Michael Brown's Pretend Virtues On Trump, Part 2
The WorldNetDaily columnist was always going to vote for Donald Trump because of his lip service to right-wing agenda items, but Brown served up more performative wavering anyway.
Earlier this year, WorldNetDaily columnist Michael Brown set up his inevitable support for Donald Trump, which he had previously justified because Trump’s delivering on right-wing agenda items is more important than supporting a profoundly amoral man who is a convicted felon and rapist. He spent his July 19 column complaining about a pastor who claimed, “If you believe God intervened to save former President Trump, but didn’t intervene to save the kids in Uvalde or Parkland or Santa Fe or Sandy Hook, then you are worshipping partisan politics, not Jesus” — a sentiment forwarded by pastor Zach Lambert and “pacifist Christian leader” Shane Claiborne. He responded by touting his own support for Trump, even as he accused them of “reading the Bible through their particular theological and ideological lens”:
But could it be that Zach, along with Shane, whose article we’ll address shortly, are guilty of reading the Bible through their particular theological and ideological lens, thereby weaponizing scripture for their own cause? Could it be that this sword cuts both ways?
As a two-time Trump voter, I wrote books with titles like “Donald Trump Is Not My Savior” and “Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will We Pass the Trump Test?” (For me, the “Trump test” was: 1) Can we unite around Jesus even if we don’t agree politically? 2) Can we vote for Trump if he is our preferred candidate without taking on his negative characteristics? In my view, we failed on both counts quite dramatically.)
I also wrote “The Political Seduction of the Church: How Millions of American Christians Have Confused Politics with the Gospel,” with a constant warning not to wrap the Gospel in the American flag.
All that to say I’m sensitive to the concerns raised by Zach and Shane.
At the same time, I find this viral meme both vacuous and even potentially divisive. First, had President Biden narrowly and seemingly miraculously escaped an assassination attempt, most of us would have said that God spared Biden’s life. In other words, our view that God spared Trump’s life was not based on partisan politics but on a sense of divine intervention. It was theological, not political.
He then criticized Claiborne for criticizing right-wing Christians who assume Trump is on God’s side:
He adds, “If our theology does not make us more loving, then we should question our theology.”
Once again, I absolutely concur.
But that actually makes me question whether these kinds of memes and articles express God’s love for Christian conservatives or Trump voters or Republicans or whoever the people may be who believe that God spared Trump’s life. Are Zach and Shane being equally divisive in the name of love?
Shane also states, “Any theology that puts God, rather than sinful human beings, behind a gun or a bomb is bad theology.”
Once again, however, he overstates his case in his understandable zeal to come against a pseudo-Christian, hyper-nationalistic, violence-exalting mentality.
And he fails to realize that God is with the policeman who pulls the trigger to stop a crazed murderer from slaughtering a child in a playground. Or that God is with the sniper who takes out a radical Islamic terrorist who is about to execute peaceful Christians. As the Word says, “For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer” (Romans 13:4).
He concluded by asking Lambert and Claiborne to appear on his radio show.
In his Aug. 2 column, Brown complained that Republicans are no longer hating LGBT people and abortion as much as he does:
As a GOP voter for as long as I can remember, I’m not discouraging you from voting Republican. Not in the least. And as a two-time Trump voter, I’m not discouraging you from voting for Trump. That is not my intent at all, as I personally plan to continue to vote GOP. Instead, I’m urging each of you Christian conservatives who votes for Trump and the GOP to do so with your eyes wide open, recognizing that the GOP is not God’s party and Trump is not the Jesus-centered leader of the Christian right. Far from it.
Already in 2016, a featured speaker at the RNC was gay billionaire Peter Thiel, a personal friend of Trump, who said, “Of course, every American has a unique identity. I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American.” (He said this to applause.)
He added, “I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform, but fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline. And nobody in this race is being honest about it, except Donald Trump.”
That was 2016.
Today, Republicans like Thiel don’t need to worry about differing with the party platform. All affirmation of God-ordained marriage has been removed from the GOP platform along with all opposition to same-sex “marriage.”
That’s why the headline to an op-ed on Newsweek by Brad Polumbo proclaimed, “Trump’s New GOP Platform Is a Massive Win for LGBT Americans.”
Once again, Brown equivocated, declaring that none of this should stop anyone for voting for Trump because the other side is “evil”:
The truth be told, despite Trump’s frequent professions of faith (most recently, at a Turning Point USA Believer’s Summit, saying, “I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian”) and despite saying the “sinner’s prayer” privately with different Christian leaders (I’ve heard this anecdotally), there is no real evidence that Trump understands what it means to be a Christian, let alone a “born-again” Christian. (As for Trump being a changed man after coming within an inch of his life, he has jokingly stated the change lasted for a few hours at most.)
That doesn’t mean that Christian conservatives should not vote for him or for the GOP in general. Not at all. What are the real alternatives? Just the Biden-Harris proposals to radically revamp the Supreme Court should draw our serious opposition.
I also believe that we should be deeply appreciative for the great things Trump did as president, including appointing many fine judges to the courts, most notably to the Supreme Court, standing for religious freedoms, moving our embassy to Jerusalem and successfully negotiating the Abraham Accords.
I’m simply saying that we should vote with our eyes wide open, not misrepresenting or exalting Trump, not sanitizing the GOP, and, above all, not looking to politics to do what only the Gospel can do.
So, yes, by all means, get out and vote, and yes, recognize just how debased and evil some of the Democrats’ agenda really is. No argument there.
But then, with far more zeal and passion and focus and energy and effort and devotion, let’s give ourselves to the Great Commission, meaning, let’s be disciples and make disciples. That’s the primary way that America will be changed.
Politics has its place, but politics is not the Gospel, and there is a vast difference between the kingdom of God and the GOP, not to mention an infinitely large difference between a Messianic savior and Donald Trump.
Brown is invoking the “lesser of two evils” argument — but he won’t admit that this means his preferred candidate is, by his own definition, engaging in evil.
The hypocrisy continues
Brown more fully fleshed out that hypocrisy in his Aug. 19 column, in which he cited none other than WND managing editor David Kupelian — who had abandoned his sense of morality in 2016 to sell his soul to Trump — to make that case:
In past articles and on many “Line of Fire” broadcasts, I have expressed my strong reservations about Donald Trump and the current direction of the GOP (most recently here), so my potential vote for him/them would be with caveats and concerns. But under no circumstances could I possibly countenance a vote for Kamala Harris.
Writing in October 2020, conservative author David Kupelian took issue with Pastor John Piper, who encouraged Christians not to vote for either Trump or Biden.
Kupelian asked, “Does the good pastor not realize that when you vote for a president, you are not choosing only one leader and his policy agenda, but a multitude of leaders and policies in every area of life, and therefore a whole ‘future’ for the country, as Franklin Graham put it? Most prominently, you are choosing a vice president who may well become president (as has happened 14 times in U.S. history). You are also choosing Cabinet and department heads. And you are choosing federal judges, including Supreme Court justices with lifetime tenure who will decide issues of stupendous importance that affect every American. And you are choosing thousands of other people – about 4,000 federal government appointees in all – who will profoundly shape the nation in which your children and grandchildren will live for a long, long time – whether for good or for ill.”
Brown then dutifully repeated his right-wing anti-Harris agenda items:
Simply stated, if you vote for Harris, you are voting for the reinstating of Roe “as the law of the land again,” which would mean overturning all the pro-life laws that have now been passed in state after state. The blood of the unborn would certainly be on your hands. Your vote helped make this happen.
As for LGBTQ+ issues, the acronym LGBTQ+ is found 37 times in the platform, including promises like this: “… Democrats will pass the Equality Act to codify protections for LGBTQI+ Americans and their families.”
In short, this means that transgender identity would be placed on the same footing as race and ethnicity. Consequently, just as you could not refuse to hire a black or Hispanic person to teach little children in your nursery school because of their race or ethnicity, you could not refuse to hire a bearded man who identified as a woman to teach the little children.
This is what you’re voting for if you vote for Vice President Harris.
[…]
So, if you vote for Harris, you’re voting for boys who identify as girls to share bathrooms and locker rooms with your daughters (or sisters), not to mention voting for men who identify as women to share bathrooms and changing rooms with your wives (or mothers or sisters or daughters). Is that what you want?
Perhaps worse still, we are told that Harris “supports a national ban” on so-called “conversion therapy,” which means outlawing all professional counseling for anyone with unwanted same-sex attractions or gender-identity confusion. Outlawed!
So, the 16-year-old girl who was raped repeatedly by her uncle and now feels a repulsion toward men would not be allowed to receive professional counsel to help her deal with her trauma and recover her opposite-sex attractions, even with her parents’ consent based on her expressly stated desires. Illegal!
Brown concluded: “That’s why, regardless of my views on Trump and the GOP, I could not possibly vote for Kamala Harris. To do so, for me, would be to participate in evil.” He didn’t explain why it’s “evil” to not hate LGBTQ people the way he does. Also, one would think that coercive and abusive“conversion therapy” would be thought of as evil — but not to Brown.
Brown spent his Aug. 26 column in his regular ritual fretting over Trump:
In my 2020 book, “Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will We Pass the Trump Test?” I devoted an entire chapter to the question, “Does Character Still Count and Does Morality Still Matter?” Four years later, that question is still relevant, especially for Christian conservatives. They (or, we) cannot possibly vote for Kamala Harris for a host of reasons. But can we, in good conscience, vote for Donald Trump?
Back in the ’90s, in response to the candidacy of Bill Clinton, the Southern Baptist Convention drafted a resolution in which it was stated clearly that “that moral character matters to God and should matter to all citizens, especially God’s people, when choosing public leaders.”
In keeping with this, the resolution urged “all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”
How do we reconcile this with our support for Trump (and I write this as a two-time voter for Mr. Trump)? Does he, “although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character”? Hardly.
How, then, can we justify our vote for him?
[…]
But can we really look to Trump to fight for the things that are important for us? On Friday, Aug. 23, he posted on Truth Social that if he is reelected, his “administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”
What? Here is an allegedly pro-life candidate using the misleading rhetoric of the pro-abortion camp (speaking of “reproductive rights” rather than the so-called right to abortion) and promising this “right” to women.
Talk about a deep betrayal of our values, also reflected in the GOP’s gutted 2024 platform, where the pro-life plank is virtually gone and all opposition to same-sex “marriage” has completely disappeared.
The point of all of this, of course, is for Brown to manufacture a pretense justify that vote, which he would do regardless. This time, Brown wants his fellow evangelicals to pretend they’re voting against Harris, not voting for Trump:
How, then, can Christian conservatives justify their vote for Trump?
Many would still argue that, despite his caving in on some of the issues most important to us and despite his many glaring character weaknesses, he will still do a better job on the economy, on securing our borders, on standing with Israel, on standing up to our international enemies. And so, overall, balancing out the pros and the cons, Trump is the better choice.
This could well be true.
But let’s stop pretending that Trump is someone that he isn’t. The cards are on the table for all to see.
In the end, though, it may all come down to this: a vote for Trump is, more than anything, a vote against Harris.
So, we can vote for Trump without being enamored by him, without being his defenders or apologists, and without being unrealistic in our expectations.
And if we do choose to vote for him, a choice that the vast majority of Christian conservatives will make, we must remember to keep our focus on Jesus and the Gospel and to be sure that, to the extent Trump’s character deficiencies are a negative example, we distance ourselves from those deficiencies while setting the bar high in our lives and conduct. We can vote for him without becoming like him.
But a vote for Trump is effectively an endorsement of those “character deficiencies,” though Brown wants you to pretend otherwise. Brown makes sure not to mention the fact that Trump is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist — presumably so he won’t have to figure out a way to defend against that as well. Indeed, the word “evil” appears nowhere in this column despite Trump’s behavior arguably falling under that category.
Brown was always going to vote for Trump all along — all of this fretting is just performative (he did the same thing in 2020) because he has given Trump permission to be as evil as he wants because he was always going to demonize Harris to portray a false sense of principle behind that vote. He wants that right-wing goodies he thinks Trump will provide, and that end justifies his politically motivated (if not morally approved) blind eye.
In his Oct. 14 column, Brown played the just-asking-questions card to advance the unproven claim that anti-Semitism kept Harris from choosing Josh Shapiro as her vice presidential candidate:
According to an Oct. 9, 2024, article in the New York Times by Shane Goldmacher, “There may be seven main battlegrounds in the race for the White House in 2024, all of which could prove crucial. But Pennsylvania stands apart as the state that top strategists for both Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump have circled as the likeliest to tip the election.”
In light of this observation, which is hardly novel, the obvious question is: Why, then, wasn’t Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro chosen as Harris’ vice presidential running mate? Wouldn’t he do a better job of delivering Pennsylvania to the Democrats? And overall, wasn’t he a much better choice than Tim Waltz?
Now, I am neither a political pundit nor a pollster. And I am simply raising questions rather than making assertions, let alone dogmatic assertions.
But what if Trump wins the national election and taking Pennsylvania was a key to that victory? (Again, this is not a prediction; these are questions.) What if choosing Shapiro for vice president would have secured Pennsylvania for Harris? And what if he was not chosen because of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish sentiments?
Brown conceded that Democrats are not anti-Semitic but insisted they were catering to Arab-Americans by not choosing Shapiro:
Obviously, Jews have played a prominent role in Democratic politics for years. And there have been more than a few Jewish Democratic presidential candidates, most prominently Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg and Joe Lieberman (vice presidential candidate in 2000 as a Democrat before becoming an Independent). Few would seriously argue that the main reason Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders in the primaries was because he is Jewish. (For the record, both Howard Phillips and Marianne Williamson are Jewish too.)
And then there was Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for president in 1964, who was crushed in the election by the Democratic incumbent Lyndon Baines Johnson – and not, primarily, because he was Jewish. (Arlen Specter, formerly a Democrat, ran for president in 1996, but as a Republican.)
What is different today, however, is Israel’s war in Gaza (and beyond) and the massive spike in anti-Israel sentiments throughout America, coupled with the Biden-Harris efforts not to alienate Arab American voters.
Given the potential importance of Pennsylvania in the elections, it is foolish not to consider concerns of an anti-Jewish, anti-Israel backlash as a main reason Shapiro was not chosen. This is hardly a matter of playing the anti-Semitism card. In this case, it could well be real.
Brown spent his Oct. 28 column attacking Harris for wanting to reinstate Roe v. Wade protections for abortion:
Doesn’t this sound reasonable? Abortion is one of the most personal decisions anyone can make, and so, if anything is “not the government’s decision,” it is this.
What Harris failed completely to address is why “many” people “rightly” oppose abortion, namely, because abortion takes the life of another human being. Could anything be more basic than that?
That’s why we have laws against murder and laws against rape and laws against kidnapping. All of them are transgressions against another person.
That’s also why, more specifically, we have laws against infanticide, even if the baby is intolerable, even if the child has a congenital disease, even if the mother is simply incapable of caring for the little one.
Whatever the case might be, the one thing she (or the father) is not allowed to do is terminate the life of the baby. Obviously. To do so would be to commit murder.
But Brown refused to fully embraced the logical endpoint of that absolutist line of thinking: that every woman who has ever had an abortion must be arrested and imprisoned (and even executed) for murder. Instead, he promoted his new book in which he claimed “to present compelling arguments for the cultural positions I oppose, seeking to help us respond with more heartfelt, compelling answers.” His idea of this is to present a hypothetical case of a 12-year-old girl who was “abducted and raped by a sexual predator who had just been released from jail — then dismissed the case as exceedingly rare and then offering “stories of women who were raped and aborted their babies, only to learn that the abortion didn’t heal the pain. And I tell the stories of some of the finest people on our planet, people who have an incredible amount of good but were conceived in rape.” He made no mention of Trump’s moderation on abortion or why he considers that acceptable.
Brown did finally acknowledge Trump’s retreat from anti-abortion extremism in his Oct. 30 column — but decided it doesn’t matter because Democrats are the real extremists:
It’s true that Kamala Harris is proving to be a very unpopular candidate. In fact, according to a recent poll, “When asked which candidate they rejected ‘more,’ 50.1 percent said Harris, while 48.6 percent said Trump.”
That is really quite striking when you just think of how much hatred there is toward Donald Trump. Yet, according to this poll (conducted from Oct. 25-29), more of them “rejected” Harris than Trump.
But if Trump and the GOP do triumph next Tuesday, it will not just be due to Harris’ unpopularity and Trump’s popularity. That’s because Trump has too much baggage. Too many haters. Too many alienating flaws. Too many obstacles to overcome.
Plus, Trump has disappointed many Christian conservatives by taking the teeth out of the GOP platform on important issues such as abortion and same-sex “marriage.”
No, there is something else going on, something that is driving many voters away from Harris and the Democrats. As articulated by the left-leaning political pundit Van Jones, “I just wonder if we look back on this period – there’s no excuse for the stuff that Elon Musk is doing, the stuff he says, he’s irresponsible – but if progressives have a politics that says, all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil, it’s kind of hard to keep them on your side. And so, we might want to think about, if you’re chasing people out of the party, you can’t be mad when they leave. And maybe if we had a different politics, where we actually said, dignity for everybody, everybody’s respected, and we need you, more people might stay.”
Quite true. Except for the fact that the scorpion isn’t thinking rationally and pragmatically. It’s being true to its own nature. It can’t help but sting the very one that it’s depending on for survival.
Put another way, defending tampons in boys’ bathrooms (as per Gov. Tim Waltz) is not a winning strategy.
In fact, Walz (whose name Brown misspelled) did not force schools to install tampon dispensers in boys’ bathrooms at school, and he offered no evidence that Walz ran on that issue in the election. But then, Brown was always going to find a reason to support Trump and oppose Harris, even when his right-wing sense of morality should have told him differently. To borrow from the scorpion analogy he used in this column, it’s his nature.
Post-election equivocating
At the end of the election process, even Brown seemed to get tired of it all. His final column before the election, on Nov. 4, and his first column afterwards, on Nov. 8, were focused on analyzing a psalm, as copied from a book he wrote: “Whoever wins on November 5, of this we can be sure: America will be in turmoil, and emotions will run high. But for those who have a personal relationship with God, there is a place of refuge from the storm. It is God’s hiding place – or secret place – and it is described in Psalm 91[.]”
Brown’s Nov. 12 column continued his grousing about his fellow evangelicals who made prophecies about Trump that were blown up with his 2020 election loss (despite his own dabbling in it):
It was all the rage back in 2020. A chorus of prophetic leaders announced with certainty that Donald Trump would be reelected and serve a second term in the White House, but he did not – at least, not in 2020. Now that he has been reelected, resoundingly at that, does this mean that these prophets were right after all? Certainly not.
First, some of the “prophets” (I will let God decide their actual status and calling) said that Trump would serve eight consecutive years. They were dogmatic and clear and aggressive, even after the 2020 election results were announced. “Watch and see” they proclaimed, but nothing happened.
Second, after Biden’s victory was announced, the prophets predicting his reelection doubled down. Many said that Trump did win the election, but it was stolen.
But that begs the question: If Trump would win but actually lose, why didn’t God show them this too? This would be like me giving you a prophetic word that a rich man would be giving you a Porsche next week, entirely for free. I just failed to tell you it would be carjacked on the way to your house and you would never see it.
Still, he tried to give then a way out:
You might say, “But what if God did show these prophets that Trump would be reelected, but they just misinterpreted what they saw?”
That’s actually a valid question, and it’s in keeping with biblical prophecy, in which the prophets did not always understand the timing of the revelations they received.
[…]
Given that the whole story of Trump’s reelection is almost impossible to believe – whether you’re for him or against, it seems almost miraculous – I have no problem believing that God showed people in 2020 that he would serve two terms.
If He did, the failure was in speaking prematurely and giving false hopes and expectations, rather than praying secretly for God’s will to come to pass based on prophecies received. It would also have been fine if they had said, “God showed me Trump will serve two terms, but I have no idea if they’ll be consecutive or not.” Today, we’d be shaking our heads and marveling.
Let us, then, tread carefully when it comes to speaking for God.
In his Nov. 25 column, Brown served up more equivocation of Trump:
What are the cultural implications of Donald Trump’s decisive presidential victory? On the one hand, he incurred the ire of the pro-life movement by distancing himself from historic pro-life stances, gutting the GOP platform in the process. (He gutted the platform in terms of pro-life issues as well as marriage and family issues.) On the other hand, his victory signaled the large-scale rejection of radical leftist policies, to the point that major, leftist media outlets have been scrambling to move closer to the center. How should followers of Jesus assess all this?
On a certain level, things just got a lot simpler. That’s because it will become increasingly difficult for the church to look to Trump to lead the way on key moral and cultural issues.
To be sure, he has chosen his battles carefully, highlighting the destructive extremes of radical transgender activism while distancing himself from Project 2025. It seems evident that this reflects pragmatism more than (or, at least as much as) conviction.
More and more Americans are saying “No way!” to boys sharing locker rooms with girls and to the genital mutilation of minors. At the same time, the vast majority of Americans have no idea what is in Project 2025, other than the Democrats said it was really, really draconian and evil. Trump campaigned against trans-activism while vigorously declaiming any connection to Project 2025.
Again, he’s a pragmatist, and it worked.
But are transgender children really the biggest supposed threat the country faces? Brown hates transgender people, so in his mind it is. He then fretted that Trump doesn’t hate LGBTQ people or gay marriages and was being too much of a pragmatist to get votes:
So I ask once again, “How should followers of Jesus assess all this?”
It’s really quite simple.
Trump never was and never will be the moral savior of America. As for the GOP, it is not God’s party, championing righteousness and purity in the land. Hardly.
But this is not necessarily bad news, since, as I have stated endlessly over the years, politics cannot do what only the Gospel can do. And while there are highly moral politicians, and while I still prefer GOP policies to Democratic policies, we make a terrible, sometimes even fatal mistake when we look to a worldly system to carry out heavenly work.
[…]
That’s why I say that things have simplified for us as followers of Jesus, in particular, for those of us who voted for Trump. We no longer have to present him as Saint Donald (as some almost did in 2016), the champion of the pro-life movement, a fine upstanding Christian.
We can recognize his many weaknesses and appreciate all the good he can do without looking to him to do our job.
Brown concluded: “And while we can seize the cultural movement in which so many radical leftist policies and ideas are being exposed, we cannot let secular culture lead the way. That’s our job.” He apparently thinks it’s also his job to demonize anything not as right-wing as he is as “radical leftist.”