Trump's Rant About How Joe Biden Will Kill God Was Insane But Clarifying

From Esquire

Just as Vice President Mike Pence provided a clarifying look this week at how conservatives see the Supreme Court, his boss has been a clarifying force when it comes to American political religion. In short, the kind of Political Christianity that now dominates on the American right has very little to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ, or even the Old Testament. That's how Donald J. Trump became the standard-bearer for Evangelicals despite personifying all of the Seven Deadly Sins at once, and despite his palpable disdain for believers even when addressing them directly. "Two Corinthians 3:17, that's the whole ballgame," he said at Liberty University way back in 2016. "Is that the one you like?"

It didn't matter that the president was essentially saying, I'm pandering to you because I think you're an easy mark, or that he clearly has no familiarity with even basic tenets of the Bible, or that he rarely, if ever, goes to church, or that he's cheated relentlessly on all three of his wives, paying hush money to multiple mistresses. It won't matter that he's demonstrated callous indifference to the deaths of 158,000 Americans, or that, as more than 1,000 of his constituents die each day and the current economic suffering is set to explode with the lapse in boosted unemployment benefits, he really packed his schedule Friday as he heads to one of his golf courses.

Related: A history of Donald Trump's obsession with pseudoscience

On Thursday, the last day that he and Congress saw fit to work this week, he gave a speech in Ohio in which he once again demonstrated that his strategy for courting Evangelical votes is just throwing things at the wall.

The idea that a presidential candidate could "hurt God," a Supreme Being who exists beyond space and time, is not really the kind of talk you'd expect from someone who believes in or understands the concept. But this is a fairly revelatory look at the state of the conservative movement. As Trump has proven, this sort of Godliness and religiosity is less tied to any principles to live by than they are one facet—along with gun ownership and, apparently, burning fossil fuels—of a conservative identity around which the movement's base is organized. He doesn't mention opposition to nonwhite immigration here, or the larger concept that this is a country built for and by white people and everyone else should just be happy to be here, but those are the really animating features that drew movement conservatives to his candidacy in the first place.

It's probably worth mentioning that insufficient religiosity is not among Joe Biden's issues, of which there are many, though many fewer than the incumbent president has. By all indications, the Democratic nominee is a man of faith, and it would take approximately two church visits a year for Biden to prove himself more devout and committed than Trump. (The president did visit a church recently, albeit after he had federal forces violently clear peaceful protesters so that he could stage a photo op holding a Bible upside down.) There is zero reason to believe Biden would somehow crack down on religious believers—not even make them provide employees with health insurance that covers contraception, which is considered oppression in this country. None of this is to suggest Trump really believes any of what he says about this, or cares. Meanwhile, the actual problems that exist in reality have not gone away, and will not disappear beneath another culture-war food fight.

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