The wife of a close friend of mine, JB (a close friend in her own right) is really disappointed in the recent presidential election results. Thus, she asked me to address the question: Why is it that so many Christians voted for this loathsome, creepy, villainous character, Donald J. Trump? (She didn’t word it quite that way, but I doubt that rendering is far from her reality).
Here are four reasons why:
First, most Christians believed that Donald Trump, whatever his personal flaws, was far more capable of running the government than was Kamala Harris. Enough people saw how Trump performed as President in his first term and surmised that he did a reasonably good job. People didn’t see much to celebrate when it came to Kamala Harris, who spoke in word-salads and came across as unintelligent.
Second, whatever Trump’s moral lapses were, they were seen by Christians to be a personal matter between Trump and God. Christians realized that they cannot know the heart of a person the way God can, and Christians cannot be absolutely certain when a person with a sinful past has repented and to what degree they have repented, so they left such matters in God’s hands.
Third, Christians weren’t viewing Kamala Harris as the epitome of moral rectitude either, given rumors about her having slept her way to the top with the help of a married Willie Brown, who served as the Speaker of the California State Assembly, and later, as Mayor of San Francisco. Likewise, Christians remembered that Joe Biden was seen as a dirty old man, invading the personal space of many a female, and even being accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer. Thus, it wasn’t as if Christians were presented with a sexual predator on one side, and a saint on the other side.
Fourth, ever since Donald Trump declared his intent to run for the Presidency on June 16, 2015, the media has almost uniformly declared open season on Donald Trump. Since many people derive their impression of Trump from the way the media portrays him, it was easy to see media bias at work.
Think about it: Whether you love Donald Trump or hate Donald Trump, how do you know anything at all about Donald Trump since you have no direct experience with him? What is it that enables you to form an opinion – any opinion – about Donald Trump?
The answer to that question is due to media portrayals of him.
And how does the media generally portray Donald Trump?
The answer to that question depends on where you choose to get your media from.
The vast majority of the various media entities are Left-of-Center. Fox News is the only large-scale exception (and perhaps the Wall Street Journal editorial page).
The mainstream media overplayed their hand. The people who run the mainstream media – reporters, anchors, analysts, contributors, producers, editors, etc., didn’t merely prefer Kamala Harris to Donald Trump; they hated Trump. They considered Trump to be at a level of insidiousness comparable to Adolf Hitler. And when the media went that extreme, their reporting caused them to lose credibility. Everyday Americans who were not particularly hyper-partisan quickly saw through the over-the-top fomenting and concluded the media was neither credible nor fair.
But it got worse: The media would frequently either misrepresent the facts relative to Donald Trump, or would go even further and deliberately lie about Donald Trump. More and more people who were consuming the news from the mainstream media eventually sensed a pattern – the media was trafficking in FAKE NEWS when it came to Donald Trump.
Let me speak broadly. Many independent thinkers who work in media have commented on the deeply irresponsible work being done by the media. For example, Jay Caspian Kang, a Staff Writer for The New Yorker, made this damning comment on October 18, 2024:
“Every news organization that feigns objectivity is actually heavily slanted toward the left. Not only that; the media is actively working with the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump. The most obvious explanation for this impression is that the press corps is mostly made up of liberals. At prestige outlets—many of which do don the armor of impartiality—the imbalance skews a lot further to the left than what many outsiders might imagine. . . I have mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: in the course of a fifteen-year career that has included stints at radio shows, print outlets, digital media and television, I have yet to meet a Trump supporter at work.”
Kang may well have had Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, Editor-in-Chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, in mind. Garcia-Ruiz said the secret part out loud recently when he stated, “Objectivity has got to go.” My question to Mr. Garcia-Ruiz would have been: “Are you telling me that your paper is currently objective?” (By the way, both James Carville and Margaret Sullivan – the latter of the Washington Post – openly agreed that journalists should give up any pretense of objectivity and just go full-bore Anti-Trump – as if they hadn’t already done so).
Here are 12 random examples of the problems with the mainstream media as they pertain to Donald Trump:
A heated rally took place at Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. There were various groups protesting over whether a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee should be removed. One of the several groups in attendance was comprised of neo-Nazis and “skin-heads” (one of which drove his car over a woman, killing her). The mainstream media – uniformly – reported that President Donald Trump said, during a press conference following the events at Charlottesville, that there were “fine people on both sides” of the conflict, and that in saying those words, he was claiming he believed there are very fine neo-Nazi’s and skin-heads. That was not just false reporting. It was not a mistake. It was a deliberate, unmitigated lie. It was a lie that both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris used on Trump during their debates in 2024. The mainstream media (CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, ABC News, etc.,) never came clean and corrected the record. FAKE NEWS!
Time magazine published an issue in June 2018 showing as a cover photo Donald Trump, stern and unmoved, staring down in disdain at a crying 2-year-old girl from Honduras, an illegal immigrant who was said to have gotten separated from her mother. The idea was to create the impression that Trump was iron-fisted and unyielding and would show no mercy even to a defenseless little 2-year-old. But the entire photo was photo-shopped and the entire story was a lie – the little girl was never separated from her mother, she entered the country illegally with her mother, the mother wasn’t trying to escape tyranny in her own country, and Trump was never involved whatsoever. FAKE NEWS!
On September 27, 2020, the New York Times published an article claiming Donald Trump had not paid any federal income taxes whatsoever in 10 of the 15 years beginning in 2000. FAKE NEWS!
On January 25, 2019, the Washington Post denounced President Trump’s claim that tape was being used to silence women during illegal border crossings. Yet Trump later proved to be correct. And worse, on May 9, 2019, WAPO suggested that President Trump tacitly endorsed the shooting of illegal aliens crossing the border. Actually, Trump said the exact opposite. FAKE NEWS!
On April 9, 2024, Uri Berliner, long time editor at NPR, admitted that an experienced journalist at NPR said out loud in a meeting that he thought it was good that NPR wasn’t going to report on the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 because doing so could help Donald Trump.
CNN, which always maintained Trump and his fellow Republicans are anti-black racists, on February 1, 2019 reported that Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was a Republican racist for having worn black-face in college. Ralph Northam has always been a Democrat. On May 16th, CNN’s Jim Acosta tweeted a completely dishonest summation of remarks made by President Trump regarding immigration, deliberately leaving out key statements that gave the exact opposite message that Acosta was attributing to him. FAKE NEWS! Thus, it was no surprise that CNN Senior Political Commentator, Scott Jennings, said “I have to say, when I see what Democrat politicians say about Donald Trump, when I see what Democratic [CNN] commentators say about Donald Trump, and their platform is built on a bunch of lies, frankly, that are designed to radicalize a political base, it makes me wonder. . .”
At MSNBC, anchor Nicolle Wallace falsely claimed on August 5, 2019 that Donald Trump wanted to “exterminate” all Latinos attempting to cross our borders. FAKE NEWS! She had to issue an apology the next night. Also at MSNBC, on August 27, 2019, Lawrence O’Donnell stated on Rachel Maddow’s show that he had evidence he would report on in the next hour that shows Trump was in cahoots with Russian banks to obtain loans no one else would give him. FAKE NEWS! He had egg all over his face and had to apologize for his made-up story.
George Stephanopoulos from ABC News recently said, ten separate times on live TV, that Donald Trump had been found liable in a court of law for the crime of rape. FAKE NEWS! ABC got sued and settled out of court, paying out over ten million dollars.
NBC News published a headline at Christmas time in 2018 claiming the following: “Trump becomes first president since 2002 not to visit troops at Christmastime” in an attempt to portray Trump as being selfish and anti-military. Actually, President Trump made a surprise visit to the troops in Iraq at Christmastime. NBC lied. FAKE NEWS!
USA Today once claimed a Trump campaign T-shirt depicting an eagle was actually a Nazi symbol, ignoring the fact that Nancy Polisi’s House Speaker government website used the same symbol, and that it was in no way a Nazi symbol. FAKE NEWS!
Anti-Trump bias showed up during the first Trump impeachment hearings in November 2019. The Washington Post was on hand to do Fact-Checking. They limited 100% of their fact-checks to Republic statements. They did not fact-check a single Democrat statement. Likewise, during the Trump-Harris debate on ABC News in September 2024, the moderators had agreed to a rule not to fact-check anyone during the debate. Yet, during the debate, they violated their own agreed-to rules and relentlessly fact-checked Donald Trump but never once fact-checked Kamala Harris. Media Bias?
Finally, in terms of media bias, The Media Research Center published a study in the summer of 2020 to ascertain just how negative the news media was towards Biden and Trump as seen on the big 3 networks beginning June 1, 2020 through July 31, 2020. The results: a grand total of 4 negative statements against Biden. A grand total of 634 negative statements against Trump. No person endowed with common sense could possibly see that as objective journalism.
I could easily go on for another hour and post dozens if not hundreds of additional examples of how the mainstream media has twisted the facts, manipulated the data, and often times openly fabricated outright lies involving not only Donald Trump but also involving Conservatives, Republicans, and anyone not committed to Left-wing values.
So why did so many Christians vote for Donald Trump? Because they caught on to the dishonesty of the mainstream media, which lost all credibility in reporting on Trump.
And that, my friends, is the latest elephant in the room.
