There was a time, not so long ago, when the Republican Party was firmly in the grip of the religious right. They supported the likes of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz right up to the 2016 Republican Convention. Then they allowed their leaders to convince them that Donald Trump wasn’t all that bad. All they had to do was hold their noses and vote for someone they knew in their hearts wasn’t fit to be president.
They listened to false prophets then and are listening to them now. Evangelical ministers who were his strongest supporters in the fall election now are defending him in the face of his hate-filled racist and anti-Semitic rant. In supporting the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who marched, caused mayhem and murder in Charlottesville, Trump showed his true anti-Jewish, anti-African American, and anti-democratic beliefs. It was laid bare for all the world to see and reel in revulsion. But not the Reverend Franklin Graham, son of famed evangelist Billy Graham. He chose to rush to trump’s defense.
Like Trump, Graham gave lip service to non-violence, while excusing those jack-booted Nazi thugs who marched into Charlottesville specifically to incite violence. He and Trump tried to put Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan on equal footing with those who oppose their hateful rhetoric. So too did the Reverend Jerry Falwell Jr., the head of Liberty University, who tweeted his continuing support for the worst president in modern history and his defense of racist ideologies and those who expose them – the so called “very fine people” among them, to use Trump’s turn of phrase.
These are the religious profiteers of the Republican Party who delivered up their flocks to be slaughtered should Obamacare, Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare be dismantled. Would Jesus recognize these as men of God or would he drive them from the temple precinct?
What of the prominent Jewish members of the Trump administration? Gary Cohn, the former chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs and now Trump’s top economic adviser, was reported to have been “very upset” with Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville. What about Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin who rushed to Trump’s defense? Or the deafening silence of the president’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner?
Seeing hundreds of Nazis marching by torchlight, chanting their anti-Jewish slogans in the night, had to be a wake-up call to not only the Jewish community, but to every person of conscience. How can any person of the Jewish faith, knowing what the words “never again” mean, have anything to do with supporting this administration or President Trump?
There are a few voices starting to emerge among Republican senators, congressmen and governors. A few voices questioning what should be obvious, that this president is no president. That Donald Trump is unfit to serve. You can’t hear those voices very clearly here in Missouri as yet. Our Republican leaders are still holding their noses while feigning respect and trust in Trump. They will find it ill-placed as he continues to embarrass our great nation, divide our people, and encourage those who espouse the evils our fathers and grandfathers fought to extinguish in World War Two.
Joshua Peters (D-St. Louis) represents Missouri House District 76.
