Transcript: Trump Christian Allies Unnerved as His On-Air Rage Darkens

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 12 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.It took many years, but Donald Trump’s Christian and evangelical allies have finally grown unnerved by his public displays of malevolence and hate. This came after Trump’s interview with CBS this week, in which he refused to say he’d forgive his enemies, even in order to get into heaven. This comes amid other related developments. A lot of Trump’s evangelical supporters stayed home in the midterms, and a number of Democratic candidates ran overtly on liberal Christian themes and won.So we’re checking in on all of this with Holly Berkley Fletcher, who covers right-wing Christianity on her Substack, A Zebra Without Stripes. Holly, thanks for coming on.Holly Berkley Fletcher: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So before we get deep into Trump’s latest, can you just explain his relationship to evangelical Christianity—how he’s viewed as a very flawed vessel who’s nonetheless carrying out divine providence to realize Christian nationalist ends, all that?Fletcher: Yeah. So I don’t think you’d have Trump without white evangelicals. They voted for him at over 80 percent every election, and they’ve voted for Republicans at above 80 percent as well for a while, including this current election. And I think his appeal, and the Christian nationalists’ appeal, is rooted in their fear of cultural decline, accompanying their longtime sense, that goes back decades and decades, that they are sort of God’s chosen people and God’s chosen nation. So as their numbers and sort of cultural influence have declined, they have responded with fear and authoritarianism, basically.Sargent: And Trump is basically the guy who said, I will do whatever it takes to save the Christian America that you think is slipping away, basically.Fletcher: Correct. He’s explicitly tapped into that feeling. Sargent: And as you said, he’s been hijacking long-running trends on the religious right, the move toward Republicans that really kind of took off in the ’80s and now is culminating.Fletcher: Yes, absolutely. Sargent: So let’s go to Trump’s remarkable moment on CBS. Speaking to CBS’s Ross Douthat, Trump first confirms that he hopes he goes to heaven. Then Trump is asked if he would be able to forgive his enemies in order to pass God’s judgment. The back-and-forth is long, but worth it. Listen.Ross Douthat (voiceover): You pass away. You’re entering the next life. And all you have to do to enter paradise is feel love and forgiveness for James Comey, Nancy Pelosi, anyone who you have expressed hate for over the years. Do you think you can do it?Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, then I wouldn’t be real, would I? I mean, if I said to you, sure—the easy answer to that’s yes, I could forgive.Douthat (voiceover): Is the answer no?Trump (voiceover): The answer is no. I want to be honest.”Douthat (voiceover): Before the judgment throne of God.Trump (voiceover): Before the judgment. No, I think they were very bad people. And I dislike—I can use the word hate. I do hate some of my enemies. I think they’ve been terrible. Look what they put me through, the weaponization. I get indicted.Douthat (voiceover): Mr. President, you have had the most charmed and remarkable life of any American in my entire lifetime. And you are telling me you couldn’t find it in your heart to forgive some of your enemies, after all that’s been given to you? Trump (voiceover): I mean, it’s such an easy answer. All I have to do is say, yes, I can. Douthat (voiceover): Again, I don’t think it’s an easy answer. Trump (voiceover): That’s my—can I be honest? I probably cannot do that now. Because I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will.Sargent: So Holly, I know that Donald Trump has said similar things before. He has said that he won’t forgive his enemies before. He’s very much confirmed that he hates his enemies. But it’s a little remarkable for him to talk this way after such a dramatic national repudiation of him, isn’t it?Fletcher: Yes. Well, I mean, if he was a rational actor, which he’s not, of course, he should be scrambling to shore up his support from his evangelical base. And this is certainly not the way to do it. Again, whenever he puts them on the spot by just, like, countering explicitly a really foundational evangelical Christian belief, like loving your enemies, or repenting, or forgiving, these types of things, it really puts them in a very tough spot and sort of sends them scrambling. And that’s not what they want and need at this time, when they’re sort of feeling deflated. And that’s not what he should really be doing at this time. But again, not a rational actor.Sargent: I’m going to float a theory, OK, and see what you think of it. I think Trump was essentially giving his evangelical supporters the middle finger in some sense. He knows they didn’t show up in quite the numbers that he needed in this election. We’ll get to that in a sec. But he was very much out there in red America saying, you’ve got to turn out for us, you’ve got to turn out and save us. And they didn’t. And I just wonder whether, on some level, he was basically saying, you know what? I don’t really give a shit about your heaven. What do you think of that?Fletcher: I don’t know that he’s that calculating. I think he’s, you know—again, he usually tells us what he’s thinking. I think he’s long worried about the eternal destination of his soul on some level. He lets that slip a lot of times. So I don’t know if he’s that calculating. But he’s got to be upset with them right now, you know. And we know he sort of lashes out when he’s upset.Sargent: I don’t really believe that he’s religious. I’m sorry. What do you think of that?Fletcher: I’m shocked, Greg. I’m shocked that you would say that? So yeah, no, I think he’s completely without belief of any kind. I think he’s amoral. He only believes in his own narcissism. And I think he’s been using religious voters this entire time. They’re a very easy mark for a con man, because they have very deeply held, easily hijacked beliefs. You say certain things, you champion the issues that they want—which, of course, he did on abortion, and gave them their Supreme Court, you know—and he’s been using them the whole time. They’ve been a very cheap date, and he’s taken advantage. Sargent: I don’t think he’s worried about the state of his soul. He’s worried about dying, which he confuses with worry about the state of his soul, maybe. Fletcher: I think he thinks—I don’t know, sometimes I think he thinks that maybe he won’t ever die. I think he might be that narcissistic.Sargent: Yeah, possibly. Well, you know, with his health issues, I have a feeling he’s really looking straight into the abyss right now. That’s the way I see it.Well, anyway, a number of leading Christians took issue with this. Pastor Franklin Graham, who’s a leading Trump ally, posted a long response. He said this: “To enter heaven, the Bible tells us that you must acknowledge your sins, turn from them in repentance, and receive Jesus Christ by faith. Religion can’t save you. Only a relationship with the Savior, Jesus Christ, can save you. Do you have that assurance?”Holly, Franklin Graham didn’t exactly say he was addressing Trump here in that last line, but I think he was. And he’s basically telling Trump, you may not get into heaven, given not just your answer there, but also the state of your soul, Mr. President. What do you make of that?Fletcher: Yeah, again, I think the reaction, whenever he does one of these, like, major boo-boos, theological boo-boos, it puts evangelicals in just a really terrible position, especially the ones like Graham, who has at various times vouched for his, you know, his itty-bitty baby faith. He’s just an itty-bitty baby Christian and growing in his faith. But when he makes a sort of theological mistake, they often sort of gently correct the record, if not directly him. And so Franklin Graham has done that.Others have been a little bit more pointed, saying it’s extraordinary, and to pray for him. A lot of them are praying for him today. Some of them are saying that they appreciate his honesty. He’s struggling in his faith right now. Anyway, he needs a lot of prayer, Greg, is what the bottom line is.Sargent: Well, Denny Burk, a right-wing pastor and influencer, did say exactly that. He put this on Twitter: “Ross Douthat’s interview with the president is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever seen. Pray for the president.” Fletcher: And then he lists Bible verses that say, forgive your enemies. So that one was actually quite pointed, from someone—we call them theobros in my world. What we mean by that are sort of MAGA evangelical pastor-slash-influencer types who think they are the authority on all things Christianity. And Denny Burk is a well-known name in that world. So I thought that was more pointed than I’ve seen, for sure.Sargent: Talk a little bit more about what a theobro is. It strikes me that this is a very unique phenomenon to our time. You’ve got the MAGA movement, which is really very large and multifaceted, and it’s got all sorts of different strains, different kind of rivulets and stuff like that running into it. And there’s this right-wing Christianity element to it that’s sort of riding the MAGA train in some sense, but bringing all this religious talk to it. What is that world?Fletcher: Yeah. Well, the theobros are—some of them are pastors, but they’re very much the online sort of crowd of men. They’re all men, generally younger-ish men. Like, I wouldn’t quite call Franklin Graham a theobro. But they’re very much online, and they basically police their corners of the internet and their evangelicalism. They tend to really go after women in particular. One of their favorite targets is historian Kristin Du Mez, whose book Jesus and John Wayne, and now her latest book, Live, Laugh, Love, has been very critical of white evangelicalism. So they’ve gone after her quite a bit.Some of them are extreme types, of the Pete Hegseth model, where they don’t think women should have the right to vote. That’s been a newer strain of the theobros lately. But generally they’re the online sort of white evangelical bulwark that trolls and argues and polices the boundaries of that religious movement.Sargent: There are these others as well who are sort of a little more in the post-liberal vein. I guess Rod Dreher is one of them. He’s a thinker in that world. He reacted very strongly to Donald Trump’s quotes to Ross Douthat there. Rod Dreher said this: “My God, the pettiness and hatred in that man’s heart. Despite being given so much in life, he hates his enemies more than he fears God.”I mean, I think that’s exactly right. And what’s so striking about the Douthat interview is, when Ross Douthat confronts Trump directly on that point, he says to him, why are you so fucking crazy? He doesn’t say it in those terms. But he basically says to him, you always win, you’re rich, you had everything handed to you, why the hell are you so filled with rage and hate? That’s basically what Ross Douthat said to him. And the answer was pretty interesting. He basically said, I don’t know, I just hate people.Fletcher: Yeah. Well, the answer is, of course, he’s a malignant narcissist, and they can’t take any sort of criticism.Sargent: Well, let’s talk about white evangelical support for Trump in the election that we just had. The exit polls show that white evangelicals voted Republican by huge margins, but notably they declined as a share of the national vote, down to 17 percent. Can you talk about those findings and what they mean?Fletcher: Yeah. And I went and did the sort of basic math, looking at the raw vote numbers as well, to determine whether the actual numbers went down, or if they were just overwhelmed by turnout. And they definitely were diluted by the overall turnout, but their actual raw numbers went down by about seven million. That’s, like, really significant.Sargent: Wow.Fletcher: Yeah. And granted, caveat everything: this is looking at early exit data, which is always adjusted later, and the real data, you know, will be done over the coming months and will adjust a lot of that. But comparing to previous midterm exit data in particular, they’re usually about a quarter of the electorate, which is huge. That’s why they’re so influential. They’re only about 13 to 15 percent of the population, but they come out like no other group in our electorate. They are overrepresented at the polls, and they still were this time. Seventeen percent is an overrepresentation of their numbers in the population. But it’s a massive decline from the 25 percent.And they vote so much in lockstep. That’s why they’re the ultimate electoral prize for the Republicans: you have the combination of overwhelming turnout, overwhelming conformist support, and the immovability.I have to confess, as heartbroken as I’ve been watching their behavior for the last 10 years, I thought maybe this time there would be more actual switching sides. And the data so far do not show that. A little bit in Kansas. It looks like in the Senate race, about 5 percent of them actually did cross the aisle and vote for Adam Hamilton, which is not surprising really, because he codes really evangelical. His personal faith, the way he talks about his faith, is much more evangelical than, say, James Talarico’s. His church is the largest church in Kansas and has kind of a megachurch flavor to it, even though it’s technically part of a mainline denomination. So if anybody was going to get them to cross over, Adam Hamilton was probably the type of candidate that would. But even then, not many of them did. They mostly just couldn’t bear it, and they just stayed home.Sargent: Well, let’s talk about James Talarico for a second. In this midterm, we saw Democratic candidates seeking to offer an alternative to white evangelical Christianity. James Talarico, obviously, right, running very emphatically on a liberal Christian vision. You saw him really do this with immigration. Talarico insisted that we have a duty to the stranger. And he actually pulled ahead of Ken Paxton on who was trusted to handle the immigration issue, which is really a rare thing for Democrats. And that was in Texas. I really wonder whether the religious talk helped there, maybe including with religious Latinos. What do you think of all that?Fletcher: Yeah, I think so. I think the importance for Democrats of including these more liberal Christian voices is to create kind of permission structures and comfort with religion. White Christianity has been sort of the driver of a lot of authoritarianism in our history, going back to pro-slavery Christianity and the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. And even the ancestors of us mainliners were in a lot of that camp as well. And white Christianity has really driven this MAGA movement. So I think it’s really important for white Christians to be out there driving a wedge in between the Republican Party’s definition of faith and these voters, and just presenting another view of what Christianity can be.And I want to say that the Black church has long been that. The Black church has long been a very strong voice for democracy and justice throughout American history. But unfortunately, religion and race have been so tied up in American Christianity that I do think, and I hate to say this, but white Christians need to see other white Christians putting forth this message. They’re used to not paying attention to the Black church, unfortunately. So kudos to the Black church. They remain a key bulwark for democracy.And I think people like James Talarico and Adam Hamilton, and mainline churches—my own church, we read a lot of Black theology, and this is something we’re trying to learn as a tradition. So it’s not about replacing Black Christianity or not giving them their due, but it’s about showing our fellow white Christians there’s another way to be a Christian.Sargent: Well, this story hasn’t been written yet, but the Black church obviously played a very big role in this outcome. The Black church and the Black vote throughout the South was really instrumental in helping to create this enormous outpouring.We’ve just seen Donald Trump essentially say he won’t forgive his enemies. He hates them. He doesn’t care if that costs him eternal bliss or whatever. And we’ve also seen evangelicals not turn out in the numbers that I think Republicans are accustomed to. How do you see this developing going forward? What’s going to be the story of the Christian right from here on out, in 2028 and so forth?Fletcher: It is not over. Like, the biggest mistake Democrats could make, or anybody could make, is thinking that white evangelicals are now sad and they’re going to continue to stay home and lick their wounds. They will be back as soon as the Democrats give them the foil again.I think that it’s almost better for their movement and their mobilization to have Democrats in power. So if they can have some Democratic enemies that do some things that they really don’t like—say on abortion, in particular in Texas, for instance—they will be back with a vengeance.All of us as humans have a capacity to sort of find ways of managing cognitive dissonance and compartmentalizing things. But I tell you what, the psychological resilience of white evangelicals is unmatched. Their ability to rewrite the story, to make themselves the heroes, to never admit they’re wrong—I mean, this is a 200-year tradition, you know, and it is unmatched. I’ve never seen anything like it in our culture. So they will be back.I do not think that this whole chapter is going to measurably change their self-estimation. I think our greatest hope for democracy is that their numbers will continue to decline as the country becomes more secular, and as young people in particular become more secular.Sargent: Yeah, it’s unfortunate. Hopefully Democrats can be a bit smart and try to appeal to them, just to peel down those numbers a little bit here and there.Fletcher: A little bit. And to turn out everybody else to get candidates with very broad appeal, and to put together this huge coalition that overwhelms their vote. Sargent: That is the key. That’s what we saw. Holly Berkley Fletcher, awesome to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.Fletcher: Thank you so much.