There’s something medieval about Trump’s uneasy partnership with his running mate Mike Pence – and I’m not just talking about Pence’s retrograde politics.
Partnering with the embattled governor of Indiana was a strategic marriage a feudal dynast could be proud of. Pence, though wildly unpopular following his Religious Freedom Restoration Act, is a born-again evangelical, a demographic Trump desperately needs to court.
Trump has admitted as much.
“I think if you look at one of the big reasons that I chose Mike – and one of the reasons is party unity,” Trump said the day he announced Pence as his VP pick. “I have to be honest.”
It’s a match made in hell. Trump was uneasy about Pence from the beginning. Reports surfaced that Trump wanted to change his mind up to the very last moment. In December 2015, Pence referred to Trump’s proposed Muslim travel ban as “offensive and unconstitutional”.
But if Trump is to run as a Republican, he must embrace the zealots. And if he is to embrace the zealots, he must engage in that most time-honored tradition of the religious right: scapegoating the LGBT community.
On the eve of the two-month anniversary of the Pulse massacre, where we lost 49 of our LGBT brothers and sisters, Trump is speaking at an anti-LGBT summit in Orlando called Rediscovering God in America Renewal Project.
According to Right Wing Watch, he is joining “Little” Marco Rubio in a lineup of speakers that make Kim Davis look like a “Love is Love” bumper sticker:
• David Barton, a Republican activist who believes HIV/Aids is God’s punishment for homosexuality and that God is actively preventing a cure to maintain it as such. He also believes anti-bullying policies in schools are attempts to indoctrinate students into homosexuality.
• Pastor Ken Graves from Maine, who often talks about “militant homofascism” in his sermons. According to him, the gays and their coalition of allies are attempting to build a “secular humanist caliphate” in America.
• Bill Federer, a conspiracy theorist who believes gay rights are bringing about an Islamist takeover of America.
• David Lane, founder of the American Renewal Project, who has explicitly stated he plans to grill Trump on how he plans to fight “homosexual totalitarianism” and gay rights “militants”.
And, of course, standing by his side is Mike Pence, who has referred to gay marriage as indicative of a “societal collapse” and who wanted to use HIV/Aids money to fund conversion therapy.
It’s worth pointing out that most of these speakers break from Trump, who uses Islam as a bogeyman to position himself as an ally to the LGBT community. The religious right sees Islam and LGBT as one in the same, agents of evil sent to destroy America.
“Ask yourself, who is really the friend of women and the LGBT community?” Trump said in a speech after Pulse in which he directly referred to Islam. “Donald Trump with his actions, or Hillary Clinton with her words?”
Attending an anti-gay summit in Orlando so soon after Pulse is, of course, an “action” from Trump, one that exposes an unsettling truth for Democrats and Republicans alike: religious extremists are pulling at least some of the strings now.
Donald Trump is a weak candidate. Donald Trump is easy to manipulate. All evidence suggests that, at the end of the day, he’s just not very smart. And the religious right is taking full advantage.
They infiltrated and shaped the official GOP platform, which endorses conversion therapy and condemns same-sex marriage. They have pinned him down to a summit where they will ask him how he plans to turn American into a Christian nation. Should Trump win, they will be one impeachment-worthy Drumpf-up away from the presidency.
