Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Trump as the new Evangelical savior

In any right thinking evangelical's mind, Donald Trump is the closest thing to the anti-Christ as there has been in a long time.  While he is not a smooth talker, Trump plays to the hopes and fears of Americans who are increasingly unnerved by the pace of change in modern life.  He focuses on the fear of immigrants, probably because they have little or no defense against his rhetoric.  But behind this bashing of the "others" among us is the unstated belief that women, minorities, the LGBT community and anyone else looking for equality with white men are out of luck in The Donald's world.  Paul Krugman gets it right this morning when he notes that Trump's support on the religious right wing of the Republican party gives the lie to the movement's faith based conservatism.  It's all about retaining white male privilege in a multicultural world.  The men and women of the megachurch milieu want to go back to the 1950s when everyone knew their place and was resigned to whatever station their birth designated them.  If Sarah Palin was the first model of the new evangelical populist, Donald Trump is the new edition; white, male, wealthy and unafraid to espouse intolerance.  So what if he is divorced multiple times, owns casinos and probably hasn't paid a dime in taxes in the new millennium.  He is perhaps the last hope of the dead end haters who blame everyone else for the death of mid twentieth century America.

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