Trump Blasts Critical Editorial Aimed at Evangelical Voters
Trump Blasts Critical Editorial Aimed at Evangelical Voters
(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump pilloried an editorial in Christianity Today that called for his removal from office, underscoring the importance of religious voters to his 2020 re-election prospects.
In a series of tweets on Friday, Trump called the publication -- which was founded by the late Reverend Billy Graham -- “a far left magazine” and said that “no president has done more for the Evangelical community.”
Hours later, Trump fired off another tweet, saying, “No President has ever done what I have done for Evangelicals, or religion itself.”
In an editorial published Thursday, Christianity Today’s Editor in Chief Mark Galli said Trump “attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents.”
Galli added that Trump’s “Twitter feed alone -- with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders -- is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.”
Christianity Today is the flagship magazine of evangelicals. Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2016 election, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of exit poll data.
Trump has maintained overwhelming support among evangelicals, who comprise a significant part of the voting bloc in key states including Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
“The bulk of them are in the South, but there are significant amounts of evangelicals in the Midwest, exactly the type of swing states we wonder about, Michigan, definitely, Ohio, Pennsylvania,” said Thomas Kidd, a history professor at Baylor University and author of “Who Is An Evangelical.” “If there was a breach in the evangelical-Trump firewall it would start probably in the Midwest.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Mario Parker in Washington at mparker22@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Joshua Gallu, Justin Blum
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