Exploring Conservative Dogma: A Reply to 'Why does the Left hate Trump and Christians love him?'

On Quora, Trump supporter Dan Lauffer asks:

Why does the Left hate Trump and Christians love him?

I hate insincere, loaded questions, especially those written by Trump-supporting individuals who are also self-described Christians, but I’ll try to explain this anyway.

First of all, it’s not just “the left” that dislikes Donald John Trump. There are many millions of people - not just in the United States, but also around the world - who find Trump distasteful in every way possible. And it's not just liberals that don't like Trump; quite a few conservatives, among them columnist George F. Will, have left the Republican Party due to its embrace of "Don the Con."  From his aggressive “I’m from Queens, New York” mien, his constant bragging, his dishonesty, his pandering to his “base,” his total disregard for diplomacy, his hateful attitudes toward minorities, and his admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jung Un, Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte to his “Presidency by Twitter,” Trump is everything that a good leader is not.

For many years now, at least since the Cold War, the far-right wing of the conservative movement (regardless of political party affiliation) has been pushing a simplistic message that “liberals” are, in essence, either Communists or Communist sympathizers who are out to destroy the country and its “Christian” traditions. This is not a new argument; it was trotted out many times during the “Red Scare” of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and it was used to great effect in the South when blacks and other minorities were working to dismantle the white supremacist institutions of segregation and disenfranchisement, especially those codified by Jim Crow laws in the former Confederacy.

This is the nostalgic view of the 1950s that Trump supporters cling to when they talk about “making America great again.”

This, in essence, is one of the ways in which the “right” tries to link liberal causes, such as equal rights for minorities, as being instigated by Communism.

Those of us who oppose white supremacy, the denial of civil rights, institutional prejudice against LGBTQ individuals, the subsumption of the Separation of Church and State, and the imposition of a theocracy upon a pluralistic and secular democratic republic dislike Trump because he is allied himself with what I call the Id of America.

I’ve written many posts that explain why I dislike and even hate Donald J. Trump, so I’ll not repeat myself here. Suffice it to say that based on his actions and behaviors throughout his long public life, Trump reflects not the very best of American society, but its darker, uglier worst.

Now, by “Christians,” the question writer (who is self-described as a retired pastor) does not refer to every believer in Jesus Christ from every denomination that exists in the U.S. and around the world. He is referring to a particular subset of self-identified Protestants, especially the more militant Evangelical denominations that are deeply entrenched in the South and in rural America.

This is a crucial detail, because as much as Trump supporters like to think otherwise, the opposition to the 21st Century Republican Party and its agenda is not made up by atheistic, Godless, Marxist-Leninists who seek to turn the U.S. into a larger version of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, or the former Soviet Union. That’s simply not true.

What is true, though, is that the “Christians” that love Trump do so because he will give them what they want most as long as he is the duly elected President.

And what do Trump’s “Christian” followers want?

• They want to make abortion illegal again in all 50 states
• They want more conservative judges appointed to federal courts, especially the Supreme Court (Why? See above)
• They want the United States to be officially a “Christian” nation and to get rid of the separation of Church and State, a concept that they hate despite the fact that the Founding Fathers did not believe it was wise to mix government with religion
• They want to decide who can get married and who cannot
• They want to limit immigration into the U.S. because they believe that immigrants (legal and otherwise) take jobs away from “real” Americans

Don’t believe me? This is a comment written by a Christian/Trump Supporter:

When asked why right-wing Christians are so opposed to the Democratic Party and liberals in general, one adherent replied:

Because the Left supports abortions on demand, forcing children not to pray in schools, open illegal immigration that force the poor out of work and support wealthy persons to hire illegals and not Americans, support forcing every state to allow marriages for same-sex couples and support the destruction of those who oppose this, and on and on…..

And ironically, although one of the “Christian right’s” tenets is that Muslim immigrants want to Islamize the U.S. and impose Sharia law on all of us, they want to impose their equally repressive religious ways on the rest of America.