primary and drew more support from evangelicals than Cruz did.

The hammer fell in the South Carolina primary on February 20, 2016. With two-thirds of the Republican voters being white evangelicals, everyone expected Cruz to run away with the delegates, and he worked the state hard. He ran a TV ad showing Trump’s appearance on a “Meet the Press” program in 1999 in which he answered a question about abortion by asserting, “I am very pro-choice, in every respect.” That should have totally cost Trump the evangelical vote everywhere. But Trump announced he had converted from being completely pro-choice to being completely pro-life, and he won not only the statewide vote, but the evangelical vote too. Trump captured nine of the eleven states that held Republican primaries on Super Tuesday, February 26, and in each of the nine he again chalked up more evangelical votes than Cruz.

On March 3, 2016, Mitt Romney, the Republican Party nominee for president in 2012, gave a speech in which he denounced Trump as “a fraud” and warned, “He’s playing the American public for suckers.” He warned Republicans not to vote for him.14 But the leaders of the religious right began showing a jittery acceptance of candidate Trump as their followers increasingly wandered away from the fold to attend his energetic rallies, which he had started opening with a prayer. After Super Tuesday the de-flocked shepherds, scrambling to catch up to their runaways, grabbed hold of the bandwagon as it rumbled to the Republican convention. They were permitted to kiss Trump’s ring, so to speak, by joining his one-thousand-member evangelical board.15 The race effectively ended on May 3, 2016, when Trump won another evangelical-rich state, Indiana, although it would take a few more primaries for him to lock up a majority of the delegates.,

In November, he most unexpectedly won the presidency. According to the exit polls, white voters who said they were born-again or evangelical Christians gave Donald Trump 80 percent of their votes, while only 16 percent went to Clinton.16 That was five to one! Trump, who had spread sin like butter on toast, won massively among the religious right.

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