Earlier this year, we caught WorldNetDaily columnist Michael Brown setting up his inevitable support for Donald Trump, which he had previously justified because Trump’s delivering on right-wing agenda items is more important than supporting a profoundly amoral man who is a convicted felon and rapist. He more fully fleshed out that hypocrisy in his Aug. 19 column, in which he cited none other than WND managing editor David Kupelian — who had abandoned his sense of morality in 2016 to sell his soul to Trump — to make that case:
In past articles and on many “Line of Fire” broadcasts, I have expressed my strong reservations about Donald Trump and the current direction of the GOP (most recently here), so my potential vote for him/them would be with caveats and concerns. But under no circumstances could I possibly countenance a vote for Kamala Harris.
Writing in October 2020, conservative author David Kupelian took issue with Pastor John Piper, who encouraged Christians not to vote for either Trump or Biden.
Kupelian asked, “Does the good pastor not realize that when you vote for a president, you are not choosing only one leader and his policy agenda, but a multitude of leaders and policies in every area of life, and therefore a whole ‘future’ for the country, as Franklin Graham put it? Most prominently, you are choosing a vice president who may well become president (as has happened 14 times in U.S. history). You are also choosing Cabinet and department heads. And you are choosing federal judges, including Supreme Court justices with lifetime tenure who will decide issues of stupendous importance that affect every American. And you are choosing thousands of other people – about 4,000 federal government appointees in all – who will profoundly shape the nation in which your children and grandchildren will live for a long, long time – whether for good or for ill.”
Brown then dutifully repeated his right-wing anti-Harris agenda items:
Simply stated, if you vote for Harris, you are voting for the reinstating of Roe “as the law of the land again,” which would mean overturning all the pro-life laws that have now been passed in state after state. The blood of the unborn would certainly be on your hands. Your vote helped make this happen.
As for LGBTQ+ issues, the acronym LGBTQ+ is found 37 times in the platform, including promises like this: “… Democrats will pass the Equality Act to codify protections for LGBTQI+ Americans and their families.”
In short, this means that transgender identity would be placed on the same footing as race and ethnicity. Consequently, just as you could not refuse to hire a black or Hispanic person to teach little children in your nursery school because of their race or ethnicity, you could not refuse to hire a bearded man who identified as a woman to teach the little children.
This is what you’re voting for if you vote for Vice President Harris.
[…]So, if you vote for Harris, you’re voting for boys who identify as girls to share bathrooms and locker rooms with your daughters (or sisters), not to mention voting for men who identify as women to share bathrooms and changing rooms with your wives (or mothers or sisters or daughters). Is that what you want?
Perhaps worse still, we are told that Harris “supports a national ban” on so-called “conversion therapy,” which means outlawing all professional counseling for anyone with unwanted same-sex attractions or gender-identity confusion. Outlawed!
So, the 16-year-old girl who was raped repeatedly by her uncle and now feels a repulsion toward men would not be allowed to receive professional counsel to help her deal with her trauma and recover her opposite-sex attractions, even with her parents’ consent based on her expressly stated desires. Illegal!
Brown concluded: “That’s why, regardless of my views on Trump and the GOP, I could not possibly vote for Kamala Harris. To do so, for me, would be to participate in evil.” He didn’t explain why it’s “evil” to not hate LGBTQ people the way he does. Also, one would think that coercive and abusive “conversion therapy” would be thought of as evil — but not to Brown.
Brown spent his Aug. 26 column in his regular ritual fretting over Trump:
In my 2020 book, “Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will We Pass the Trump Test?” I devoted an entire chapter to the question, “Does Character Still Count and Does Morality Still Matter?” Four years later, that question is still relevant, especially for Christian conservatives. They (or, we) cannot possibly vote for Kamala Harris for a host of reasons. But can we, in good conscience, vote for Donald Trump?
Back in the ’90s, in response to the candidacy of Bill Clinton, the Southern Baptist Convention drafted a resolution in which it was stated clearly that “that moral character matters to God and should matter to all citizens, especially God’s people, when choosing public leaders.”
In keeping with this, the resolution urged “all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”
How do we reconcile this with our support for Trump (and I write this as a two-time voter for Mr. Trump)? Does he, “although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character”? Hardly.
How, then, can we justify our vote for him?
[…]But can we really look to Trump to fight for the things that are important for us? On Friday, Aug. 23, he posted on Truth Social that if he is reelected, his “administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
What? Here is an allegedly pro-life candidate using the misleading rhetoric of the pro-abortion camp (speaking of “reproductive rights” rather than the so-called right to abortion) and promising this “right” to women.
Talk about a deep betrayal of our values, also reflected in the GOP’s gutted 2024 platform, where the pro-life plank is virtually gone and all opposition to same-sex “marriage” has completely disappeared.
The point of all of this, of course, is for Brown to manufacture a pretense justify that vote, which he would do regardless. This time, Brown wants his fellow evangelicals to pretend they’re voting against Harris, not voting for Trump:
How, then, can Christian conservatives justify their vote for Trump?
Many would still argue that, despite his caving in on some of the issues most important to us and despite his many glaring character weaknesses, he will still do a better job on the economy, on securing our borders, on standing with Israel, on standing up to our international enemies. And so, overall, balancing out the pros and the cons, Trump is the better choice.
This could well be true.
But let’s stop pretending that Trump is someone that he isn’t. The cards are on the table for all to see.
In the end, though, it may all come down to this: a vote for Trump is, more than anything, a vote against Harris.
So, we can vote for Trump without being enamored by him, without being his defenders or apologists, and without being unrealistic in our expectations.
And if we do choose to vote for him, a choice that the vast majority of Christian conservatives will make, we must remember to keep our focus on Jesus and the Gospel and to be sure that, to the extent Trump’s character deficiencies are a negative example, we distance ourselves from those deficiencies while setting the bar high in our lives and conduct. We can vote for him without becoming like him.
But a vote for Trump is effectively an endorsement of those “character deficiencies,” though Brown wants you to pretend otherwise. Brown makes sure not to mention the fact that Trump is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist — presumably so he won’t have to figure out a way to defend against that as well. Indeed, the word “evil” appears nowhere in this column despite Trump’s behavior arguably falling under that category.
Brown was always going to vote for Trump all along — all of this fretting is just performative (he did the same thing in 2020) because he has given Trump permission to be as evil as he wants because he was always going to demonize Harris to portray a false sense of principle behind that vote. He wants that right-wing goodies he thinks Trump will provide, and that end justifies his politically motivated (if not morally approved) blind eye.