How to explain Trump voters’ embrace of a man who makes a mockery of the Christian and conservative values many of them profess to share

By Chris Honoré

Ever since that day in 2015 when Donald Trump, accompanied by his wife, Melania, came down that golden escalator to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the United States he has dominated and all but demanded our national attention. I soon came to regard his presence as the equivalent of passing slowly by the scene of an accident and feeling unable to look away.

His ability to remain stage center, over the course of decades, has been extraordinary, the tentative embrace of the Republican party is now complete, and the coalescence of millions of followers that now reaches beyond the MAGA base continues to baffle. His rambling, contradictory rhetoric, filled with crude, coarse, authoritarian non sequiturs, the cruel mocking of imagined challengers, his rejection of a free press, four indictments, two trials for sexual assault and defamation, a manifest rejection of democracy and the rule of law — all of it transcends any known normative presidential candidacy or term in office, and can feel jarringly counterintuitive.

Trump is like a dark character in a too-long novel with a melded protagonist/antagonist at its center, a man who continues to be the source of exhausting narrative analysis that takes us beyond politics.

And adding to this sense of vertigo, this need to suspend our disbelief while we watch from the cheap seats, we find those who literally worship at the shrine of Trump. Who are these people? Have they long been waiting for someone of his ilk?

And then there are those identified as Christian evangelicals. According to polling regarding the 2016 and 2020 general elections, Trump won eight out of 10 white evangelical voters. And we learn that their contribution to his recent victory in Iowa was not only significant but has increased.

Their fulsome support of this man, given their core values, bewilders. They believe that the Bible is the ultimate spiritual authority, that spiritual rebirth (a personal conversion) is a prerequisite to becoming an evangelical. They commit to following the teachings of Christ, they practice respect for others, believing all men and women are created in the image of God, and strive for moral purity. How is it possible that such beliefs in any way cohere with those of Trump’s? Or do evangelicals practice a kind of selective morality, and are therefore able to rationalize this Rubik’s Cube of nonalignment?

But then I ask those same questions with regard to the once righteously conservative Republican Party that seems to have abandoned not only the Constitution, but its cornerstone principles of governance. Do they now practice a selective form of malleable Republicanism? In this moment they support a candidate who openly declares that on Day One of his administration he will be a retributive dictator and that democracy is anachronistic.

Finally, as this Republican primary unfolds, the percentage gap between Trump and Nikki Haley in New Hampshire was in double digits. And, according to polls, 70% of the Granite State’s Republican primary voters, when asked to reflect on Trump’s first term, insist that he did more to help the nation than hurt it.

Clearly, his appeal now reaches well beyond the cultish MAGA movement; Trumpism has gone mainstream. And there’s this: Recent polling indicates that just 31% of Republicans would not vote for Trump if he were convicted of a crime.

Lastly, as Trump stands on the rally dais or sits for an interview, he reportedly promises to do the following: reimpose a travel ban from majority-Muslim countries; appoint a special prosecutor to go after the Biden family; build a wall and all that implies; end the war in Ukraine; dismantle the “deep state”; and repeal and replace Obamacare. Will that be just on “Day One”? And doesn’t the unflinching support for Trump that we are now witnessing beg the question: Will the 2024 election be our last? Was the quixotic attempt to overturn the 2020 election simply prologue?

Email Ashland resident Chris Honoré at honore307@gmail.com.