Michael Steele is the former chairman of the Republican National Committee. In a new book by journalist Tim Alberta, he called the evangelical Christians who support Trump “the biggest phonies of all.”
In the new book, “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump,” he says:
“These evangelical [leaders] are the biggest phonies of all. These are the people who spent the last forty years telling everyone how to live, who to love, what to think about morality. And then this motherf—er comes along defiling the White House and disrespecting God’s children at every turn, but it’s cool, because he gave them two Supreme Court justices. They got their thirty pieces of silver.”
Evangelical Christians make up a large group of the American voting population in general, about 20%. They overwhelmingly supported Trump 77% to 16% in the 2016 election and count for about a third of all Republican voters.
Steele has been a longtime critic of Donald Trump and his administration. He has also been known to call evangelical Christians hypocritical for their support of the president. Even though he has many disagreements with the party he used to help lead, Steele is still a registered Republican.
Other prominent politicians have also had criticism for the evangelical community. Mayor of South Bend, Indiana and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, is one recent politician to condemn a warped use of religion by the Trump administration.
“For a party that associates itself with Christianity, to say that … God would smile on the division of families at the hands of federal agents, that God would condone putting children in cages, has lost all claim to ever use religious language again,” Buttigieg said during the second Democratic debate.
Republicans have largely used rhetoric involving religious beliefs and lifestyle being under attack to drum up support amongst their base through fear. In fact, Trump even claimed to evangelicals at their annual Faith and Freedom Coalition conference that “the shameful attempt to suppress religious believers ended the day I took the oath of office.”
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