Donald Trump looks to retake the White House in 2024. Tensions are growing between the former president and one of the key groups that helped propel him to the Oval Office in 2016, evangelicals. In a radio interview this week, Trump had a prickly response when asked about evangelical leaders who may choose to support other candidates in the next presidential election. Take a listen. well i don't really care look uh that's a that's a sign of disloyalty there's great disloyalty in the world of politics and that's a sign of disloyalty because nobody as you know and you would know better than anybody because you do such a great job nobody has ever done more for right to life than donald trump i put three supreme court justices who all voted and they got something that they've been fighting for for 64 years or many many years right and nobody thought they could win it. You know, they won. Roe v. Wade, they won. They finally won. And, you know, I was a little disappointed because I thought they could have fought much harder during the election, during the 22 election, because, you know, they won and a lot of them didn't fight or weren't really around to fight. And it did energize the Democrats. But a lot of the people that wanted and fought for years to get it, they sort of, I don't They weren't there protesting and doing what they could have done. But with all of that being said, there's nobody that's done more for the movement than I have. And that includes the movement of evangelicals and Christians and the movement very much of Right to Life. It's just remarkable. The guy, I mean, even in the small details, he just can't tell the truth. He talks about they've been fighting about this for 64 years. No, Roe was around for 49. He just adds 15 years on to it. It's just like he kept talking about the pandemic of what, 1917. I just it's very strange. Just very everything just remains very strange. Let's bring in New York Times political correspondent Michael C. Bender. Michael wrote the article about evangelical leaders and why Donald Trump is is feeling that they're being disloyal. But he bit Michael talk to Gage to support for the former president. And also with us, New York Times opinion columnist David French. So let's first talk about the story. And Michael give us your take What did you learn Yeah I think this is going to be one of the central tensions here heading into the 2024 primary for the Republican Party I mean, we've seen Donald Trump shedding support from Republicans going back to 2020, right? I mean, that was one of the reasons he lost to Joe Biden. He lost 9 percent. 9 percent of Republicans in 2020 did not vote for Trump. Might not sound like a lot, but consider that was more than twice the Democrats that Biden shed. You can't win a national election without holding your party tight these days. And evangelicals, evangelical leaders are every bit as pragmatic as Republican donors, as CEOs. They want to be with a winner. And Trump cannot afford to lose their support. What we're seeing here is Robert Jeffress, a big-name pastor down in Texas, has remained neutral, one of Trump's early supporters. Bob Vander Plaats, a very important supporter in Iowa, told us in this piece that it's time to turn the page. You know, they are very appreciative of what Trump has done with them. And that was an uneasy alliance they've had for several years, supporting a thrice married former darling of the New York tabloids in order to, you know, get really a bucket list of campaign promises on the hard right, on the evangelical right. But now they want to win the White House, and they're not sure Trump is the right guy to do it. So, David French, what did we learn? What did you and I learn about evangelical leaders in the age of Trump? What we learned was they're not leaders. They're followers. They follow the flock. This is one of the things that we've had some guests on before. Pastor Stanley on talking about how discouraged he was that, you know, if people in the flock told the pastors not not to support vaccines and not to support basic medicine, they wouldn't do it. So this goes back to Reverend Al's question earlier. Like, who's going to knock out the champ? Trump is the champ and the same people that wanted to give money to Jeb Bush in 2015 now want to give it to Ron DeSantis. But are those evangelical leaders going to stand up to Trump if the people in the pews are all supporting him? History suggests no. I mean we know the answer pretty clearly at this point I mean what the old French Revolutionary quote There go the people I must follow them for I am their leader They're going to go where the people ultimately go. Now, I do think we're in a stage that we were in not dissimilar, not terribly dissimilar from, say, late 2015, early 2016, when it wasn't clear that Trump was going to be the nominee yet. As soon as it became clear that Trump was going to be the nominee, the evangelical leadership fell in line. Why did the evangelical leadership fall in line? It's not because Trump was suddenly a better person when he was. What about after Access Hollywood? Everybody said, oh, I must leave him. He cannot. We can no longer support Donald Trump. This is the most offensive thing. Oh, wait. Everybody in my congregation still likes him. OK, we're good with Donald Trump. After the Access Hollywood tape. Yeah, well, Michael's keyword was pragmatic here because what we are seeing are a lot of pragmatic calculations, not really principled calculations. There might have been some slow bleed of support over the years for principled reasons. But the 2022 elections changed the practicalities of the situation. What happened is a lot of people then, they didn't just look at 2022. They started to rethink it all. 2020, 2018. And so there's an increasing number of people are saying no to Donald Trump, not because of all of the things that Donald Trump has done, but just because they're no longer confident that he's a winner. If they start to believe he could win again, if they start to believe he's a winner again, or if he wins the primary again, they'll all be right back because that's the key word. This was a this is a pragmatic matter right now. They've lost confidence in him. It's not that they don't. It's not that they have suddenly awakened that he's not a person that he's a person of low character. It's that they've lost confidence in his ability to win. You know, Michael, Joe mentions the Access Hollywood tape. I'm also remembering the news that Donald Trump had paid off through his representatives, a porn star with whom he was having an affair while his wife was home with a newborn child. And you would always hear the same refrain, hey, we elected a president, not a saint, sort of treating him as a rascal who is going to look out for them, regardless of his character. So do you see, not just among leadership but do you see real change in your reporting among evangelical voters Are they like it appears in the polling more broadly Republicans are looking for an alternative to Donald Trump No, it's a very good question. And one of my, I think one of the resonant moments that really underscored the tenuous relationship between Trump and evangelicals was in 2016 when Jerry Jerry Falwell Jr. endorsed Donald Trump, went to Trump Tower, took a picture of him with him in front of his and Trump's me wall with all the covers of magazines. And in the picture right over the shoulder of Jerry Falwell's Jerry Falwell's wife was the cover of a Playboy magazine. And that for me is always kind of encapsulated what you know, the give and take of this relationship. I mean, there is some Trump fatigue among Republican voters, certainly after the 2022 midterms. You know, the polls recently haven't been so clear. Are the polls in November and December going to be – are they a trend? Are they sort of a trend for Donald Trump or are they a low point? And, you know, to some of the discussion that's happened here already, even in our piece, Robert Jeffress, his pastor down in Dallas, who back in November said he wasn't endorsing Trump because he saw a civil war coming inside the Republican Party and wanted no part of it. Fast forward two months later when I talked to him this week, and he kind of started anticipating an eventual endorsement of Trump, saying that evangelicals are going to coalesce around him, probably, and that Trump is the most likely nominee for the party. a very much much more softer language than he had used just a couple months ago. So that's definitely going to be a thing to watch. And Trump, you know, to his political credit, he has proven an ability to cleave conservative voters away from their longtime leaders, as he did in 2015 and 2016. You know, with this interview this week, we saw him trying to do trying to use those same tactics here with evangelicals in particular. All right. New York Times political correspondent Michael C. Bender. Fascinating. Thank you so much.
0