If Trump fails, we all lose
I made a comment on our daily radio program recently that Christians should be very thankful that Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and not Hillary Clinton. The Democratic Party of yesteryear, made of patriotic Americans who just had policy differences with the Republican Party, is gone forever. The Democrats have spent the past four decades or so evolving into a party that now works against almost everything our country was built upon. The Bible. The Constitution. The family. The free-enterprise system. I could give countless examples of this hostility, but I don’t have enough space here.
This is not to say the Republican Party has always defended these institutions. But generally speaking, it has. That is why the vast majority of Christians vote Republican. Before 1980, Christians voted for both Democrats and Republicans.
President Trump, while running in the GOP primary, reached out to the Christian community to try to better understand who we were and what we wanted to see in a presidential candidate. I know that for a fact. Initially I was skeptical of his sincerity. Some would say it was a political move, since he knew he could not win the GOP nomination if he did not have a significant percentage of the evangelical vote.
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So perhaps it was a calculated move on Trump’s part—but so what? Republicans and Democrats both pander to groups all the time. But today, Christians alone are not a large enough voting bloc to elect a presidential candidate by themselves. But Trump wanted to be our friend and he stood for a lot of the same things we stood for.
Yes, he was a flawed man who had a playboy reputation, and he had no real Christian testimony other than speaking fondly of his mother taking him to the Presbyterian Church when he was young. But still, he was not embarrassed to be seen with or stand with “the evangelicals,” as he called us. (I joked with some of my friends during the campaign that Mr. Trump didn’t know enough to understand that we conservative Christians are considered “unclean” by the elites. Serious presidential candidates are not supposed to be seen in public with us.)
In hindsight, it was probably a blessing that Mr. Trump didn’t get that, and it was also a blessing that if he did—he didn’t care. He was going with what he believed, and he was going to listen to whoever wanted to join him.
One of the reasons President Trump has taken unrelenting, incoming fire from the liberal elites—even before he was sworn in—is precisely because he is not ashamed of the Bible, the Constitution, the family and the free enterprise system.
Yes, I understand what I just said is open to mockery. It goes something like this: “So the president of the American Family Association supports a man who has been married three times and has lived a playboy lifestyle. What a joke.”
I have to say, I did wrestle with these things. However, I did not believe him to be the same man he was in the past. I thought he was an “old school patriot” who saw what the progressives and the globalists were doing to our country and wanted to stop it. But in the end, it was Trump or Clinton who would take over the most powerful office in the free world. Did I want someone who wanted to be our friend or someone who considered us to be deplorable and who represented a political party bent on the destruction of our country (as we have known it) and the criminalization of Christianity? There was no third option.
I have been somewhat hesitant to state things in such a dramatic fashion. But I’ve been in this culture war every day since 1986. The political progressives in this country are secular humanists. They have taken over one of the two major political parties in America. They have open disdain and in some cases hatred for the God of the Bible, His morals, values and His people. This is becoming more apparent. The path they are going down will lead to the persecution of Christians. Even physical persecution.
Does President Trump always exhibit the fruits of the spirit? No. Are there tweets he sends out from time to time that I wish he would not send? Yes. But you know what? The man is fighting these same people who want to destroy our country and who want to ruin our lives unless we bow the knee to Baal. And they are vicious and they are ruthless. And they, the God-haters, are after President Trump because in many respects—politically speaking—to them he represents us.
We need to pray for President Trump—every day.
Tim Wildmon is president of American Family Association, a pro-family advocacy organization with over two million online supporters and approximately 150,000 subscribers to its monthly publication. Wildmon co-hosts “Today’s Issues” on the American Family Radio network, which consists of nearly 200 radio stations across the country.
