Morning Glory: What did Iowa's evangelicals do? (And why did they do it?)

So, Trump crushed it in Iowa.

My colleagues at the Washington Post wondered again this weekend what "evangelicals" see in Trump. The provocative headline "Ordained by God" telegraphs the reporters’ answer but that is simply incorrect. 

First, after a quarter-century of grading law school exams, I can assure you as any fair grader can, there is always a Bell Curve in every distribution. There will certainly be some small percentage of "evangelicals" who believe Trump is "ordained" by God but there are going to be quite a few on the other end who support him even though they don’t believe they share a common faith. That’s just the way it is. The identity politics that has consumed so much of the left and of the elite media just doesn’t control large swaths of America. Many tens of millions of voters don’t vote for the person who is most like him or her but who is most likely to be good for him or her. They vote their perceived self-interest. The former president has been making this sale for a long time, and it’s working.

In the same piece though, there is this astonishing paragraph:

Trump has accused the Biden administration of discriminating against people of faith, suggesting at a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, that "Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted and government has been weaponized against religion like never before." Fact-checkers, however, have debunked that claim. Experts on religious liberty, such as John Inazu from Washington University in St. Louis, cite multiple major religion-related Supreme Court cases and say religious freedom is perhaps more protected than ever.

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First, and most obviously, the reasons cases vindicating religious liberties and especially Free Exercise rights make it to the Supreme Court where they are won and religious freedom protected is because the litigants’ religious rights have in fact been trampled on long before the case reached the justices.

It’s axiomatic that if religious people are winning cases before the Supreme Court it is because they have indeed been wronged by state actors. So the "fact checkers" are simply wrong, again, and ten minutes with any litigator from Alliance Defending Freedom, which handles hundreds of not thousands of anti-religious actions every year on behalf of believers can set any reporter straight on the record.

Second, the left is dominated by secular absolutists on issues such as abortion, gender. Parents who are also "evangelical" care deeply about their children’s education and want to be fully informed of their children’s record at school and any issues they may have. Evangelicals are especially hostile to teaching environments that will undermine the faith principles they intend to impart to their kids. They don’t want the president to be a preacher, and they don’t want teachers to be preachers either. Trump is no fan of the education establishment, so he’s going to pick up evangelicals on these issues as well.

But the most important thing Trump had going for him in Iowa with evangelicals, and probably in all future primary contests, is that the deeply felt belief among many people of faith that elites are after Trump.

"What is it about liberals who hate Trump that they rush headline into suicide?" Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz wondered on the magazine’s Monday morning’s podcast, after ticking off the latest self-destruct button hit by another would-be Trump Javert, in this case Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis who appears to have directed a whole bunch of Trump prosecution legal business and tax dollars to her lover.

Whether Alvin Bragg, Leticia Smith, New York State Judge State Judge Arthur Engoron, the "whistleblowers" at the National Archives and Record Administration or Special Counsel Jack Smith, none of the current posse of Trump hunters has struck the center-right in this country as fair and careful. Smith especially has reached for theories of first impression every bit as unusual as the Colorado Supreme Court’s and Maine’s Secretary of State’s in deciding that the people would in fact not get to decide whether to vote for Trump.

A LOOK BACK AT IOWA CAUCUS NIGHTS FROM THE PAST

It all adds up to a very long column of first-of-it’s-kind charges against Trump. Folks notice that the effort to "get Trump" got underway a long time ago —2015– and will seemingly never end. You don’t have to be an "evangelical" to have a sense of justice and fair play, but if you have got one, you look at this blizzard of legal gambits and conclude: This may not be right, and it certainly is unusual.

Trump is not guaranteed the GOP nomination much less the election, though I do think he’d lock it down with the right running mate, some key Cabinet announcements, and more of the relaxed Trump we saw on Fox Townhall last week than white hot rally Trump. But he’s not going to change, much. The issues have though.

Donald Trump arrives on stage during a campaign event at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, US, on Sunday, Jan. 14, 2024. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

As I wrote over the weekend, this is going to be a 10/7 election, not a 1/6 election. If the world continues to tumble into intense conflict, of whom will America’s enemies be more wary: Trump or Biden? Some may answer "Ron DeSantis" or "Nikki Haley" and almost certainly those two —just like Trump— will give America’s foes much more pause than the Appeasement Caucus around the infirm president. But Trump vs. Biden in a dangerous world with barbarians committing massacres? That’s not going to be close.

And please, Manhattan-Beltway media elites and professional analysts, put away the impulse to assume everyone or even most people vote their identity. Consider that most vote their future and the futures of their children and grandchildren.

Hugh Hewitt is one of the country’s leading journalists of the center-right. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990, and it is today syndicated to hundreds of stations and outlets across the country every Monday through Friday morning. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and this column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his forty years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio show today.

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