What Will Evangelicals Do if Kavanaugh’s Nomination Fails?


An MSNBC White House correspondent believes that white conservative evangelicals will “crucify Trump” if the Brett Kavanaugh nomination fails.

Here is a taste:

MSNBC White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor said Monday that if President Trump loses his fight to put conservative Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, his religious base may lose whatever faith they have in the man many of their sect believe was chosen by God to lead the country.

“Sarah Sanders is echoing a lot of the reaction of a lot of evangelical Christians when I asked them how they support President Trump,” Alcindor said. “They say this is someone who can be used even if he’s problematic, even if he in their mind has sinned, that he can still be someone who puts forth policies that can help people’s lives.”

But in the event that Trump fails to appoint Kavanaugh to the court, where he could be the deciding vote on an number of their political goals, conservative Christians will like flee, Alcindor believed. “This is one of the number one things that evangelical Christians wanted out of this president,” she said. “They wanted a Supreme Court that was going to try to overturn Roe v. Wade, that wasn’t going to be pro-choice, that was going to be a pro-life Supreme Court.”

I don’t see it this way.  If the Kavanaugh nomination fails, Trump evangelicals will blame the liberals.  They will not blame Trump.  Trump will nominate another conservative justice off the Federalist Society or Heritage Foundation list and we will go through all of this again.  A failed Kavanaugh nomination will not weaken conservative evangelical support for the president, it will strengthen it.

3 thoughts on “What Will Evangelicals Do if Kavanaugh’s Nomination Fails?

  1. As I was reading the excerpt, my reaction was being formed. It matched almost word for word what John said, and what James says above. If the nomination fails, it will just be viewed as further evidence of what the religious right sees as a liberal war against “religion and values.” It will further solidify the wildly overblown persecution complex which already exists. It would energize their support all the more, and increase the urgency and forcefulness with which they would seek to “take back America as a Christian nation.”

    I sometimes ponder what events could possibly diminish Trump’s widespread evangelical support. My appraisal is that most of the things I envision in my lmind experiments” would likely result in doubling-down of their support, much as we have already seen them do time and time again. Short of Trump publicly renouncing their support and becoming a “godless Christian-hating liberal” himself, I really can’t envision any scenario where their support would falter. Nothing else, in my mind, would do it. Any political failures or moral scandals I consider would simply seen as the work of those liberals, in league with Satan, trying to tear down Christian America.


  2. I concur with John. If the liberals foil the Kavanaugh nomination, especially in a “last minute” and devious manner, it will galvanize evangelical support for Trump. The manner in which this attack on Kavanaugh has been handled plays well into the narrative that the liberal Washington establishment will stop at nothing to maintain its power. By the way, I don’t know who the MSNBC speaker is, but the network must be desperate for “commentators” to fill its twenty-four hour news cycle. It seems that some of these networks will accept anyone who offers an anti-Trump narrative of some sort. The accuracy of the commentary is mostly irrelevant.


    • Devious? A woman has come forward with a credible accusation. The Democrats and some Republicans are giving her voice serious consideration. Do you think that they shouldn’t? That they should just sweep it under the rug? Do you think that congress should carry out their charge to advise and consent. Or should they just blindly yield to the demands of an unchecked king and his Evangelicals? Where, exactly, does devious apply?


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