Trump Cards, Con't

The NY Times got a hold of audio of the meeting between Donald Trump and evangelical leaders (note I didn't say evangelical Christian leaders, because the Christianity espoused by them isn't actually Christianity that is recognizable by the tenets of Christ) and as usual, he lied to them while offering some hefty quid pro quo.

President Trump warned evangelical leaders Monday night that Democrats “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently” if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections.

Speaking to the group in the State Dining Room of the White House, Mr. Trump painted a stark picture of what losing the majority would mean for the administration’s conservative agenda, according to an audiotape of his remarks provided to The New York Times by someone who attended the event.

“They will end everything immediately,” Mr. Trump said. “When you look at antifa,” he added, a term that describes militant leftist groups, “and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people.”

A White House spokesman, Hogan Gidley, declined to elaborate on what the president meant.

The blunt warning — delivered to about 100 of the president’s most ardent supporters in the evangelical community — was the latest example of Mr. Trump’s attempts to use the specter of violence at the hands of his political opponents and to fan the flames of cultural divisions in the country.

In the wake of racial violence last year in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump said there was “blame on both sides” and equated liberal, anti-fascist protesters with Nazis and white supremacists. In spring 2016, the president warned of violence by his own supporters if he did not get the Republican presidential nomination, saying “I think you’d have riots.”

Mr. Trump acknowledged to the evangelical leadership that his conservative base may not turn out at the polls in big numbers for Republican congressional candidates because he is not on the ballot in November.

The racism and division aside (that part of evangelical is definitely recognizable) Trump's plan was basically "If you don't vote for us, Democrats will destroy your megachurch empires, so you'd better start telling your flock to vote GOP in those Sunday sermons.  And don't worry about the IRS and the Johnson Amendment, I've taken care of it."

Eliminating the provision in the law would require Congress to act. Instead, Mr. Trump signed an executive order in May 2017 directing the Internal Revenue Service not to aggressively pursue cases in which a church endorses a candidate or makes political donations.

Legal experts have said the I.R.S. has very rarely pursued such cases against churches, and religious leaders have often been outspoken about politics even if they have had to stop short of officially endorsing a candidate.

Mr. Trump ignored that reality Monday night. He urged religious leaders to use what he described as their newfound freedom of speech to campaign from the pulpit on behalf of Republican candidates.

“You have people that preach to almost 200 million people — 150 to, close, depending on which Sunday we are talking about, and beyond Sunday, 100, 150 million people,” he said.

Mr. Trump bantered with the religious leaders at the dinner, noting at one point that Robert Jeffress, a Dallas evangelical pastor who once said Jewish people were going to hell, had observed that Mr. Trump “may not be the perfect human being, but he’s the greatest leader for Christianity.”

“Hopefully, I’ve proven that to be a fact,” Mr. Trump said, prompting applause, before adding, “In terms of the second part, not the first part.”

Mostly the first part.