Many evangelicals have stuck with the former president through his legal troubles, moral failings, and public indiscretions.
CHRISTIANITY TODAY
On the eve of former president Donald Trump’s indictment on charges that he attempted to overturn the presidential election of 2020, Franklin Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s show on Newsmax to share his take.
“It’s a sad day for America,” Graham said.
The indictment—the third Trump has faced in the span of four months—“is an attempt to … inflict enough political wounds on this man to where it will be impossible for him to run” for president in 2024, Graham said.
According to Graham, this is but the latest attempt by Democrats to discredit Trump. First, there was Robert Mueller’s investigation on whether Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election. Then, a probe into the Trump Organization’s tax returns, and finally, accusations of sexual harassment by women that “seem to come out of the woodwork.”
Next week Trump may face yet more charges in Georgia for attempting to interfere in the presidential election of 2020. The investigation has taken nearly two and a half years and could bring charges to nearly 20 people.
After all the scandals Trump faced in his presidency and beyond, is he still susceptible to “political wounds”?
Trump’s political career has been morally fraught from the start, and a plurality of evangelical supporters stuck with him through the Access Hollywood tape, the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, revelations of Trump paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, his impeachments, and the Capitol insurrection.
Some conservative evangelicals may be turned off by Trump’s legal fights and pivot to a different GOP candidate in 2024, said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah University. But “most conservative evangelicals gave up on the politics of character in 2016” and still consider their relationship to Trump as a pragmatic bargain.
“They have maintained their contractual relationship with Donald Trump. This means that they will essentially ignore his moral failings and his criminal indictments in exchange for Supreme Court justices, anti-abortion laws, religious liberty (as they define it), anti-‘woke’ classrooms, and the possibility of overturning Obergefell v. Hodges,” Fea said via email. “Little has changed in eight years.”
