How to explain the phenomenon of Donald Trump? How to explain why evangelical Christians embrace a candidate whose principles and life history are diametrically opposed to all they believe in?
Perhaps a clue can be gleaned from the saying, “desperate people do desperate things.” If you google it, you’ll come across a Christian genre song by Micah Stampley with the following lyrics:
Cause I’m tired of the status quo
There’s gotta be more than this
There’s gotta be more, gotta be more
There’s gotta be more than this
Desperate people do desperate things
And we’re pressing in
There’s gotta be more
Gotta be more
There’s gotta be more than this
And then there’s Trump’s blatant appeal to disaffected, threatened, disgruntled White America. In an interview with evangelical Christian journalist David Brody and in comments to an evangelical audience in Washington, D.C., last Friday, Trump positioned Hillary Clinton’s support for comprehensive immigration reform as what can only be described as Armageddon-like.
“I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the border. You’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote and once that all happens you can forget it,” said Trump, as reported in The Daily Mail (http://dailym.ai/2ctjegR).
When you’re adrift at sea with hope all but lost, and you’re clinging to an overfilled life raft, civility and compassion often are the first casualties when confronted with the choice of helping yourself or the greater good. Or helping another poor soul latch onto the presumed safety of the raft. So it is with the desperate voter.
Despite all his faults, Trump garners the support of the desperate, as Roger Cohen of The New York Times discovered during a trip to Kentucky.
“At the boot store, Carrie McCall, a FedEx driver, appears with a package.
‘I love Trump,’ she declares. ‘He shoots from the hip.’
“But, I ask, isn’t that dangerous?
‘I don’t care. After all we’ve been through, I just don’t care.’” (http://nyti.ms/2bXtNIl)
Your political witticism of the day courtesy of whowhatwhy.org:
“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.” —Karl Marx
