A top evangelical leader in the state of Iowa is firing back at failed one-term, twice-impeached and multiply-indicted former president Donald Trump, even going so far as to reference rumors that the ex-president engaged in a deviant sex act with prostitutes.
Evangelical Bob Vander Plaats endorsed Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis last week, which immediately drew Trump’s ire, HuffPost notes.
Trump, the 2024 Republican front-runner, fired off a furious message on his Truth Social platform. He called Family Leader CEO Vander Plaats a “former high school accountant” who was “more known for scamming Candidates than he is for Victory.” Trump also claimed a $95,000 donation to Vander Plaats’ nonprofit from the DeSantis campaign was to buy his endorsement, an allegation that Vander Plaats has denied.
Vander Plaats was only too happy to respond to Trump, and he brought out the nuclear weapon of allegations that have been made against the former president, leveling him on Twitter.
LOL @realDonaldTrump is the only candidate…EVER…who thought my endorsement would be for sale. He found out, and @Reuters validated, I live by higher standards.
Just returned from an Iowa stronghold for @realDonaldTrump Person to Person told me they are done with him.
While they long to leave the topic of ‘golden showers’ and return to the discussion of gold standards,The final straw…his lies about @KimReynoldsIA#ChooseWell2024
Will evangelicals continue to support Trump as he seeks a second term in the White House? Recent polls show they aren’t as enthusiastic about Donald as they once were, CBS News reported in September.
The most immoral man to ever be elected President of the United States has a complaint about the braindead evangelical Christians who eagerly supported him even when he got caught screwing porn stars and paying them off: They’re not being sufficiently loyal to him in his 2024 campaign, and he’s really pissed off about it.
Donald Trump made his complaint during an interview with David Brody of the far-right Real America’s Voice, suggesting that the “disloyalty” of evangelicals was why his latest campaign is struggling so badly.
“That’s a sign of disloyalty. There’s great disloyalty in world of politics and that’s a sign of disloyalty because nobody, as you know… has ever done more for right to life than Donald Trump. Three Supreme Court justices and they all voted [to overturn Roe v. Wade]… they won, they finally won!”
Trump also blamed Christians for the GOP’s failure to win control of both houses of Congress in the 2022 midterm election:
“I was a little disappointed because I thought they could have fought much harder during the ’22 election because they won.”
President @realDonaldTrump calls out the “disloyalty” of evangelical leaders that haven’t yet given their support for his 2024 presidential campaign.
In recent weeks, Trump has also blamed evangelicals for overplaying the abortion issue by not making sure anti-abortion laws contained exceptions for rape and incest.
Translation: Donald Trump is failing yet again, but it’s not his fault. It’s NEVER EVER his fault. When he goes bankrupt, others are to blame. When he gets caught committing adultery, that’s also the fault of others. And now the 2022 election and upcoming 2024 race can also be blamed on others, because it certainly can’t be Trump’s fault. After all, he’s perfect.
Since Trump is so damn perfect, maybe he needs to start his own religion and make himself the deity. He can be the MAGA god and ask for tithes from his flock. They can easily afford to give him 10% of their net worth, can’t they?
Kneel down and worship, MAGAts! Your tangerine savior demands it.
Caleb Campbell is a pastor at Desert Springs Bible Church in Phoenix, and he says that something he witnesses at a supposedly “Christian” pro-Trump event he recently attended left him disgusted by how scriptures were being misquoted and even used to justify some of of the most hateful things imaginable.
Speaking with Nathan Vandeklippe of The TorontoGlobe and Mail, Campbell notes that he was at a revival event sponsored by Turning Point, a conservative group based in Phoenix that is associated with conservative broadcaster Charlie Kirk.
“I was absolutely terrified and horrified,” Mr. Campbell recalled. He was in a familiar environment: people gathered inside a church singing Christian worship music, with a prayer and a collection of money.
But the person delivering the homily was not a minister. It was Charlie Kirk, a college dropout who has become a prominent conservative broadcaster and pivotal figure in spreading and sustaining the new U.S. wave of populist conservatism. He talks “like a pastor would talk,” Mr. Campbell recalled.
That includes bringing the Bible to the pulpit. Mr. Kirk regularly refers to the Book of Jeremiah, where the 29th verse says, “seek the peace and prosperity of the city.” Mr. Kirk, however, replaces “seek” with “demand,” a notion that becomes the basis for him to argue, Mr. Campbell said, for a proclamation of “why we’ve got to demand our gun rights and demand school choice.”
God and guns, what an odd mashup of completely disparate concepts. But some in the right-wing religious community seem convinced that Jesus would be toting an AR-15 if he was walking among us in this day and time. So much for that whole “prince of peace” thing, huh?
Kirk has gone even further, telling followers that the Founding Fathers didn’t actually want separation of church and state, remarking that “the church founded this country,” which would certainly be news to Thomas Jefferson, who created his own version of The Bible and didn’t think religion had any place in the workings of government. As a matter of fact, the deliberate mixing of religion and government was one of the main reasons the Jefferson and others like him left England and declared their independence from a tyrannical king who was cloaked in the blessings of the church.
Campbell adds that even more troubling than what Kirk said at the revival was the way his message was so rapturously received by attendees:
“What was shocking to me was the people in the room raising their hands and saying, ‘Amen. Hallelujah.’ They were having a religious experience.”
And that’s not all that was being spouted at the event, Campbell notes. There was also plenty of fearmongering about how ethnic minorities and others were attacking white Christians:
“They’re afraid the outsider is going to take over and eliminate their life. It’s the erasure part that is the greatest threat,” he said. He came to understand Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” as “an appeal to ethnic preservation,” in the guise of defending a Christian nation.
Campbell now sees his mission as one of trying to counter the hateful messages being spewed by Kirk and others.
Campbell says he is driven to counteract what he sees as a false doctrine of power, one that conflates political and religious kingdom-building. Such an idea is not new to Christendom, he said, pointing to Rome under Constantine and Charlemagne.
“It’s a perpetual heresy,” he said. “This one just is sprinkled with red, white and blue. This one tastes like apple pie.”