William Saletan’s Hate-Filled "Lies" About Trump … And White Evangelical Protestants

01/03/2019

In a recent column, Allan Wall talked about the hate Slate’s William Saletan feels for “White Evangelical Protestants” because they don’t hate Trump. Saletan writes, at one point, that:

Many Americans reject Trump because of his meanness, his misogyny, his ethnic demagoguery, and his squalid and abusive personal behavior.

But most [White Evangelical Protestants] don’t. In a September poll for the Public Religion Research Institute, two-thirds of white Catholics and white mainline Protestants agreed that Trump had “damaged the dignity of the presidency.” Most WEPs said he hadn’t.

Trump’s Christian Apologists Are Unchristian Polls show that on immigration, race, and poverty, white Evangelical Protestants have surrendered moral judgment and social responsibility [November 25, 2018]

There’s no attempt to prove any of the above, no “links in original” — Saletan just assumes that Trump is mean, misogynistic, demagogic, and squalidly abusive — in ways Obama and the Clintons are not — and everybody just knows that.

However, later he does get into some thorough linking in a paragraph Trump and the white Evangelicals that he (Saletan) hates, because they (WEPs) don’t have Trump, their own race, or America:

I take two lessons from these studies of white evangelicals. One is that the “Christian right,” as represented by Trump apologists, has betrayed Christianity. Trump presents a new, or in some cases newly revived, set of moral issues. Theft, open bigotry, race-baiting, explicit discrimination, boastful misogyny, sexual abuse of minors, the promotion of political violence, and the deliberate killing of innocent people are now on the table. Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, and others who stand with Trump in these fights should no longer be taken seriously as spokesmen for a faith. They’re purveyors of evil. [Emphasis added, links in original]

Let’s unpack that linkagery

Theft = In 2016, Saletan objected that Trump said that America should get some oil out of Iraq, considering how much money has been spent. (Bonus: Saletan didn’t like it that Trump had a secret plan to destroy ISIS. Remember them?)
open bigotry = Saletan hated it that Trump said “Mexican judge” when the judge was actually a “Mexican-American judge”.
race-baiting = Trump telling the truth about black crime.
explicit discrimination = The Muslim ban. (And why not, for God’s sake?)
boastful misogyny = The ACCESS HOLLYWOOD tape. And that’s not misogyny, by the way, Trump likes women, otherwise he wouldn’t be making out with them.
sexual abuse of minors = Not hating Roy Moore, or believing the accusations against him.
promotion of = Trump joked about a politician who body slammed a Guardian reporter who was harassing him.
political violence = Trump "invited his supporters to beat up protesters" at his rallies — and why not, again? They’re people who were committing a crime (“creating a disturbance”) and while normally, it’s the local police’s responsibility to beat them up and throw them out, why not crowdsource this? Plus more about the Guardian
deliberate killing of innocent people = In 2016, Trump suggested going after members of terrorists’ families. How innocent are the other bin Ladens and the other Tsarnaevs, really?

The point is that these are the kinds of things that they call lies when Trump says them. It’s also the kind of thing they call "Islamophobia" when it’s directed against Muslims. But Christophobia — fear and hatred of Christians--is practically not a word.

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