| How Much Could Trump Do without Losing Support?
Steven WoodworthMay 20, 2018
“
Icould stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Donald Trump, January 23, 2016
During the 2016 campaign Donald Trump boasted of the unshakable loyalty of his followers with that now-famous claim.
The remark has been taken, and was probably intended, as hyperbole, but Trump’s followers have certainly stuck with him through a lot. Aside from what was public knowledge before the campaign, there has been plenty more to overlook since then — Trump’s publicly acted out mockery of a reporter’s physical handicap, his ridicule of another candidate’s face, his obscene allusion to personal anatomy in a nationally televised debate, his claim in vile terms to be able to sexually molest women at will. We’ve all heard this list, and yet the tenacity of Trump’s followers in sticking to him despite it all can still elicit a slow shake of the head at least from some of us.
Maybe he actually could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and not lose a single follower.
Or maybe . . .
Recently a law professor suggested in a published article that last month’s scandal regarding Elliott Broidy, deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, may not have been what it seemed. Four days after federal agents raided the home and office of Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen, Broidy told reporters he had carried on an affair with Playboy model Shera Bechard, who became pregnant and then killed the child by means of abortion. Bechard engaged the services of Keith Davidson, the same lawyer who represented Trump mistresses Stephanie Clifford and Karen McDougal. Davidson told Broidy that Cohen knew how to fix this sort of thing, so Broidy hired Cohen to represent him, and in late 2017 Davidson and Cohen arranged for Broidy to pay Bechard $1.6 million for her services and subsequent silence. That’s more than five times as much as the President of the United States paid to secure the silence of Clifford and McDougal combined.
The professor, Paul Campos of the University of Colorado Law School, believes that’s not what really happened. Instead, he believes it was Trump who had an affair with Bechard sometime in the not-very-distant past and fathered the child whom Bechard aborted. Campos believes Broidy, to curry favor with Trump, paid off Bechard and agreed to take the blame for the affair if news of it should leak to the public. The raid on Cohen’s office meant the sensitive information could leak at any time, and four days later, Broidy, having less than six months before paid $1.6 million, supposedly to conceal his affair with Bechard, now owned up to it without hesitation, thus protecting Trump.
As Campos makes clear, his theory is unproven, but he makes a good and very interesting case for it, and it seems at least as likely as not to be true.
What if it is? Maybe it’s not, but what if is? Suppose it’s true that Trump had yet another affair with a porn model, this one within the last couple of years. Suppose she got pregnant and Trump paid her $1.6 million to have an abortion and keep quiet. What would Trump’s followers do then?
More to the point, what would be the reaction of Trump’s most unshakeable core constituency, the approximately 75% of professing evangelical Christians who support him despite all they know about him? Would they give him a “Mulligan” on an affair that wasn’t twelve years ago but possibly as little as one or two years ago? Would they be less willing to claim for him (what he has never claimed for himself) status as a “baby Christian”? Even if he were still arranging to have hush money paid as recently as six months ago? Most of all, would they be willing to look the other way from an abortion?
I’d like to think such news would wake them up. But I’m afraid it wouldn’t. I can practically hear the excuses now: “He didn’t kill the baby. She did. He’s heartbroken about it.” We’d hear that Trump actually became a Christian at an even later date than previously claimed — just after arranging for the last of the hush money. Or we’d hear, “Baby Christians still commit sins. They still commit adultery with porn models, father children with them, have the kids aborted, and pay hush money. After all, we’re all sinners.” Also, “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone,” and of course that perennial favorite for all who know little of God’s law but are sure they don’t want to obey it: “Judge not that ye be not judged!” And finally, “We didn’t elect him to be our pastor!” To anyone who might think any of the above excuses have any validity at all, I recommend a thorough study of the Bible.
Am I being unfair to my fellow evangelicals. I hope so. I hope the excuses I imagined above are just the residual ringing in my ears from the prolonged din of Trump-defending evangelicals I’ve been hearing over the past year and half. I hope if it does come out that Professor Campos’s theory is true, and Trump is guilty of that behavior, my fellow evangelicals will prove my fears unfounded. I hope they’ll prove that Trump could not actually kill someone, either on Fifth Avenue or in some tawdry, anonymous abortion mill, without losing a vast host of voters, finally awakened to what kind of man he really is.
http://thefivepilgrims.com/2018/05/20/how-much-could-trump-do-without-losing-support/ |
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