“Some will say Trump is a bad man and that disqualifies him. I do not think that Trump is a bad man. But for those who do, I remind them that a bad man in some circumstances can be a good president. If you are dying of thirst and there is only one person offering you water, you accept the water gratefully, regardless of the character of your rescuer.”
(“Trump’s Virtues” by Thomas D. Klingenstein, Chairman of the Claremont Institute.)

This remarkable statement illustrates, for me, one of the many flaws in the thinking of those who support Donald Trump. They see an analogy to Trump in a bad man who is the only one offering dying people the water that will save them, which they accept gratefully without taking his character into account. This picture is supposed to convince us to support Trump, or at least to justify their own vote for him. He’s the only one that has the ability to rescue the nation, so even if he’s a bad man, it doesn’t matter because of the importance of the issues involved.

Bad men are indeed willing to rescue you. The problem is, if you accept their rescue, you owe them a big one. Some day in the future, probably sooner rather than later, they will come calling to remind you that you are in their debt and are expected to do something to pay back that debt and to not inquire too closely into the morality or ethics of it. Even better if you can be convinced that what you’re doing for them is the only right thing you can do.

This is the devil’s bargain that the Republican party has made with Donald Trump. They’ve accepted the help of a strong but bad man and now he is pulling all the levers and calling all the shots, and the majority of the party is apparently convinced that this is absolutely the right thing to do and is just great. Many traditional conservatives could see this coming and warned against it but are powerless to do anything about it now that people like that are in control. The most tragic situation, however, is that of evangelical Christians who are convinced that Trump is going to restore Biblical values and make America great again, and that we must get behind him politically to help him do that. But they aren’t following a man God is using to restore the nation, they are following a man that is using them to build up his own political standing.

In short, the objection of traditional conservatives to Trump is not merely that he has a flawed character—men with flawed characters can and often do have good principles which they effectively act on in spite of their flaws—but that he has no discernible principles at all outside of his own self-interest. He is not really committed to the principles of America’s Founding Fathers, much less to Biblical principles or values. He is committed only to gratifying his own desires and enhancing his own power, and in pursuit of those goals he has no reservations about lying, disregarding the law, and using and then discarding people. But conservative, evangelical and Pentecostal Christians have willingly blinded themselves to the long and very public history of his behavior because they feel themselves to be in his debt for implementing the policies they think are the only way the nation can be saved. They hardly realize it, or hardly see the difference, but keeping him in power and preserving his view of reality has become a more important objective to them than keeping the principles of the Founding Fathers they originally said they wanted to preserve. Thus we see them rejecting Vice President Mike Pence with disgust for sticking to the Constitution’s definition of his role in certifying the presidential vote instead of following Trump’s demand that he ignore that definition in order to keep Trump in the presidency. Millions of conservative evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, because they believe a man even they admit is brutal and vulgar and at very best only a nominal Christian, condemn as weak an undoubtedly Christian man who was doing his best to stick to his duties under God and under the Constitution.

These Christians need to wake up to the foolishness of what they’re doing. Politicians and political policies, either of the left or the right, are not going to save this nation. Changing the laws is not going to change people’s hearts, which is where the problem is; if the laws are changed without changing people’s hearts, the nation will continue to self-destruct anyway. That is to say, all governments and nations of the world will eventually fail and be judged by God at a time which he has already set. Until then, trust in God and in his Word, not in men.