Leaning into the anti-politician sentiment that continued to buoy him, the president made a show of acting unilaterally to keep his commitments. In his first six months in office, he signed a flurry of executive orders touching on everything from energy regulations to religious liberty, abortion to deportation policy. He began filling the federal courts with conservative jurists, and his White House ran a professional operation overseeing the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Perhaps most visibly, he withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord, a global-warming pact with other nations that Trump said threatened American economic sovereignty. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he decreed.
From thirty thousand feet, and certainly from inside the Beltway, these developments were obscured by the president’s unpopularity. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in mid-July showed Trump’s approval rating at 36 percent, “the lowest six-month approval rating of any president in polls dating back 70 years.”4 And yet that same poll showed Trump’s approval rating at 90 percent among conservative Republicans.
In many ways, the new president’s flaws and failures—and the harsh judgments thereof—endeared him to the GOP base. Conservatives, and especially churchgoing Christians, could identify with someone dismissed by the political elite, disrespected by the mainstream media, delegitimized by the American left. Feeling ostracized in a culture that no longer reflected their core values or tolerated their most polarizing principles, the religious right came to feel a kinship with Trump that defied all reasonable expectations.
In early June, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual gathering in Washington, the president offered an extraordinary sentiment when pledging his continued support to Christian conservatives. “We’re under siege. You understand that,” Trump said. “But we will come out bigger and better and stronger than ever.”
It was a stroke of polysemantic genius from the president and his speechwriters. As heads nodded in agreement across the hotel ballroom, media outlets seized—as the White House knew they would—on the phrase, “We’re under siege.” After all, at that very moment, just six miles from where Trump was speaking, former FBI director James Comey was testifying under oath in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee about his unseemly interactions with the commander in chief. These were the tensest hours of Trump’s young presidency, and here he was, acknowledging a defensive posture. But he was also expressing solidarity with an audience that could relate to feeling victimized.
Of all the early surprises offered by the Trump presidency, none proved more enduring than his alliance with Christian conservatives. Trump thrived on transactional relationships, and in white evangelicals—81 percent of whom voted for him in 2016—he discovered an ideal trading partner. He would give them the policies and the access to authority that they longed for. In return, they would stand behind him unwaveringly. “Those fucking evangelicals,” Trump mused in a meeting with GOP lawmakers, smiling and shaking his head at the depth of their devotion.
That he was not one of them was beside the point. “I’ve been at the White House for meetings more in the first four months of the Trump administration than I was during the entire Bush presidency,” Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council president, said that spring.
Ralph Reed, the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s chairman, put it thusly: “Jimmy Carter sat in the pew with us. But he never fought for us. Donald Trump fights. And he fights for us.”
Naturally, this marriage invited skepticism, if not outright scorn. It was Jesus who posed the question, “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” And yet many of his followers, students of a faith that stresses the eternal, not the ephemeral, pledged their uncritical allegiance to an earthly leader in exchange for political gratification. To vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils while holding him to a high standard in office was more than defensible; but those who stood indiscriminately supportive of him despite behaviors that would have been intolerable from a Democrat opened themselves to every charge of shameless opportunism.
“In my experience over the last thirty or so years of political life, there’s hardly any group in American politics that is as easily won over or seduced by power as Christians,” says Pete Wehner, a Trump critic and one of the prominent evangelicals who served in the Bush 43 White House.
The most frequent rebuttal from faith leaders supportive of Trump amounted to a fascinating concession: Their idyllic visions of virtuous leadership in government had been a mirage. They had railed against Bill Clinton’s philandering, but came to realize afterward that America was past the point of prioritizing morality in its leaders. The country was changing too much, too quickly, for their old expectations to be realistic. In 1976, Jerry Falwell had crucified Jimmy Carter for giving an interview to Playboy; forty years later, Jerry Falwell Jr. posed with Trump in front of a framed Playboy cover featuring a nearly nude woman. This was to be the new normal. “It’s not our job to choose the best Sunday school teacher, like Jimmy Carter was,” Falwell Jr. told CNN in 2016.5
In fairness, it wasn’t just the religious right revising its standards. This was a time of transition for conservatism writ large. The Tea Party insurgency had redrawn the battle lines inside the GOP. The Freedom Caucus had neutered the House Republican leadership. John Boehner and Eric Cantor had been pushed out of power. Mitch McConnell found his chamber increasingly ungovernable. In May, Jim DeMint was fired by the Heritage Foundation, concluding a ruinous experiment that had further sullied the think tank’s reputation. And Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff who remained Trump’s strongest link to the party establishment, was on his way out.
That summer, having breakfast with a blissfully retired Boehner, I asked him whether the Republican Party could survive Trumpism. “There is no Rep—” He stopped himself.
There is no Republican Party?
He shrugged. “There is. But what does it even mean? Donald Trump’s not a Republican. He’s not a Democrat. He’s a populist.”
What Trump was demonstrating, however, is that political labels were less relevant than ever. And to the extent that they still mattered, their very definitions were changing.
Any doubts of this were erased by the Conservative Political Action Conference of 2017. One year earlier, there had been threats of a mass walkout if the GOP front-runner came to speak, leading Tump to cancel his appearance. Now, CPAC had turned into “TPAC,” as Kellyanne Conway told the audience to wild cheers. She was right. To attend the event was to witness an ideology conforming to an individual rather than the other way around. Trump brought down the house with a speech that made no mention of “liberty” or “constitution,” choosing instead to champion “our movement” as one that would embrace protectionist, cronyist, big-spending policies in the name of shielding Americans from the menace of a global economy.
Meanwhile, traditional mainstays such as Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio and Rand Paul were nowhere to be found. In their place was Steve Bannon hawking “economic nationalism” and his old media company, Breitbart (once banned from CPAC) sponsoring the event with its logo slapped across the stage. The event’s organizers had even invited Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right carnival barker with no serious claim to conservatism, to speak. (He was disinvited only after video surfaced of him making approving remarks about pedophilia.)