One of the most nauseating sights of the last three years has been the extent to which the religious right has been willing to bow down to Donald Trump. Even in the face of the almost daily outrages coming from this White House, the nation’s so-called moral guardians have been firmly in the Donald’s corner.
Part of that effort involves feeding white evangelicals a false narrative. The religious right has tried to convince us that Trump is a Christian whose faith is very important to him, and has led him to become a champion for people of faith. You would think that a cursory glance at Trump’s Twitter feed would prove this to be yet another alternative fact. But the religious right has a ready explanation–he’s just speaking in the same way that Jesus himself spoke.
Until this week, this was the biggest logic leap we’ve seen to justify fundie support for Trump. But one of Trump’s most fanatical religious right followers may have topped even that. He claimed that people of faith should still remain loyal to Trump even though it’s no secret that he engaged in debauched behavior. Why? Wait for it–at least he didn’t molest anybody.
Paul McGuire, a pastor from the Santa Clarita Valley north of Los Angeles, has recently put himself in the same class as the most diehard Trump-worshiping pastors and evangelists. He believes that the fervent opposition to Trump is actually a sign he’s doing something right–after all, his most fervent opponents are the ones getting sucked down after he started draining the swamp. If that wasn’t enough, he actually thinks that Christians who oppose Trump are guilty of cowardice–and thus putting their salvation at risk.
McGuire’s claim that opposing Trump amounts to cowardice probably explains a spiel he gave on the Wednesday edition of his radio show. He claimed that even if reports that Trump had affairs with porn stars were true, it wasn’t enough to justify backing away from him. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
McGuire wondered why Stormy Daniels and former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal waited so long to speak up. What McGuire doesn’t want his listeners to know is that Daniels and McDougal’s lips were sealed by non-disclosure agreements that both women are trying to cancel. Moreover, Daniels already talked about the affair in 2011, and her non-disclosure agreement may not even be valid.
But such details don’t matter to McGuire, who believes Daniels and McDougal are being used as a fallback to bring down Trump after claims that his campaign colluded with Russia were supposedly knocked down. He doesn’t think that it’s an accident Trump’s foes are trying to turn the hot lights on Trump’s debauched past.
“The strategy is to bring up these events that all involve sexual sins, allegedly, because they know—the people, the strategists behind the scenes—they know that this will upset a significant percentage of evangelical Christian voters. And their goal is to turn Donald Trump’s primary supporters, which have been the evangelical Christian voters, against him by bringing up these sexual, moral scandals.”
McGuire told his listeners that even in a “worst-case scenario” and there is something to Daniels and McDougal’s stories, they should remember that God has used leaders who were guilty of all manner of immorality. For instance, Pharaoh and the king of Babylon were full-on pagans who engaged in “off-the-charts” sexual debauchery that was far worse than anything Trump has been accused of doing. And yet, God still used them to “deliver his people.”
To McGuire’s mind, Trump was “perhaps the greatest champion for Christianity” and for the religious right’s pet issues, and all of that should trump (the pun was intended) his past debauchery. After all, McGuire harrumphed, nothing that Trump is accused of doing involved “raping or molesting or this other sexual abuse stuff.”
Apparently McGuire wasn’t paying attention during the campaign, when a dozen or more women claimed that Trump groped, forcibly kissed, or otherwise molested them. But even without that to consider, is McGuire saying that it’s okay for a man to look at a woman like “a piece of meat” and walk in on her while she’s in her dressing room getting ready for a pageant? Or to claim that a reporter was hard on him during a debate because she had “blood coming out of her whatever“? Or to make harassing and degrading comments about female Senators? Or, lest we forget, to boast that he can treat women any way he pleases just because he’s a celebrity–even “grab ’em by the p***y”?
Oh, that’s right. None of that matters because Trump isn’t just making America great again, but making us Christian again. Even if that’s true, what price are we paying for it? Are you willing to effectively throw victims of domestic violence under the bus in order to further that cause? It sure sounds like that’s exactly what McGuire is doing.
Two months before Election Day, one of the charter members of the Never-Trump club, Erick Erickson, wrote that he could not consider voting for Trump in part because he believed Trump would do “far more damage to the church” than Hillary Clinton would do. After listening to this spiel from McGuire, it’s hard not to agree. When you have a pastor excusing depraved and debauched behavior from a president just because he makes the right clucking noises on social issues, something is very wrong.
(featured image courtesy GOD TV via McGuire’s Facebook)
