There are reasonable ways to explain the high levels of evangelical support for President Trump, but Robert Jeffress’ latest contention is not among them.
Asked about evangelical support for Trump in a Friday interview, Jeffress compared the president to Ronald Reagan, arguing evangelicals had similarly prioritized policy over character in 1980. “This is not an unusual thing, we’ve been here before,” he said. “Back in 1980, evangelicals chose to support a twice-married Hollywood actor who was a known womanizer in Hollywood. His name was Ronald Reagan. They chose to support him over Jimmy Carter, a born-again Baptist Sunday school teacher who had been faithfully married to one woman.”
No, we haven’t exactly been here before.
To be sure, the stigma of divorce was much stronger four decades ago. It’s perfectly fair for Jeffress to assert it was a hurdle for some voters. But in this context, there’s no comparison between Reagan and Trump, who after all admitted to cheating on his first wife with his second (“life was just a bowl of cherries,” he reflected in 1994), engaged in racy back-and-forths with Howard Stern on the radio, bragged about grabbing women, posed on the cover of Playboy, and the list goes on. The common thread, by the way, is that Trump volunteered most of this information, and has crafted much of his reputation for womanizing on his own terms. Consider only his Stern appearances: “Does she have a good body? No. Does she have a fat ass? Absolutely,” he once said of Kim Kardashian.
“She’s probably deeply troubled and therefore great in bed,” Trump said of an 18-year-old Lindsay Lohan.
He also admitted to having watched Paris Hilton’s sex tape, let Stern refer to his daughter as a “piece of ass,” joked (after her death) about asking Princess Diana to get an HIV test, and much more.
It’s not exactly Reagan-esque, but certainly explains why he made great reality television.
And if voters don’t care, which in many cases is obviously true, that’s understandable. Though I may disagree, the argument that Trump’s ostensible candor and brash political incorrectness is a key part of his appeal with working class voters between the coasts who feel despised by urban elites and hungry for economic revival is grounded in reality.
Overused as the word “unique” may be, it applies to this president. Jeffress needn’t pull any muscles stretching to make flimsy comparisons. “We’re not under any illusion that we were voting for an altar boy when we voted for President Trump… We voted for him because of his policies,” he added later in the interview on Friday. That’s true enough — and the pastor should stick to it.
Implying the two men’s pasts constituted similar hurdles for evangelical voters to clear is inaccurate and unnecessary.
