Someone has said that Twitter is where you find out that your FB friends aren't all that and a bag of chips. Maybe this is just a way of indicating that your world is your world, subject to every fault and taint, whereas Twitter, if you make judicious decisions about whom to follow, allows you to drop in on a better one? Anyway, I am glad that yesterday Kwame Anthony Appiah retweeted Matthew Yglesias's comment on a headline. The headline was, "President Donald J Trump Proclaims October 15 through 21, 2017, as National Character Counts Week." Yglesias's comment: "Satire is dead."
In a similar vein, David Frum, after citing Trump's statement to "Values Voters" about how he's busy "stopping the assault on Judeo-Christian values," notes a few exceptions:
- Thou shalt not steal
- Thou shalt not commit adultery
- Thou shalt not bear false witness &
- Thou shalt not covet.
There are six more commandments but Twitter has a character limitation.
These tweets raise a question for which I have no answer satisfactory to me: Why is Trump such a darling of conservative Christians? It seems, to this outsider, that his past is spattered with too many women, too many bankruptcies, too many shady dealings, too many stiffed creditors, too many lawsuits, too many positions on abortion, too much boasting, too much glitz, too much Manhattan, too many tone deaf references to (for example) "Two Corinthians." Yet, according to Pew Research, he won the white evangelical vote by a whopping 65 points (81 to 16 percent), which is unprecedented--beyond even George W Bush's margin over Kerry with this group. All my theories go bust upon further review. For example, white evangelicals obviously self-select for whiteness, but, considering that Trump won white Catholics by only 60-37, and lost lopsidedly among Jews and religiously unaffiliated whites, that seems over simple. Trump is rich, thereby proving he's favored by God? But they wouldn't vote for an even richer Democrat.
I need to be on the receiving end of some evangelsplaining.
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