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John Fea, Opinion contributor Published 4:00 a.m. ET Jan. 11, 2020

Trump mocked his enemies, trafficked in half-truths, instilled fear and expressed zero humility. My fellow evangelicals loved every minute of it.

I have spent my entire adult life in the evangelical community. I had a born-again experience when I was 16and I never looked back. I currently teach history at a Christian college with evangelical roots. As a historian, I study American evangelicalism.

But I have never seen anything like what I witnessed last Friday night as I watched Donald Trump speak to a few thousand of his evangelical supporters at El Rey Jesus, a largely Hispanic megachurch in Miami, during the kickoff to his Evangelicals for Trump campaign.

It is no coincidence that this rally took place two weeks after Christianity Today, the historic voice of moderate evangelicalism, called for Trumps removal from office. The magazines editor, Mark Galli, described Trumps character as grossly immoral and warned his fellow evangelicals that their ardent support of the president was damaging to their Christian witness.

While the Evangelicals for Trump campaign had been in the works for several weeks prior to Gallis editorial, it is hard to see the decision to schedule the kickoff event for Jan.3 as anything but damage control. Even the smallest crack in his evangelical support especially in swing states like Florida could result in a Trump loss in 2020.

BeforeTrumps speechFriday night, several evangelical leaders laid their hands on the president and prayed for him. Apostle Guillermo Maldonado, the pastor of El Rey Jesus, prayed that Trump would fulfill his role as a new King Cyrus, the Old Testament Persian ruler who released the Jews from captivity and allowed them to rebuild Jerusalem.

Paula White, a preacher of the Prosperity Gospel (God blesses the faithful with financial and physical health), prayed against the demonic forces, presumably Democrats, trying to undermine Trumps presidency.

"Evangelicals for Trump" event in Miami, on Jan. 3, 2020.(Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

As Trump took the podium, the evangelicals in attendance, many wearing pro-Trump clothing and Make America Great Again hats, began screaming USA, USA, USA. It was clear from the outset that this event would be no different from any other Trump rally. It didnt matter that the room was filled with born-again Christians. Trump only knows how to sing one note, and it is music to the ears of his evangelical supporters.

Trump and the 'Prosperity Gospel': He's selling false promises to credulous evangelical Christians

Trump bragged about the crowd size, adding that there were thousandsof people outside trying to get in. He called the Evangelicals for Trump movement the greatest grass roots movement in American history. He reminded everyone that he took the life of Qasem Soleimani. You Cant Always Get What You Want, the Rolling Stones anthem that has become Trumps theme song, blared over the church loudspeaker in Spanish when he finished his speech. Maybe Onward Christian Soldiers would have been more appropriate.

Trump painted himself as a president who is protecting American evangelicals from those on the political left who want to punish people of faith and destroy religion in America. One of the evangelical Christians in the audience screamed Pocohontas, a racist reference to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Trump was visibly pleased.

Trump the strongman was on display. Like autocratic leaders before him, he stirred fear among his people and offered them safety under his regime.

At one point in his speech, Trump rattled off the names of the Fox News personalities who carry his water on cable television. The crowd roared as the president read this laundry list of conservative media pundits.

This rhetorical flourish was all very appropriate on such an occasion because Fox News, more than anything else, including the Bible and the spiritual disciplines, has formed and shaped the values of so many people in the sanctuary. Trumps staff knows this.Why else would they put such a roll call in the speech?

At times, it seemed like Trump was putting a new spin on the heroes of the faith described in the New Testament book of Hebrews. Instead of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Joseph, Moses, David, and Samuel, we got Sean (Hannity),Laura (Ingraham), Tucker (Carlson), and the hosts of Fox and Friends.

Message to evangelicals: Impeachment is about Donald Trump. It's not an attack on you.

I am used to this kind of thing from Trump, but I was stunned when I witnessed evangelical Christians those who identify with the good news of Jesus Christ raising their hands in a posture of worship as Trump talked about socialism and gun rights.

I watched my fellow evangelicals rising to their feet and pumping their fists when Trump said he would win reelection in 2020.

Trump spent the evening mocking his enemies, trafficking in half-truths in order to instill fear in people whom God commands to fear not, and proving that he is incapable of expressing anything close to Christian humility.

His evangelical supporters loved every minute of it. On Friday night, Christians who claim to be citizens of the Kingdom of God went to church, cheered the depraved words of a president, and warmly embraced his offer of political power. Such a display by evangelicals is unprecedented in American history.

I usually get angry when members of my tribe worship at the feet of Trump. This time I just felt sad.

John Fea teaches history at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the author of "Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump," which was published Jan. 7.

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DO NOT PUBLISH 'Evangelicals for Trump' was an awful display by supposed citizens of the Kingdom of God - USA TODAY

Was it a birth certificate? You tell me, he told ABC News in 2013. Some people say that was not his birth certificate.

That same year, Nunberg arranged for Trump to make his Levin show debut, preparing a memo to familiarize Mr. Trump with Mark Levin, he wrotedeploying tried-and-true ways to pique Trumps interest. Nunberg emphasized Levins ratings history (In the first 18 months on the air, the program jumped to #1 in the time slot), the company he kept (considers Sean Hannity his best friend), his reach (books Liberty and Tyranny and Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America sold more than a million copies, Nunberg noted), and his compensation (a reported annual salary of $12.5 million a year). Nunberg mentioned, too, that what he said on the air often was disseminated on a variety of websites like TheRightScoop.com. People, in other words, some people, many people, a lot of people, were listening to what Levin was saying.

Armed with this advance work, the memo as well as the emails, Trump fit in well with Levin. In addition to shilling for the upcoming season of The Celebrity ApprenticeTrace Adkins, La Toya Jackson, Dennis RodmanTrump delivered to Levins listeners what they wantedwhich essentially was Levins ideas, studiously collected by Nunberg, consumed by Trump and regurgitated back to the host.

If the Republicans are going to win, Trump said, theyre going to have to break away from the Karl Roves of the world and, frankly, get more involvedyou know, the Tea Party, these people are great. Ive done some speeches in front of the Tea Party. They are great Americans, they love this country, they work so hard, and they have been so mistreated by the liberal media. They truly are not treated with proper respect.

And he landed especially hard on immigration and any notions of amnesty for undocumented immigrants.

I watched last night, he continued, referring to Obamas State of the Union that year, as Senator McCain and everybody were jumping up and down, you know, applaudingI never saw him move so fast, you know, nice guy, but he jumped upand was applauding as soon as the immigration became a part of the discussion, a part of the speech.

Immigration, Trump said, will be the next thing, based on what Im watching.

Trump and Levin wrapped up by exchanging compliments.

Im extremely impressed with what youre doing, Levin said.

You just have a great show, Trump said. Im always listening.

Donald Trump, Levin told his listeners after Trump signed off. See that, folks? Very solid. Very conservative. To the right of the Republican establishment. Strong supporter of the Tea Party. Im telling you. Ive been watching this. Ive been listening. People have been sending me his tweets.

There was a reason for that. Hes putting stuff out there, Nunberg told me of Trumps tweets at the time, some of which Nunberg was suggesting, that sounds like Mark Levin.

In the few months before his interview with Levin:

And in the few months after:

This ear-to-the-proverbial-ground political ramp-up wasnt limited to Levin and talk radio. It was around this time as well that Trump began to give more and more talks on the pre-presidential hustings, GOP chicken dinners in places like Iowa and New Hampshire.

He talked to Pat Caddell about what he was picking up on the trail. He would put forth his position or his feelings, and he would judge the level of the response to it, and that helped him organize, I suppose to whatever degree it was organized, his views about issues, Caddell told me in 2018. Things he said that didnt go over disappeared. Things that did stayed.

Twitter, too, increasingly served a similar purpose.

He glommed onto it like it was an oxygen source, Caddell explained. And he would tweet what he believed, and people would retweet or answer or whatever, and it was kind of his ongoing focus group.

He loved it, Nunberg said. He doesnt trust the political people who do the focus groups. Instead: What are we getting the most retweets on?

In 2014 and 15well before Trump came down the escalator and announced his intention to runNunberg sent Trump nearly daily updates of snippets of news and possible topics and wordings for tweets. At the tops of the documents he showed the number of Trumps Twitter followers ticking up (a snapshot from December of 2014: 2,751,488 2,753,548 2,757,190 ) and the number of days left until the GOP primary debate at the Reagan library and the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries ticking down.

A month into the presidential campaign, after the Vietnam-avoiding Trump insulted McCain by saying he was not a war hero and that he liked people who werent captured, he refused to apologize. That, Nunberg said, partly was because of what he had internalized by listening to Levin. Nunberg told Trump it was going to help him. (It certainly didnt hurt him.) He said, Why? Nunberg said. And I said, Because our people despise John McCain. They despise the fact that McCain hides behind his military record to shit on Republicans and you cant criticize him on anything because of his military record. I said, John McCainhe is hated almost as much as Barack Obama on talk radio. I said, He might as well be Barack Obama on talk radio.

Talk radio led the way. Trump followed.

Theoretically, Trump could have changed. As successful as this pattern of behavior had been in the years preceding his run and during the campaign itselfhe was, after all, elected presidentTrump could have adjusted once he took office, having at his disposal, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, the worlds preeminent intelligence-gathering apparatus. But nosticking to that gossip kind of mentality, said ODonnell, the casino exec, Trump has continued to mine Twitter, plucking what he wants, very comfortable with half thoughts, always looking for tidbits of information that he can use to his advantage.

He sees the ones that are the most popular, former Fox News anchor Eric Bolling, identified by Time as someone who speaks regularly to Trump, told the magazine in June of 2018, and getting the most [of the] zeitgeist, most attention on social media.

And then? The last and most important piece of this by now almost rote process?

He repeats it, Bolling said.

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Trumps Art of the Steal - POLITICO

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Imagine a man who is accused of a crime and faces a trial. Imagine the man has connived to prevent testimony from several key witnesses, and that he has met privately with the jury foreman who promises openly that he will work hand-in-glove with the accused man during the trial. It would not be a huge deductive leap to conclude the man fears a fair trial, because he is guilty.

That is precisely what President Trump has done with the impeachment proceedings in Congress. It's yet another sign among many that he is guilty beyond any question of trying to blackmail Ukraine into subverting the 2020 election.

To review, President Trump withheld about $400 million in military aid to Ukraine until its government promised to start a fake investigation into the Biden family. We know this because the aid was indeed held back until the scheme came to light, and from testimony describing the effort from acting Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, National Security Council Ukraine specialist Alexander Vindman, and Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, who actually participated in the plot. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself implicitly confirmed Trump pressured him to smear the Bidens indeed, he was going to go along with it in despair until the plot became public.

(There is also no evidence Biden actually abused his power as vice president as the conspirators allege on the contrary, his efforts to remove a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor made scrutiny of his son's business dealings there more likely, not less.)

The president's lawyer Rudy Giuliani has admitted to demanding Ukraine look into Biden, and Trump's acting White House Chief of Staff has also acknowledged the whole scheme. Trump himself has all but admitted his guilt, saying in response to accusations that he demanded Ukraine dig up dirt on Biden that "[I]t's very important to talk about corruption. if you don't talk about corruption, why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt?" The memorandum the White House released describing the call between Trump and Zelensky also contains an unmistakable veiled blackmail demand.

That is unquestionably why Trump has prevented his top officials from testifying before the House impeachment inquiry. Giuliani, Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Vice President Pence were all party to the conspiracy, while former National Security Adviser John Bolton was (oddly) dead against it, according to other testimony. Yet Trump has prevented any of them from testifying before the House and when Bolton said he would be happy to come before the Senate, Trump quickly said he would try to restrict what Bolton could say through claims of executive privilege.

Trump claims that, no, he would really like all his close associates to testify, but the welfare of future presidents prevents it. "I am fighting for future presidents and the office of the president. Other than that, I would actually like people to testify," he tweeted. This is absolutely preposterous. In addition to the gigantic conflict of interest here, and the fact that he lies pretty much every time he opens his mouth, Trump is probably the most nakedly selfish person ever to occupy the White House (and that is saying a lot). He's a guy who ran out the budget of his own bodyguard service nickel-and-diming them for staying at his own properties and renting his own golf carts. One would struggle in vain to recall a single instance in which Trump has ever taken the slightest move to benefit anyone outside himself or his immediate family.

At any rate, after a president is impeached, the Senate conducts a trial (which requires a two-thirds vote to convict and remove him from office). Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised on Sean Hannity's Fox News show which is akin to Saddam Hussein's state propaganda TV except Baghdad Bob had considerably more concern for the appearance of neutrality that: "Everything I do during this, Im coordinating with the White House counsel ... There will be no difference between the presidents position and our position as to how to handle this to the extent that we can." The fix is in.

McConnell also recently met privately with Trump to discuss impeachment, and announced on January 7 that he is prepared to conduct the trial without any agreement with House Democrats about calling witnesses. He implicitly argued that it would be breaking Senate precedent to call witnesses which would be true except for the niggling detail that witnesses were called in every single one of the previous 15 Senate impeachment proceedings. (Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has refused to send over the articles of impeachment until there is such an agreement.) Any trial run by McConnell is so obviously going to be a sham that even a couple Republican senators have expressed concern about a fair process.

This is not the behavior of an innocent man who wants to clear his name. Trump whines that the impeachment is an unfair "Democrat Scam," but as we have seen, in reality the process is heavily biased towards him the Senate is controlled by Trump's shameless allies, and it is virtually impossible to imagine them voting to remove him from office no matter what came to light at the trial. No, this is what someone does when he wants to avoid any discussion of his flagrant abuses of power or Republican senators having to take embarrassing votes revealing themselves as amoral political hacks. The man is guilty.

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Donald Trump is behaving like the guiltiest man alive - The Week

Brittany GreesonGetty Images

At this point, thanks to the almighty curve on which we as a nation have decided to grade Donald Trump, American president, Thursday night's yell-fest in Toledo was just another Very Presidential Event. The world's most powerful man demonized his political opponents as enemies of the state because they want Congress to have some role in making less-and-less-theoretical war on Iran. He called members of the assembled press "sick," and again suggested the free press has no legitimate role in our democratic republic if it fails to support his version of reality. He again characterized Hispanic immigrants as violent criminals, MS-13 "animals" against whom any measures are presumably justified. He lied, and also threw out more evidence-free claims about imminent attacks that justified his assassination of Iran's second most important figure. He yelled, and not for the first time, that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has a "pencil neck." This is all considered normal.

But there was one moment that proved particularly revealing. In the course of these explosions of, uh, patriotism, El Jefe tends to drift on and off the script provided to him by his lackeyschiefly, the Santa Monica Wormtongue Stephen Miller. In the course of one such drift last night, he railed against Democrats on-script and then jumped off to, for perhaps the first time in his life, reflect on what he's doing.

Let's just get a transcript here.

You might say he's just joking around, but the blas way he recites the "stuff" he says about Democrats points to it being a kind of bit. It's a routine. Unlike Miller and unlike the people in the crowd, Donald Trump is no true believer. He's a vector for forces that long predate him, the fear and resentment of a changing world that has long blasted out of Fox News and talk radio. He knows what people want to hear and he says it. He thinks something will help him so he says it. Democrats? Sure, call 'em vicious and horrible crime-wanters.

It's times like these that you remember Donald Trump does not actually care about any of this stuff. He does not care about illegal immigrationhe's employed undocumented immigrants at his properties and on construction projects. He does not care about these people in the crowd who support him so enthusiastically, one of whom he shouted out for booing the very mention of Central American countries. Everybody's a mark or an enemy. Do they love me, or do they not love me? The Democrats have chosen to oppose him, so now he'll say whatever's necessary to destroy them. Meanwhile, can you imagine what the Liberal Media would do if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren called Republicans "vicious, horrible people" who want crime and chaos? The Washington Post fact-checker needles Sanders for intricate healthcare policy claims that...are true.

Is Trump's rapacious cynicism better or worse than being a true believer? I suppose we're about to find out. The run-up to the 2018 elections, where Trump himself was not even on the ballot, were incredibly ugly. Imagine what's about to come over the next 11 months.

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Another Insane Trump Rant, But This One Had a Revealing Moment - Esquire.com

Columnist E. Jean Carroll, who accused President Donald Trump of raping her two decades ago, won a key victory on Thursday in her defamation suit against the president.

The judge presiding over the case rejected Trump's argument that Carroll can't sue him in New York because he lives in Washington and denied Trump's motion to delay discovery.

"There is not even a tweet, much less an affidavit by defendant Trump in support of his motion," the judge wrote.

Carroll's lawyer, Roberta "Robbie" Kaplan, said she was "pleased, yet unsurprised" by the decision.

"We look forward to moving ahead and proving that Donald Trump lied when he told the world that he did not rape our client and had not even met her," Kaplan said in a statement.

Carroll, who went public with her rape allegation against Trump last June, celebrated the development on Thursday, tweeting, "WE MOVE AHEAD!!"

The longtime advice columnist accused Trump of violently sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s. She accused him of "lunging" at her, forcibly kissing her, and forcing his penis inside her.

Trump has aggressively denied the allegation and claimed never to have even met Carroll, though a photo shows the two chatting at a party a few years before the alleged assault. The president accused Carroll of using the story to sell her memoir and insulted her by saying she wasn't his "type."

Carroll's suit alleges that Trump hurt her reputation with tweets and other statements accusing her of lying and otherwise attacking her.

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham previously told Insider that "the lawsuit is frivolous and the story is a fraud just like the author."

Trump is facing another defamation suit from an ex-Apprentice contestant, Summer Zervos, who was one of several women to accuse him of sexual misconductin the days leading up to the 2016 election, saying he groped her twiceduring a business meeting in 2007. Trump denied the allegation,calling her claims "fake news."

Ashley Collman contributed reporting.

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Trump suffered a key loss in a defamation case brought by the columnist who accused him of rape - Business Insider