The walls around Trump are crumbling. Evangelicals may be his last resort.
By Greg Sargent
Opinion writer
January 2 at 10:22 AM
Why does President Trump continue to keep the government shut down over his demand for a border wall, when large majorities oppose it? The most obvious answer is that he senses his long-term political survival depends on keeping his wall-adoring base behind him as his legal travails mount.
What is more interesting, though, is that the core of that base support may grow increasingly dependent on the white evangelical Christians who continue fervently supporting Trump no matter what he says and does. And for these voters, it appears, the wall is an extraordinarily potent totem, one whose significance for them calls for better explication as we head into a protracted showdown over it.
On Wednesday, Trump will meet with Democratic leaders over the shutdown and the wall. Axios reports that Trump will stage this meeting in the Situation Room to dramatize “security concerns at the border,” which is absurd, since in reality the wall has little to do with border security and is only about giving him the win he thinks he needs. But this also shows again that Trump senses just how important the wall has become as a political theater piece in the eyes of his base. And one fascinating component of this is white evangelical support for it.
Among white evangelical Christians, support for the wall has risen nearly 10 points since Trump campaigned on it. In the most recent Public Religion Research Institute poll, in September 2018, a staggering 67 percent of them favor Trump’s wall. PRRI provided me with data on this question going back to April 2016:
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/02/walls-around-trump-are-crumbling-evangelicals-may-be-his-last-resort/
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