The US president is making a desperate plea to the one group that seemingly hasn’t deserted him – yet
He has lost the Catholics, the foreign policy isolationists and the millions of people affected by ICE’s immigration raids. But Donald Trump is still counting on the goodwill of one powerful constituency of American voters, to whom he appealed this week by reading a passage from the Bible urging people to repent their “wicked ways”. A lot of thoughts spring to mind in relation to this, but at the very forefront, one question: do the US’s evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly support Trump, have a red line and if so, can they find it with both hands?
I’m stating the obvious but it’s worth raising again, if only to boggle at the sheer shamelessness of a religious community that has thrown in its lot with Trump: how on earth do the evangelicals work out the maths on this? Let’s remind ourselves of the facts; that the president treating us to a section of the Old Testament as part of a week-long, continuous public reading of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation – separation of church and state, anyone? – is the same president who has, variously, been found by courts to have falsified business records, as part of a hush-money payment scheme to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, and sexually abused and defamed E Jean Carroll. As the president intoned to camera in the Oval Office on Tuesday: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist