The Trump Religion: The Easiest Lies

"If you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to. They won't all lie to you but a lot of them will. And it will be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes."


-Alan Alda as California Republican Senator Arnold Vinick on The West Wing

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In our previous post, we discussed how so called faith leaders are turning on Jeff Sessions, a man who has consistently and for decades fought in the political trenches for conservative Christian causes. These alleged Christian leaders have decided that protecting Donald Trump from Robert Mueller is more important than standing by a fellow conservative Christian who has supported and defended their causes for many, many years. 

The devotion of evangelical Christians to Donald Trump is a hypocritical shitstorm that defies understanding. 

Except maybe it does when these so called Christians hear what they want to hear. And Donald Trump is more than willing to tell them what they want to hear

Trump held a closed-door meeting with evangelical leaders Monday night. 

Trump said, "Now one of the things I'm most proud of is getting rid of the Johnson Amendment. That was a disaster for you."

That is, of course, a lie. The law remains on the books, after efforts to kill it in Congress last year failed.

Some background: what pray tell is the Johnson Amendment?   

Johnson Amendment is a provision inserted into law in 1954 by then-senator and future President Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who was miffed that a conservative nonprofit group was helping his opponent.

The law says churches and charities "are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office."

The law forbids religious organizations and other charities from formally endorsing candidates if they want to retain their federal tax exemption.

Trump said to the religious leaders at the White House: "Now you're not silenced anymore. It's gone and there's no penalty anymore."

Trump is still lying. The president doesn't have the power to repeal a law; only Congress can do that but they have not repealed this law. 

The Supreme Court can also rule a law unconstitutional, but that has not happened in this case either.  

Trump goes on: "If you like somebody or if you don't like somebody you can go out and say, 'This man is going to be great for evangelicals, or for Christianity or for another religion. This person is somebody that I like and I'm going to talk about it on Sunday."

In practice, there has been nothing stopping anyone from doing that. The Johnson Amendment doesn't prohibit individual speech, and it has rarely been enforced. More than 2,000 mainly evangelical Christian clergy have deliberately violated the law since 2008 as a form of protest against it, but only one has been audited by the IRS, and none punished.  

In May 2017, Trump signed an executive order that purported to ease enforcement of the Johnson Amendment. But nothing came of it as enforcement of the Johnson Amendment was never a priority of the Treasury Department in the first place. Basically, Trump's executive order just basically directed the Treasury Department  to keep doing what they were doing which was nothing.  

But Trump cited this alleged accomplishment as one in a series of gains he has made for his conservative Christian supporters. 

The religious leaders nodded in agreement, applauded and uttered a few amens. They were hearing what they wanted to hear. 

Even though they were being lied to.  

And Trump lied to them some more as he warned, "You're one election away from losing everything that you've got," and said their opponents were "violent people" who would overturn these gains "violently."

If the GOP loses, he said, "they will overturn everything that we've done and they'll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There's violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups — these are violent people."

The religious leaders nodded in agreement, applauded and uttered a few amens. They were hearing what they wanted to hear. Evangelical Christians in America love to believe they are under assault.  

Then Trump brought this shit up again.  

"Little thing — Merry Christmas. You couldn't say Merry Christmas. I'm telling you — when I started running I used to talk about it and I hate to mention it in August, but I used to talk about it. They don't say Merry Christmas anymore. They say Merry Christmas a lot right now. It's all changed. It's all changed."

Which is, of course, a lie. There has never been any prohibition on saying Merry Christmas. We've always been able to say Merry Christmas. 

In response to Trump's proclamation that he saved "Merry Christmas", the religious leaders nodded in agreement, applauded and uttered a few amens, accepting the easiest lies Trump tells.   


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As I said in today's earlier post, I am so sorry for all the Trump centric shit on this blog. It is my intent that the next hand full of posts on this blog will not have anything to do with this fucking moron. 

But there is so much going on that cries out for commentary.

Sen. John McCain dies but Trump refuses to act respectfully because McCain was mean to him or something once and only finally lowers the White House flag to half mast because veterans got pissed but Trump didn't wanna! This is the behavior of a spoiled, petulant child in the seat of ultimate political power and I have to say something, don't I?   

Trump says China has Hillary Clinton's hacked emails. The FBI has to issue a statement: "No, they don't."  This demands a comment! An urbane observation! A witty riposte! At least a basic level fuck you! Right?  

Trump discovers that when he Googles "Donald Trump", he finds a bunch of stories that say he's a lying fucking moron and his assumption is that Google is rigged. Oh my God! How can I let that idiocy go by? How can I?  

By I feel I must. For my sanity. Or whatever is left of it.







So the next few days, there will be posts about comic books, Star Wars, Doctor Who (of course), Chik Fil A and anything else I can talk about other than Donald Trump, the lying fucking moron.  Look, if you want to read something about Donald Trump and what a lying fucking moron he is, just Google him.

Apparently, there is a lot of it out there!




But for the next few days, not here.


On the topic of Trump and religion, let's close out on some shit I stole from the internet on that subject.