White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a newly published interview she doesn’t expect her office to be her church when asked how she squares her backing of President Trump with her religious beliefs.
“Frankly, if people of faith don’t get involved in the dirty process, then you’re missing the entire point of what we’re called to do,” Sanders told The New Yorker. “You’re not called to go into the places where everyone already thinks like you and is a believer —you have to go onto a stage where they’re not.”
“You have to take that message into the darkest places, and the dirtiest places, and the most tainted and dysfunctional places,” she said. “If you can influence even one person, that’s what you’re supposed to do.”
Sanders stressed to the magazine that she was not referring specifically to the White House, but broadly.
The question to Sanders is one frequently posed to evangelicals who support the president, particularly given revelations that Trump was involved in a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, who said she had an affair with the president in 2006.
The president has come under scrutiny for the payment, and that scrutiny was heightened after his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight counts, including violations of campaign finance laws “in coordination and at the direction” of a candidate for federal office, believed to be Trump.
Court documents in Cohen’s case detail an agreement he entered into with the chairman and CEO of American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, to deal with negative stories about Trump’s relationship with women.
