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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 11:31:15 GMT
Trump loves whoever he needs to love at the moment to get what he wants. Any female or any member of a minority group will be loved when it helps Trump. The reality is that he doesn't love anyone except those who plead fealty. His love of Israel is because they let him build a giant hotel there and for no other reason.Site That Called Impeachment a 'Jew Coup' Got Passes for Trump TripMichael M. Grynbaum www.yahoo.com/news/called-impeachment-jew-coup-got-192917920.html
The New York TimesJanuary 27, 2020, 12:29 PM MST
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after delivering opening remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21, 2020. (Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times)
To coordinate coverage of President Donald Trump’s trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the White House provided press credentials to the usual mix of American news organizations, including Fox News, Reuters and The New York Times.
One media outlet stood out: TruNews, a website aimed at conservative Christians whose founder, a pastor named Rick Wiles, recently described Trump’s impeachment as “a Jew coup” planned by “a Jewish cabal.”
Five employees of TruNews, which is based in Florida, received formal credentials from the White House to cover the president’s trip, Wiles said in an interview last week from his hotel room in Switzerland — a room in a ski lodge reserved by the Trump administration for traveling members of the American press. (Like other media organizations, TruNews paid for its flights and lodging.)
White House officials, in this and previous administrations, tend to be flexible in choosing which news organizations receive press credentials: Reporting is a form of free speech and there are no legal restrictions on who can declare themselves a journalist.
But Wiles’ ability to secure credentials after his anti-Semitic remarks — which prompted a formal rebuke from two members of Congress — has left civil rights groups deeply troubled.
“It’s a validation of their work,” said Kyle Mantyla, a senior fellow at the progressive group People for the American Way, which has tracked Wiles’ work. TruNews, he said, “sees it as the White House being on their side.”
TruNews was not granted special access to the president in Davos, nor did its members travel on Air Force One. But one of Wiles’ colleagues, Edward Szall, asked a question of the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump during a news conference.
“We want to thank President Trump and the White House for extending the invitation to be here,” Wiles said in a video from Davos. “We are honored to be here, representing the kingdom of heaven and our king Jesus Christ.”
It was not the first time TruNews has gotten close to Trump and his family.
The president took a question from Szall at a 2018 news conference in Midtown Manhattan. In March 2019, a TruNews correspondent filmed an interview with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, after a rally in Michigan. (A spokeswoman for Donald Trump Jr. told The Washington Post that the interview was impromptu and that Trump was unfamiliar with the site.)
TruNews, which Wiles founded as an online radio program in 1999 called America’s Hope, has a history of spreading conspiracy theories and proclaiming an imminent apocalypse. It drew more scrutiny in November after Wiles, in an online video, accused Jews of orchestrating Trump’s impeachment.
“That’s the way Jews work,” Wiles said. “They are deceivers. They plot, they lie, they do whatever they have to do to accomplish their political agenda. This ‘Impeach Trump’ movement is a Jew coup, and the American people better wake up to it really fast.”
Wiles also warned his listeners that “when Jews take over a country, they kill millions of Christians.”
Afterward, Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida and Elaine Luria of Virginia wrote to the White House asking why TruNews had been allowed to attend presidential events. They did not receive a response.
The White House declined to comment for this article. In the past, the administration has faced lawsuits after revoking press credentials from reporters from CNN and Playboy.
On the phone from Switzerland, Wiles explained how his Davos trip had come about.
“We’re on a list of media organizations at the White House and from time to time they send out notices that there are events taking place,” Wiles said, adding that his team had also covered Trump’s visits to NATO summits and Group of 20 gatherings. He said that he received an email from the White House about the Davos trip and that his request to attend was approved.
The team from TruNews — three correspondents and a two-person production crew — stayed at a hotel where the White House had reserved a block of rooms for the use of American journalists. (As with a wedding block, those who used the rooms paid the hotel directly.) Reporters spotted Wiles at the breakfast buffet at the hotel, the Privà Alpine Lodge.
Asked in the interview if he understood why his “Jew coup” comments prompted charges of anti-Semitism, Wiles replied: “I coined a phrase. It came out of my mouth: ‘It looks like a Jew coup.’ All I pointed out was many of the people involved were Jewish.”
Pressed if such rhetoric could be reasonably interpreted as anti-Semitic, Wiles said: “It’s hard to say. I don’t know. I can tell you from my heart there is no ill will toward the Jewish people, with all sincerity.”
His critics disagree. Deutch, the representative from Florida, learned of TruNews’ presence in Davos while on a congressional trip to Jerusalem to commemorate the Holocaust.
“I can’t believe the day before I attend an event at Yad Vashem marking 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, anti-Semites were given WH credentials to broadcast from European soil,” Deutch wrote on Twitter. (Yad Vashem is the Israeli Holocaust memorial.)
The president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Jonathan Karl of ABC News, has asked the Trump administration why TruNews was credentialed for the trip.
“It’s puzzling that a known hate group would get press credentials from the same White House that revoked the credentials of a correspondent for a major television network,” Karl said Sunday, referring to Jim Acosta of CNN, whose credentials were revoked — and then restored after a lawsuit — in 2018.
“We have asked why this happened and if the White House intends to issue credentials to this group in the future,” Karl said. “We have not received an on-the-record response.”
Wiles, in the interview, said that he had been unfairly attacked by “the self-appointed gods and goddesses of the news media, who do not think we should be permitted to attend any event.” He went on to blame George Soros, the Jewish financier often cited in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, for coordinating a campaign against him.
“I don’t think anybody can find fault with our news coverage at these events,” Wiles said. “They may not agree with our analysis and conclusions. But our behavior at these events — we’re professional, we’re respectful.”
He added: “And we’re able to get interviews with prominent people.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2020 The New York Times Company
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 13, 2020 11:32:39 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 9, 2020 20:33:07 GMT
Trump strategy on COVID-19 continues to rely on miracleswww.yahoo.com/news/trump-pence-coronavirus-miracle-vaccine-final-term-151141767.html
Christopher WilsonSenior Writer,Yahoo News•August 21, 2020
In a potential preview of what their messaging will be during next week’s convention, the Republican presidential ticket is again insisting that the coronavirus will go away by a “miracle.”
During a Thursday night interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity timed to coincide with the final night of the Democratic National Convention, President Trump said he hoped the pandemic was “nearing the final term.”
That was followed by a round of Friday morning interviews by Vice President Mike Pence. On CNN, Pence said that “we think there’s a miracle around the corner” in the form of a coronavirus vaccine that could be available by the end of the year, calling it a “tribute to President Trump’s leadership.” That follows comments from Trump earlier this month predicting a vaccine could be ready by Election Day, and earlier this year when he alluded to the virus disappearing “like a miracle.”
www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-covid-vaccine-election-day-optimism/
This week Mike Lindell, a major Trump supporter who is widely known for appearing in commercials for his bedding company, has been promoting an untested plant extract called oleandrin as a “miracle” therapy for COVID-19, although botanists warn it can be extremely toxic. “This thing works — it’s the miracle of all time,” Lindell said in a contentious interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Lindell is on the board of the company that produces the substance.
www.nytimes.com/2020/08/20/health/covid-oleandrin-trump-mypillow.html
Trump has said the administration “will look at it.”
In March, televangelist Kenneth Copeland, a faith adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, invoked a different kind of miracle in a widely seen video in which he executed God’s judgment against the coronavirus and pronounced it “finished.”
President Trump listens as Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow Inc., speaks during the daily coronavirus briefing at the White House on March 30. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said in July that while millions of doses of a vaccine could be available by early 2021, it wouldn’t be widely available until several months into the new year. According to tracking by Johns Hopkins University, more than 174,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 out of more than 5.5 million confirmed infections, both numbers the most by far of any nation.
www.cnbc.com/2020/07/24/dr-fauci-says-coronavirus-vaccine-likely-wont-be-widely-available-until-months-into-2021.html
coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
With the online Republican National Convention set to start on Monday, Trump and his team will again confront the question of why they were unable to safely hold the planned in-person convention in Charlotte, N.C., which was moved to Jacksonville, Fla., before it was essentially canceled altogether. Democrats spent much of their convention hammering the White House for its failed COVID-19 response.
news.yahoo.com/biden-makes-his-closing-argument-at-democratic-convention-it-didnt-have-to-be-this-bad-033746760.html
“The tragedy that we face today is that it didn’t have to be this bad,” said Democratic nominee Joe Biden in his speech Thursday night. “The president keeps waiting around, looking for a miracle. Well, I have news for him: Mr. President, no miracle is coming.”
The comments from Trump and Pence continued a White House strategy of promising that the coronavirus will go away without aggressive action to stop it, after a slow initial response and encouraging states to reopen businesses, sometimes against the advice of public health experts.
news.yahoo.com/the-coronavirus-enemy-remained-invisible-because-the-trump-administration-didnt-make-the-effort-to-see-it-090022804.html
news.yahoo.com/despite-worsening-pandemic-trump-says-states-should-be-opening-up-210531206.html
Vice President Mike Pence greets workers at Tankcraft Corp. in Darien, Wis., on Wednesday. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“I think we’re gonna be very good with the coronavirus,” Trump said in a July 1 interview with Fox Business. “I think that at some point that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope.”
“You still believe so?” Trump was asked by the interviewer, as the death count for the virus in the country sat at over 128,000.
“I do, I do,” replied the president. “Yeah, sure, at some point — and I think we’re going to have a vaccine very soon too.”
“Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in,” said Trump at a Feb. 10 meeting with some of the nation’s governors. “Typically, that will go away in April. ... We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.”
www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-white-house-business-session-nations-governors/
“Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. I hope that’s true,” he repeated at a campaign rally in New Hampshire that night.
factba.se/transcript/donald-trump-speech-kag-rally-manchester-new-hampshire-february-10-2020/
“We have done an incredible job,” Trump said at the White House on Feb. 27. “We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows. The fact is, the greatest experts — I’ve spoken to them all. Nobody really knows.”
www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-claims-covid-19-could-disappear-2020-2
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 13, 2020 6:36:34 GMT
What he really thinks: Trump mocks Christians, calls them "fools" and "schmucks"www.yahoo.com/news/really-thinks-trump-mocks-christians-100354053.html
David Cay Johnston
SalonSeptember 11, 2020, 3:03 AM
Donald Trump
Donald Trump with thumbs up in front of elderly white congregation in church Drew Angerer/Getty Images/Salon
Michael Cohen's book about his years as Donald Trump's fixer is a clarion call to Christians to wake up; recognize the man many of them revere as a heavenly agent is a religious fraud; and act.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/25/why-evangelicals-like-rick-perry-believe-that-trump-is-gods-chosen-one/
Trump loathes Christians and mocks their faith, but pretends to believe if it suits his purposes.
In Disloyal, published today, Cohen shows how Trump is a master deceiver. He quotes Trump calling Christianity and its religious practices "bullshit," then soon after masterfully posing as a fervent believer. In truth, Cohen writes, Trump's religion is unbridled lust for money and power at any cost to others.
www.amazon.com/Disloyal-Memoir-Personal-Attorney-President-ebook/dp/B08FXTSKLJ
Cohen's insider stories add significant depth to my own documentation of Trump's repeated and public denouncements of Christians as "fools," "idiots" and "schmucks."
In extensive writing and speeches, Trump has declared his life philosophy is "revenge." That stance is aggressively anti-Christian. So are Trump's often publicly expressed desires to violently attack others, mostly women, and his many remarks that he derives pleasure from ruining the lives of people over such minor matters as declining to do him a favor.
Cohen describes himself as an "active participant" with Trump in activities ranging from "golden showers in a sex club in Vegas" to corrupt deals with Russian officials.
The author offers new anecdotes about Trump's utter disregard for other people and his contempt for religious belief. Cohen's words should shock the believers who were crucial to his becoming president, provided they ever read them.
By denouncing the book Trump has ensured that many of those he has tricked into believing he is a deeply religious man will never fulfill their Christian duty to be on the lookout for deceivers.
None of the evangelicals I have interviewed in the past five years knew Trump has denounced in writing their beliefs and written of the communion host as "my little cracker."
Trump detests Christianity
Despite the irrefutable evidence that Trump detests Christianity and ridicules such core beliefs as the Golden Rule and turning the other cheek, America is filled with pastors who praise him to their flocks as a man of God. Trump himself has looked heavenward outside the White House to imply he was chosen by God.
Pastors who support Trump were scolded two years ago by Christianity Today, a magazine founded by Billy Graham, for not denouncing Trump as "profoundly immoral." Many evangelical pastors then attacked the magazine rather than following the Biblical exhortation to examine their own souls.
Cohen writes that as a young man who grew up encountering Mafioso and other crooks at a country club he fell into the "trance-like spell" of Trump, whom he describes as an utterly immoral, patriarchal mob boss and con man.
Trump is "consumed by the worldly lust for wealth and rewards," Cohen writes, which puts him at odds with the teaching of Jesus Christ about what constitutes a good life.
"Places of religious worship held absolutely no interest to him, and he possessed precisely zero personal piety in his life," Cohen writes.
Prosperity gospel embraced
Cohen explains that the only version of Christianity that could possibly interest Trump is the "prosperity gospel." That is a perverse belief that financial wealth is a sign of heavenly approval rooted in 19th Century occult beliefs that is anathema to Christian scripture.
www.vox.com/identities/2017/9/1/15951874/prosperity-gospel-explained-why-joel-osteen-believes-prayer-can-make-you-rich-trump
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/opinions/outlook/worst-ideas/prosperity-gospel.html
Many actual Christians regard the prosperity gospel as evil. Christianity Today, calls it "an aberrant theology" promoted by disgraced televangelists including Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Baker.
www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/what-you-should-know-about-the-prosperity-gospel/
Early in Trump's aborted 2012 presidential campaign, Cohen writes, he was ordered to reach out to faith communities. Soon Paula White, now the White House adviser on faith, proposed a meeting at Trump Tower with evangelical leaders. Cohen writes that Trump liked White because she was blonde and beautiful.
Cohen said that among those attending were Jerry Falwell Jr., who recently resigned in disgrace over sex and greed allegations as head of Liberty University, and Creflo Dollar, who solicited donations for a $65 million corporate jet and who was criminally charged that year with choking his daughter. Dollar said those charges were the work of the devil.
www.christianpost.com/news/creflo-dollars-daughters-911-call-released-not-the-first-time-its-happened.html
Once the evangelical leaders took their seats, Cohen writes, Trump quickly and slickly portrayed himself as a man of deep faith. Cohen writes that this was nonsense.
Laying on hands
After soaking in Trump's deceptions, the leaders proposed laying hands on Trump. One purpose of laying on hands is to call on the Holy Spirit for divine approval.
Cohen was astounded when Trump, a germaphobe, eagerly accepted.
"If you knew Trump as I did, the vulgarian salivating over beauty contestants or mocking Roger Stone's" sexual proclivities "you would have a hard time keeping a straight face at the sight of him affecting the serious and pious mien of a man of faith. I knew I could hardly believe the performance or the fact that these folks were buying it.
"Watching Trump I could see that he knew exactly how to appeal to the evangelicals' desires and vanities – who they wanted him to be, not who he really was. Everything he was telling them about himself was absolutely untrue."
To deceive the evangelicals, Cohen writes, Trump would "say whatever they wanted to hear."
A perverse epiphany
Trump's ease at deception became for Cohen an epiphany, though a perverse one.
In that moment, Cohen writes, he realized the boss would someday become president because Trump "could lie directly to the faces of some of the most powerful religious leaders in the country and they believed him."
Later that day, Cohen writes, he met up with Trump in his office.
"Can you believe that bullshit," Trump said of the laying on of hands. "Can you believe that people believe that bullshit."
Cohen also writes about Trump's desire, expressed behind closed doors, to destroy those who offend him. Trump has said the same, though less vividly, in public.
"I love getting even," Trump declared in his book Think Big, espousing his anti-Christian philosophy: "Go for the jugular. Attack them in spades!"
He reiterated that philosophy this year at the National Prayer Breakfast. Holding up two newspapers with banner headlines reporting his Senate acquittal on impeachment charges, Trump said, "I don't like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong. Nor do I like people who say, 'I pray for you,' when they know that that's not so."
www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/trump-holds-newspaper-front-page-headline-acquitted-national-prayer-breakfast-n1131421
Trump spoke after Arthur Brooks, a prominent conservative, told the breakfast meeting that "contempt is ripping our country apart."
Brooks went on: "We're like a couple on the rocks in this country…Ask God to take political contempt from your heart. And sometimes, when it's too hard, ask God to help you fake it."
Everyone in the room rose to applaud Brooks except Trump, though he finally stood up as the applause died down.
Taking the microphone, Trump said, "Arthur, I don't know if I agree with you… I don't know if Arthur is going to like what I'm going to say."
Trump then said he didn't believe in forgiveness. That is just as Cohen wrote: "Trump is not a forgiving person." Trump's words at the prayer breakfast made clear that he rejects the teaching of Jesus at Luke 6:27: "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you."
The question pastors should raise in their Sunday sermons, the question Cohen's book lays before them, is how can any Christian support a man who mocks Christianity, embraces revenge as his only life philosophy and rejects that most basic Biblical teaching—forgiveness.
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 9, 2020 8:28:24 GMT
Donald Trump Starring in The Ten Commandments
With his followers claiming he is a "christian president", let us see how well he does in following the ten Commandments?
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 9, 2020 8:31:56 GMT
Absolute Proof that God Exists
Don't believe there is a God? This video will prove it to you in less than a minute.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 21, 2021 11:18:14 GMT
The Daily Beast  The Evangelicals’ Trump Obsession Has Tarnished Christianitywww.yahoo.com/news/evangelicals-trump-obsession-tarnished-christianity-090640339.html
Matt Lewis
Sun, March 21, 2021, 2:06 AM
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty
The recent death of Christian evangelist Luis Palau, the “Billy Graham of Latin America,” has me thinking about how the Trump era has affected the ability of Christians to share the good news about Jesus’ salvation with a diverse and skeptical world. According to his New York Times obituary, Palau “was especially aware of the common assumption that evangelicals are rabid right-wingers,” so he sought to compensate by holding “festivals” in progressive cities. “In New England, when you say ‘Christian,’ they think ‘those maniacs on the right,’” Palau told the Times in 2001. “I want to show that we are not maniacs but that we are well educated. This is a rational faith, but a faith that fires you up.” If you believe, as Palau did (and as I do), that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life,” then it makes sense to share the good news with everyone you can—yes, including college-educated urbanites and progressives. That’s what Palau did.
www.thedailybeast.com/how-billy-graham-conquered-america
www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/us/luis-palau-dead.html
www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/nyregion/evangelist-is-heading-to-the-state-but-will-people-care.html?searchResultPosition=3
But what happens when so many of Christ’s messengers have sacrificed their credibility and moral high ground by allying with a controversial political figure such as, say, Donald Trump? What happens when Jesus’ brand ambassadors to a lot of Americans are Donald Trump and Jerry Falwell Jr., not Billy Graham and Pope Francis, much less Jesus himself? In today’s climate, you might be forgiven for thinking that Christians are, as Palau worried we would be perceived, “maniacs.”
www.thedailybeast.com/keyword/donald-j-trump
Evangelical Christians thought lining up behind a Trump was worth it; they couldn’t be more wrong. The cost-benefit analysis that led them to support him as the “lesser of two evils” in 2016 didn’t factor in the long-term damage he, in fact, is still doing.
www.thedailybeast.com/im-a-christian-and-a-conservative-trump-is-making-it-terribly-hard-to-be-both
I recently wrote about how the Trump era has undermined the ability of conservatives to effectively sound the alarm on government spending and debt and deficits, a development that could have grave consequences for our temporal political world. But the consequences of undermining the Christian witness are even more serious. For believers who take John 14:6 seriously and literally, anyone who undermines the church’s ability to credibly evangelize to a fallen world is culpable for sending other human beings—people who might have otherwise have been receptive to a salvation message—to an eternal damnation.
www.thedailybeast.com/my-party-has-been-overtaken-by-cancel-culture-trolls
www.bibleref.com/John/14/John-14-6.html
You think gaining a few Supreme Court seats guarantees an enduring legacy? Consider the consequences of... eternity. This puts the political trade-offs so many Evangelicals made in fuller perspective. It also highlights the potential consequences of one side of the political aisle trying to monopolize an entire religious faith.
According to political scientists David E. Campbell and Geoffrey C. Layman of the University of Notre Dame and John C. Green of the University of Akron, authors of Secular Surge: A New Fault Line in American Politics, this corruption is happening already. They designed an experiment to test whether the rise of Americans who identify as “nonreligious” resulted from backlash against the Christian Right. The experiment involved first asking participants about their views on faith and then exposing them to news stories that mix religion and politics; the experiment concluded by again asking participants about their religious identity.
www.cambridge.org/core/books/secular-surge/97F16AA6E64D63718D58AF327100BFE2
During an interview with Religion News Service, Campbell said that just exposing people to one such story was “enough to push a sizable number of people away from holding a religious affiliation. That’s one story at one point in time, and we can get that effect,” he said. “Imagine what happens when people are exposed to hundreds of stories over many, many years. It would only reinforce that idea that religion and the Republican Party go together, and that if you’re not sympathetic to the Republican Party, you don’t want anything to do with religion.”
religionnews.com/2021/03/12/allergic-to-religion-conservative-politics-can-push-people-out-of-the-pews-new-study-shows/
The connection between Christianity and the Republican Party has existed for four decades. But it’s fair to say that associating religious faith with Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism or George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” does not result in the same level of negative repercussions as embracing the MAGA ethos.
As Daniel K. Williams writes in The Politics of the Cross, “[J]ust as some evangelical supporters of Republican conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s conflated white middle-class suburban fears about rising crime rates and social welfare costs with Christian principles, so some evangelical supporters of the contemporary Republican Party have conflated white working-class rural fears about immigration, gun control, and cultural change with Christianity.
www.amazon.com/Politics-Cross-Christian-Alternative-Partisanship/dp/0802878512
“The result may be even more catastrophic for the gospel than the Christian conservatism of the late twentieth century was, because the Christian nationalism of the contemporary Republican Party is even further removed from historic evangelicalism—and certainly further removed from historic Christian principles, at least in its attitude toward immigrants and marginalized racial minorities.”
This problem isn’t limited solely to religion. In my estimation, Trumpism has tarnished numerous causes, including (but not limited to) our credibility when it comes to 1) compassionately championing the unborn and the sanctity of life, 2) questioning the wisdom of spending $1.9 trillion, and even 3) celebrating the values, traditions, and works of art of our Western civilization. In a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast, Charlie Sykes reflected on this development, lamenting that Western civilization has been co-opted by “white nationalists and racists.”
podcast.thebulwark.com/elizabeth-neumann-on-confront-the-salad-bar-of-hatred
To put it in business terms that a consumerist society can understand, we have a brand problem. If you’ve never heard it, Grover Norquist, the conservative anti-tax crusader, employs a rather colorful hypothetical to explain the importance of brand management (as it pertains to tax cuts): “Coca-Cola spends a lot of time quality control branding Coca-Cola,” he says. “Everybody knows what’s in Coca-Cola. And so you can buy a bottle of Coke, take it home, you don’t have to ask what’s in it, or read the ingredients, or ask your friends about [it],” he continues.
www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/03/14/norquist_republicans_who_raise_taxes_are_rat_heads_in_a_coke_bottle.html
But “if you get two-thirds the way through your bottle of Coke and you look in and there is a rat head in what’s left in your Coke bottle, you do not say to yourself, ‘You know, I'm wondering whether I’m going to finish all of the rest of this particular bottle of Coke this evening.’...It damages the brand.”
“Republican elected officials who vote for tax increases,” Norquist concludes, “are rat heads in the Coke bottle. They damage the brand for everybody else.”
This colorful metaphor could be extended into other realms. Trumpism, I would argue, has damaged the Christian brand, as well as the conservative brand.
The good news is that Trump does not exist in a vacuum. Others are seeking to reach disparate communities and separate the gospel message from toxic politics. In this regard, Luis Palau and his successors (people like Christian leaders including New York City pastor Tim Keller and president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission Russell Moore) provide a ray of hope and a hopeful alternative.
Still, finding Donald Trump as the de facto leader of your movement—in the eyes of many Americans, at least—is sort of like finding a rat head in your Coke bottle. But the consequences are even more grim. In some cases, Trumpism lasts forever. |
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Post by the Scribe on Apr 7, 2021 19:51:04 GMT
HuffPostEx-Trump Lawyer’s Claim About Not Worshipping Him Goes Up In Holy Smokewww.yahoo.com/huffpost/ex-trump-lawyer-idol-worship-reaction-133322562.htmlLee Moran·Reporter, HuffPost
Tue, April 6, 2021, 6:33 AM
Jenna Ellis, a former senior legal adviser to Donald Trump, got taken to Sunday school after claiming on Twitter that “literally no one worships” the ex-president.
www.huffpost.com/news/topic/donald-trump
Ellis made the bold declaration after MSNBC’s Joy Reid tweeted that “idolatrous” worshippers of Trump would have their thoughts on biblical Christianity “taken with a huge pound of salt by people who are reasonably familiar with the Gospel.”
Ellis, who assisted the former president in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election result because he lost, responded to Reid:
Ellis’ post soon got ratioed with a series of stark reminders.
Critics recalled the golden statue of Trump at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the time Trump signed Bibles during a church visit, and how he, his allies and evangelicals claimed he’d been sent by God.
www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-gold-statue-cpac_n_6038eac7c5b60f03d9b3dec5
www.huffpost.com/news/topic/cpac
www.huffpost.com/entry/alabama-trump-bibles-providence-baptist-church_n_5c82ff45e4b0d93616281e76
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/25/why-evangelicals-like-rick-perry-believe-that-trump-is-gods-chosen-one/
Others mockingly shared right-wing memes of Trump as a deity and suggested his supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were also in holy thrall to the then-president.www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-boycott-coca-cola-photo_n_606c0749c5b6832c793af654/photo/1 Related...Joe Biden Uses Long-Running Joke About Donald Trump To Hype Infrastructure Plan
www.huffpost.com/entry/joe-biden-donald-trump-american-jobs-ding_n_60681a01c5b68872efe6cac7
Stephen Colbert Spots The Major Flaw With Donald Trump’s Boycott Call
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