When Trump Falls, Here's How The White Evangelical Leadership Will Explain And Profit From His Fall

by Frank SchaefferTrump has a lifetime of criminal activity to hide. The dumbest thing he ever did was run for president. He’s going down. How will the white evangelical leaders that talked their followers into voting for Trump explain this, then come out winners?Trump broke the number one rule of con-artists and grifters: never attract attention to yourself. But according to his evangelical backers this too-- Trump’s ego-driven stupidity – is going to be “used by God.”Trump now has real reason to be afraid. He’s has spent his whole career in the company of cons and crooks (that includes his new evangelical leader pals like the con-artist Pat Robertson). Now the law is coming and he’s waking up to the fact that being president is the worst decision he ever made.A raid on a lawyer’s office doesn’t happen every day; it means that multiple government officials and a federal judge had reason to believe they’d find evidence of a major crime and that they didn’t trust Trump’s lawyer not to destroy that evidence.Trump is the gift white evangelical voters gave America: A con-man who has been protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado. Those mob-thug-con-artist “methods” are proving to have their limits when they are applied from the highly exposed Oval Office. Trump is going down sabotaged by his own stupidity and ego. And as history will show that self-sabotage was made possible by white evangelical leaders.So… again, how will they save face?Will evangelicals ever say sorry?No.God is still “at work” from their point of view. Here’s how:If Trump’s impeached the presidency will fall to the pro-theocracy crank Mike Pence. He’s just the kind of Reconstructionist theocrat the religious right has always really wanted in the Oval Office: an evangelical gay-hating, woman-belittling family man with a safe checklist of Wall Street/Republican/NRA/pro-white/pro-Israel/white oligarch beliefs.White evangelicals came to believe in Trump as indispensable to God’s providence. They bought into Trump using analogies to King David (who slept around a lot, too). They invented a new theological core belief that Trump’s against-the-odds victories meant that God chose him to battle for evangelicals’ religious liberties.That view can be crafted into a new theological revelation and direction by face-saving evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., if and when Trump falls. Here’s what they will say: Trump’s fall is all part of God unveiling HIS REAL PLAN!This new plan will be sold by the likes of Falwell, Franklin Graham and Jeffress, as the chance to reestablish moral order (no more having to explain a porn-president) and to replace Trump with a fellow religious true believer, born-again conservative – Mike-Theocracy-Is-Great-Pence.This new divine intervention will explain why evangelicals (after a bitter fight and “Deep State” accusations) will lie down and accept Trump’s fall as “God’s will.” It will be claimed by people like the con-artist Ralph Reed, that this was God’s plan all along, an updated version much like the updated versions of the End Times scenarios evangelicals trot out to explain why, in fact, Jesus didn’t come back as predicted last time… but will now…To get a true believer, who doesn’t pay off porn stars but will ban all abortions, gay marriage and transgender rights, and will keep blacks in their “place,” loves the NRA and will persecute brown minorities, and wants to hang gays, and defends the “religious liberty” to discriminate against gays and women, into the White House, is, clearly, what God intended all along.Praise Jesus!If you are an American who would rather not go from a porn-presidency to an Iranian-style theocracy (having swapped a joke version of Tony Soprano/Heffner for the Ayatollah Khomeini), then vote. Help sweep the entire edifice of the enabling, hateful bought and paid for Republican Party into the dustbin of history by working for a massive history-changing Democratic Party victory in 2018 and 2020.