I have the utmost respect and admiration for Jim Acosta, the news reporter and anchor who recently left his job at CNN. Acosta is among the relative few high-profile newscasters to regularly fact-check and challenge Donald Trump’s hail of loathsome lies. But I must dispute—or at least lend a smidgen of nuance to—this statement Acosta made in an interview with The Bulwark: “You’re going to see the American people rise up, and they’re going to say, ‘We don’t want this [referring to Trump and the MAGA movement].”
I think Acosta is partially right. Unsurprisingly, Democrats and other never-Trump folks have been opposing Trumpism all along and will continue to do so. And it’s likely that many of the low-information folks who are now regretting their Trump votes will join the chorus saying, as Acosta predicted, “We don’t want this.”
But one large segment of the populace will never abandon its steadfast support for the man who would be king. Of all the disparate segments that coalesced to make up MAGA, that one assemblage is the faction that is the worst at doing something that should be among its immutable purposes for existence: repentance. And that group is, of course, white evangelicals.
Repent. It’s one of a small handful of key themes permeating the Bible that white evangelicals claim as their vade mecum, their holy guidebook. Throughout the Gospels, first John the Baptist, and then the Messiah Himself repeatedly admonished people to repent, to admit the error of their ways, and to choose the correct course. But evangelicals’ new messiah has repeatedly declared his disdain for repentance. Schooled by the arrogant, reprehensible Roy Cohn, Trump views repentance as a sign of weakness. And now, his devoted white evangelical followers have likewise eschewed the way of repentance in favor of the way of dogged defiance.
So, I think Jim Acosta was partially right when he stated that Americans will say, “We don’t want this.” Millions likely will do so. But millions of others—most of America’s 50 million white evangelical MAGA disciples—will never follow suit. To do so would mean choosing to return to their former Messiah and abandoning their new messiah. (And compared to the hard-charging, take-no-prisoners, braggadocious new messiah, the original meek Messiah was kind of a pansy.) To do so would mean admitting they were wrong when they insisted that God had declared Donald Trump His new regent on Earth. To do so would be to admit that God didn’t speak to them—or that they don’t listen when He does. To do so would be watch the collapse of their pretentious cathedral of cards.
That will not happen. I guarantee it.
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