MSNBC host Joy Reid slammed Republicans as President Trump’s “racial and religious cult” after a poll showed that a majority of them view Trump as a better president than Abraham Lincoln.
“There’s a lot of ways if you look at like the public religion research institute numbers that, you know, it isn’t just a pejorative to say that it’s a cult,” Reid said Saturday on her show. “There’s a lot of evidence that is a racial and religious cult of personality in which his base is solidly among the white evangelicals that almost worship him and say that he’s the chosen one of God.”
Reid’s comments came during a discussion about a poll conducted this week by The Economist and YouGov, which found that a majority of Republicans consider Trump a better president than Abraham Lincoln. The vast majority of independents and Democrats considered Lincoln to be the superior president.
Trump jokingly referred to himself as “the chosen one” in August when talking about the U.S. trade war with China. His outgoing Energy Secretary Rick Perry also used the title to refer to the president.
“King David wasn’t perfect. Saul wasn’t perfect. Solomon wasn’t perfect. I actually gave the president a little one-pager on those Old Testament kings about a month ago. I shared it with him. I said, ‘Mr. President, I know there are people that say, you know, you said you were the chosen one.’ And I said, ‘You were.’ If you’re a believing Christian, you understand God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government,” Perry said in an interview with Fox News last weekend.
