Following the meeting that Donald Trump held with hundreds of Religious Right activists yesterday, a handful of leaders sat down for a press conference where they took questions from reporters. At this press conference, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and the Susan B. Anthony List’s Marjorie Dannenfelser perfectly displayed just how flimsy their supposed standards are when it comes to backing political candidates.
When it comes to Trump, whose history of unapologetic narcissism, pathological dishonesty and willingness to say whatever benefits him at the moment are undeniable, both Perkins and Dannenfelser made it clear that they simply do not care about any of those things because, right now, Trump is willing to tell them what they want to hear.
Admitting that Trump has a long history of doing things, saying things and taking positions that are in direct contradiction to the supposed values of the Religious Right, Perkins rationalized backing Trump by declaring that forgiveness is the core of the Christian faith.
“One of the things about the evangelical community that people have a hard time understanding,” Perkins said, ‘is we forgive. We’re all sinners, we all have messed up … When we ask people to say, ‘I was wrong, forgive me, I want to do the right thing today going forward,’ more than anybody else evangelicals in this country can accept that.”
When a reporter pointed out that Trump does not ever actually asks for forgiveness — in fact, Trump once infamously said that he has never asked God for forgiveness — Perkins responded by declaring that “when you look at the leaders that were used throughout scripture in the Bible, almost to a ‘T’ each and every one of them were flawed in some form or fashion and made bad choices at some point in their life. That’s the good thing about the Christian faith is it’s going forward, it’s not looking back.”
Dannenfelser, who earlier this year signed on to a letter urging voters in Iowa “to support anyone but Donald Trump” because “Mr. Trump cannot be trusted” on the issue of abortion, also came to Trump’s defense, declaring that the presumptive GOP nominee is working hard “to become the person that he says that he is.”
Brushing aside the debacle a few months back when Trump said that if abortion is outlawed, women who receive them should face some sort of punishment, only to then repeatedly flip-flop on the issue, even claiming at one point that he wanted to leave abortion laws the way they are, as he scrambled to do damage control, Dannenfelser spun the episode as something for which Trump deserves a lot of credit.
“To give him a lot of credit, only a person with some humility, which he doesn’t get credit for, would go back and correct his comments, which he did,” Dannenfelser said. “I’ve actually found on the abortion issue that he’s done that more on that particular issue than almost any other, a willingness to correct himself and move ahead. And I think that shows an ability to become the person that he says that he is.”
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