Evangelical leaders once played a critical role in building the coalition that won Donald Trump the presidency. Today, however, finds Trump now lashing out at the same group he once relied on as many faith leaders have chosen to remain on the sidelines in the early stages of his third bid for the White House.
Appearing on Real America's Voice on Monday, Trump told The Water Cooler host David Brody he believed evangelical leaders were being disloyal to his cause after reports of faith leaders who once supported him who are now reluctant to back him ahead of the 2024 election.
This, even after he delivered on promises to seat Supreme Court justices willing to support evangelicals' mission to overturn federal protections for abortion as well as initiatives like expanding "school choice," which would allow public dollars to flow into private and religious academic institutions.
"That's a sign of disloyalty," Trump said. "There's great disloyalty in the world of politics and that's a sign of disloyalty because nobody, as you know...has ever done more for [the] right to life than Donald Trump. Three Supreme Court justices and they all voted [to overturn Roe v. Wade]...they won, they finally won!"
Trump then diverted the blame to those groups for not doing enough to bolster conservative candidates during the 2022 midterm elections, even as some evangelicals have blamed Trump for the Republican Party's underperformance.
"I was a little disappointed because I thought they could have fought much harder during the election," Trump said. "A lot of them didn't fight or weren't really around to fight, and it did energize the Democrats. But a lot of the people that wanted and fought for years to get it, they sort of...they were there protesting and doing what they could have done.
"But with all of that being said, there's nobody that did more for the movement than I have. And that includes the movement of evangelicals and Christians and the movement very much of 'right to life,'" he said.
Though polls show Trump remains the Republican frontrunner for his party's nomination a year and a half from now, he may have some reason to worry. The evangelical vote was essential to Trump's winning coalition in 2016 as well as his performance in his losing re-election bid in 2020, when he secured record-high support from white, evangelical Christians across the board, according to exit polling compiled by the Pew Research Center.
Meanwhile, some who previously endorsed Trump now appear to be up for grabs.
Shortly after Trump announced his 2024 run for president, Robert Jeffress—a pastor at the First Baptist Dallas Church who is considered a staunch evangelical ally of Trump—told Newsweek he would decline to make an endorsement prior to the 2024 Republican primaries, saying he would "happily support [Trump]" if he becomes the GOP nominee in 2024.
In recent weeks, pieces in outlets like Vanity Fair and others have painted a picture of a reluctant evangelical community that has grown wary of Trump's sporadic moods and the baggage he carries with the American public, with some believing his lack of appeal with independent voters and some of his own party could spell out defeat for their movement in 2024.
Particularly after Trump's endorsements in the 2022 midterms appeared to actually hinder conservative nominees in numerous races when a key evangelical policy goal—the prohibition of abortion—was on the ballot nationwide. According to New York Times exit polling from the 2020 election, evangelical support for conservative candidates actually dropped by as much as five points in some states after four years of Trump, potentially robbing the GOP of much-needed victories in key states like Georgia and Michigan that year.
"The lesson of this midterm is simple and clear: Mr. Trump's endorsements hindered rather than helped the much-anticipated 'red wave,' and his petty selfishness could likely lead to another series of runoff losses in the days ahead," Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, wrote in a column for The Washington Times after the election. "The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he's our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed."
Though Trump's fledgling 2024 campaign has begun building out its networks in early-voting and highly religious states like South Carolina that will be critical to his path to the nomination, others are already outpacing him.
His former vice president, Mike Pence, has already made a number of appearances at religious universities and churches within the Palmetto State as many anticipate him to launch his own bid for the White House. Other prospective challengers, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, have also sought to supercharge their image with evangelicals, including deploying increasingly biblical prose into their campaign pitches to voters.
Pence was succinct in his assessment of the 2024 field in a recent interview with CBS News' Robert Costa.
"I think we've got time...The only thing we've decided for sure is that we weren't going to let anybody else make our decision for us," he said.
Newsweek reached out to Trump's team for comment.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more
