The Religious Right’s Come-to-Jesus About Trump
“I think that Trump is uniquely disqualified,” says Burk. “He has done some egregious race-baiting, he has said that when he becomes president, he will encourage the United States military to commit war crimes. I have seen with my own eyes him encourage violence.” Trump is, Burk says, “a unique threat to our constitutional order.”
Burk and his evangelical allies pull no punches about their fears of Trump’s neo-fascist proclivities. The writer Matthew Anderson, a leading evangelical intellectual, has referred to Republicans supporting Trump as “Vichy Republicans.”
But many of these religious conservatives won’t vote for Clinton, either, putting the #NeverTrump camp in a bind. For example, Charmaine Yoest, former president of the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life, uses Twitter to promote a #NeverHillary hashtag. (Yoest did not respond to an interview request for this article.) Other anti-abortion leaders have signaled their willingness to support Trump over Clinton.
In a last-ditch effort to fend off both Trump and Clinton, a “master group” of about 40 conservative activists are busy plotting a counter-Trump move, says Erick Erickson, the conservative activist, pundit and founder of the website The Resurgent. “More than half” of this group is religious conservatives, Erickson says, and includes evangelical GOP donors. These activists “didn’t like Trump to begin with and haven’t liked what he has done going forward,” Erickson tells Rolling Stone, “including the Moore tweet.” Those sort of attacks by Trump, says Erickson, “further emboldens a lot of them” to try to beat Trump — somehow.
According to Erickson, the group seeking a Trump alternative is equally opposed to Trump and Clinton, but he acknowledges all of the group’s available options are a long shot. In one scenario, he says, a third-party candidate — a “sacrificial lamb,” possibly — would aim not necessarily to win the general election, but to deprive both Trump and Clinton of the requisite 270 electoral votes, thus throwing the election to the (presumably still Republican-controlled) House. “It is exceedingly complicated and there are no guarantees,” Erickson says. The lack of certainty, of course, includes the unknown Trump effect on down-ballot races.