Hit the nail on the head with these:
www.sltrib.com
Right after the election, you wrote about how Trump’s crass rhetoric “has cheapened political discussions and desensitized voters to behavior that in another era they would have deemed disqualifying in a president.” Have Latter-day Saints who voted for him become similarly desensitized? How do they justify voting for a candidate who talks like this?
People that I know who voted for Trump would have been absolutely scandalized by the things that he said, even just in the final weeks of this campaign. Just look at the last six weeks of the 2024 election cycle. He spread lies about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets. He said America was the garbage can of the world. He invited a comedian onto the stage to call Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. It goes on and on. Ten years ago, if Trump supporters had seen a Republican candidate talk like that on the presidential stage, they would have said, “There’s no way that person should be in the White House.” Now, not only did those people vote for him, for the most part, that stuff didn’t bother them at all. … People who are voting for Trump for the second or third time, at this point, long ago created a permission structure for themselves to support somebody whose character and behavior are far beneath the standards that they would have set for presidential candidates in the past
Some evangelical Christians see Trump as some kind of Christian “savior” and that God wanted him to be the president. Why aren’t Latter-day Saints talking like that?
I actually wrote a story for The Atlantic earlier this year about the prayers that were offered at the beginning of Trump rallies, most of them given by evangelicals. One of the running themes through those prayers is the idea that Trump has been anointed by God to lead this country, that he is kind of a biblical character, set apart to save the country from ruin. A lot of those same supporters have just talked themselves into the idea that Trump is a godly, almost prophetic figure like Paul or other kinds of straightforwardly heroic characters in the Bible. I have not seen that very much even among Latter-day Saint ardent supporters. They will say he’s doing great things for the country. And a lot of them did lean into the idea that God saved him from the assassination attempts, but I did not hear that he is a special figure anointed by God. The way that the church is set up in this hierarchical fashion, there isn’t quite as much room for a kind of non-Latter-day Saint politician to be slotted into that hierarchy….Latter-day Saints would feel uncomfortable with comparing him to a prophet, given their own beliefs about prophets.
Donald Trump has set a new low bar, says LDS reporter, for ‘expectations of presidential behavior’
Atlantic reporter McKay Coppins discusses Latter-day Saint voters' role in Donald Trump's election victory.
Right after the election, you wrote about how Trump’s crass rhetoric “has cheapened political discussions and desensitized voters to behavior that in another era they would have deemed disqualifying in a president.” Have Latter-day Saints who voted for him become similarly desensitized? How do they justify voting for a candidate who talks like this?
People that I know who voted for Trump would have been absolutely scandalized by the things that he said, even just in the final weeks of this campaign. Just look at the last six weeks of the 2024 election cycle. He spread lies about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets. He said America was the garbage can of the world. He invited a comedian onto the stage to call Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. It goes on and on. Ten years ago, if Trump supporters had seen a Republican candidate talk like that on the presidential stage, they would have said, “There’s no way that person should be in the White House.” Now, not only did those people vote for him, for the most part, that stuff didn’t bother them at all. … People who are voting for Trump for the second or third time, at this point, long ago created a permission structure for themselves to support somebody whose character and behavior are far beneath the standards that they would have set for presidential candidates in the past
Some evangelical Christians see Trump as some kind of Christian “savior” and that God wanted him to be the president. Why aren’t Latter-day Saints talking like that?
I actually wrote a story for The Atlantic earlier this year about the prayers that were offered at the beginning of Trump rallies, most of them given by evangelicals. One of the running themes through those prayers is the idea that Trump has been anointed by God to lead this country, that he is kind of a biblical character, set apart to save the country from ruin. A lot of those same supporters have just talked themselves into the idea that Trump is a godly, almost prophetic figure like Paul or other kinds of straightforwardly heroic characters in the Bible. I have not seen that very much even among Latter-day Saint ardent supporters. They will say he’s doing great things for the country. And a lot of them did lean into the idea that God saved him from the assassination attempts, but I did not hear that he is a special figure anointed by God. The way that the church is set up in this hierarchical fashion, there isn’t quite as much room for a kind of non-Latter-day Saint politician to be slotted into that hierarchy….Latter-day Saints would feel uncomfortable with comparing him to a prophet, given their own beliefs about prophets.
