In The Garden of Trump and Evil
Plus: How to pick a winning Veep.
The U.S. men’s gymnastics team defied the odds yesterday to bring home their first team medal since 2008. Today, the women’s team—coming off a silver medal in Tokyo after winning gold in 2012 and 2016—will try to recapture the top spot. The show starts at 12:15 eastern; we hope you had the foresight to call in sick.
At the other end of the transcendence scale, we wish Olympic officials well as they work to clean enough sewage out of the Seine to permit the triathlon to happen. Happy Tuesday.
Angels and Demons
—Andrew Egger
When it comes to covering the unholy alliance between Donald Trump and America’s white evangelicals, there’s nobody who owns the beat like the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins. His latest piece is a showstopper: a meta-analysis of every main-stage prayer—58 in all—offered at a Trump rally since he announced his latest run in 2022.
Many themes ran through these prayers, Coppins writes, but a few stood out. The deep conviction that a liberalizing America had broken the contract with God that had rained blessings down on it for more than two hundred years. The unshakable assumption that Donald Trump was God’s chosen agent of renewal—and vengeance. And a deep thirst for that vengeance to come soon.
Coppins quotes an invocation from Iowa pastor Joel Tenney last December:
We have witnessed a sitting president weaponize the entire legal system to try and steal an election and imprison his leading opponent, Donald Trump, despite committing no crime. The corruption of Washington is a natural reflection of the spiritual state of our nation . . .
Be afraid. For rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country . . . Lord, help us make America great again.
This sort of stance is still pretty fringe even within American evangelicalism. As Coppins notes, it’s most concentrated within Pentecostalism, “a charismatic branch of Christianity that emphasizes supernatural faith healing and speaking in tongues.”
But it’s getting less fringe as we go. An under-covered part of the Trump/evangelicals story is that a significant chunk of their descent into political madness didn’t come until after their embrace of Trump.
Early in that relationship, evangelicals repeatedly turned to a specific biblical figure to justify their support for a man they found so unacceptable on a personal level: Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who liberated the Israelites after their captivity in Babylon. The point was that God could use even an unbelieving man to achieve his purposes.
But as Coppins notes, “this analogy seems to have outlived its usefulness to the religious right.” Strong majorities of Republicans now describe Trump in polls as “morally upstanding” and “a person of faith.”
Some of this is political: Trump followed through on many of his promises to evangelical voters during his four years in office. But a lot of it is psychological too. If you truly believe that character and godliness matter—and (believe it or not!) many evangelicals still do—it’s hard to hold that sort of tension in your soul for long. Far easier on the conscience is to recast the fight between Trump and his enemies as one between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The longer his hold on evangelicals goes on, the more frequently and deeply they make that accommodation.
What it means to be evangelical continues to change, too. Increasingly, the label “evangelical” isn’t a theological marker of professing belief in certain Christian doctrines—or even an institutional one designating membership in an evangelical church. As pastor and political scientist Ryan Burge noted last year, a full quarter of self-described evangelicals attend church less than once a year, while less than half go weekly. Increasingly, he writes, “evangelicalism has become a cultural and political marker.” It’s “evangelicalism without the religion part.”
To be embedded in organized religious practice—holding to a suite of beliefs that don’t map neatly onto the politics of the day or living in community with fellow believers who may not share your political allegiances—can shore up a person against political zealotry. Embracing the political-cultural fusion that marks much of modern evangelicalism, by contrast, can have the opposite effect. The politics sorts the good guys (Trump and his allies) from the bad guys (Democrats, the media, coastal elites). The religious language then heightens that fight from a humdrum political contest into a clash between angels and demons, with eternal stakes.
We’re not sure this election’s stakes are eternal—but we agree they’re pretty high! Come ride it out with us:
How to Find a Winning Veep
—William Kristol
Here are the vice presidential candidates on successful non-incumbent presidential tickets in the last 44 years.
1980: George H.W. Bush
1988: Dan Quayle
1992: Al Gore
2000: Dick Cheney
2008: Joe Biden
2016: Mike Pence
2020: Kamala Harris
Bush, Biden, and Harris all were selected as VP candidates during the same cycles in which they ran for president. Gore had run for president four years before Bill Clinton chose him as a running mate.
Cheney had been White House chief of staff and secretary of defense, and had considered running for president four years before his selection. Mike Pence had served in his party’s leadership in Congress and then as governor of Indiana, and had considered running for president in 2016.
Cardinals who are generally considered reasonable candidates for selection as pope are called papabile. You might say these six selections—with Pence a borderline case—were widely considered POTUSabile when they were chosen.
Dan Quayle is the one candidate on a winning ticket who hadn’t been considered a real presidential possibility at that stage in his career. And in fact he had a tough campaign as a ticketmate in 1988 (though he served, in my biased opinion as his then-chief of staff, admirably as vice president).
So: The vice presidential candidate’s main job is to be next in line to the presidency. You have an easier time as a vice presidential pick if political elites, the media, and voters are already accustomed to thinking of you as among the limited group of people who could conceivably be the next president. And the easiest way to get yourself thought to be vaguely suitable to be president is to run for president. (This is true even if your previous presidential runs were pretty spectacular failures—see Joe Biden.) Next best is to have been on a short-ish list of people who it’s generally thought could have credibly run for president.
It’s worth asking how this applies to 2024.
On the Republican side, JD Vance hadn’t run for president, and hadn’t been thought ready to do so. Tim Scott, Doug Burgum, and Marco Rubio had run for president, even if they hadn’t met with great success. Does anyone doubt that any of those failed presidential candidates would have been a better vice presidential choice than Vance?
What about the candidates Kamala Harris is considering?
Pete Buttigieg ran for president in 2020, and performed well. His position this year is like that of Al Gore in 1992.
Govs. Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro might well have run if Biden had announced a year ago he was going to be a one-term president. They were and are widely considered presidential-level politicians.
Govs. Tim Walz and Andy Beshear and Sen. Mark Kelly are impressive in various ways, but none has really been considered as a presidential possibility. This doesn’t mean they might not deserve to have been so considered. But they do seem to me to fall in a category of vice presidential selections that seems less promising.
I’m confident Vice President Harris is well aware of all this. So I expect her to select either Pete Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, or Josh Shapiro as her running mate. They have the most important qualification for being a successful vice presidential nominee: They’re POTUSabile.
Have thoughts on POTUSability? Have any POTUSabile candidates in mind we’ve overlooked? Let us know in the comments:
Catching up . . .
Rising from Biden’s shadow, Harris faces crucial test on foreign policy: Washington Post
Kamala Harris collapsed in 2020. Here’s how to avoid a repeat: Politico
Behind the curtain: The battle for Trump power: Axios
Vance calls Biden-Harris swap a ‘sucker punch’: CNN
Fred Trump III calls uncle Donald Trump ‘atomic crazy,’ says he used racial slur decades ago: ABC News
Japan built Thailand’s car industry. Now China is gunning for it: New York Times
Quick Hits: Don’t Get Distracted
“One of the perils of calling out Donald Trump’s fascist outbursts,” Will Saletan writes for the site today, “is that sometimes we get it wrong. He says things that appear scary, and we sound the alarm about it, only to find that we misunderstood him. These mistakes help Trump by allowing him and his supporters to bemoan so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome. And they distract us from other statements in which he really does threaten democracy.”
That, Will argues, is what happened after Trump’s comments this weekend imploring Christians to “get out and vote, just this time—you won’t have to do it anymore”:
Many people who fear Trump thought, when they heard or read about these remarks, that he was pledging to become a dictator and prevent any further elections. But that interpretation doesn’t fit what Trump said. He addressed his remarks to people who support him. He told them not that they couldn’t vote, but that they wouldn’t have to. And he explained why: because before the next election, he would have fixed all the country’s problems . . .
Trump’s riff, in the Turning Point speech and in his explanation to Ingraham, was creepy for several reasons: the way he spoke to Christians as though they were a foreign tribe (because to him, they are); the laughable idea that all our problems would be gone in four years and that he would be the one to fix them; and above all, his indifference to whether people vote in elections that aren’t about him. But it wasn’t a threat to end democracy.
The real threats to democracy come from other things Trump said in that same speech and at other rallies over the past two weeks.
Cheap Shots
Sorry Will, but please stop pretending that Trump doesn’t mean what he clearly says. In this case, the you won’t have to vote cause I fixed it, means you won’t have to vote cause I’ll be your emperor. No one -ever, even Trump - is dumb enough to tell their electorate that their votes wont be needed at some time in the future if there are actually going to be elections. Sheesh….this guy has been repeatedly telling us who is is. Believe him
I had been under the impression that God claimed vengeance for Himself: "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord." Apparently the Lord is out-sourcing the vengeance work to MAGA.