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Trump is Franklin Graham’s Middle Finger to the Entire World

Trump is Franklin Graham’s Middle Finger to the Entire World

Last updated on: January 12, 2017 at 5:59 am by Frank Schaeffer

Trump is Franklin Graham’s Middle Finger to the Entire World 2017-01-12T05:59:32-07:00 Frank Schaeffer

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No president in living memory has come to the brink of his inauguration with such a tsunami of problems and unanswered questions and the level of public doubt around his “leadership” and even his basic sanity. As noted by the Washington Post, in his first press conference since July the president-elect made statements that were debunked and discredited by all fact-checkers. He also came off as genuinely unhinged.

America never faced this before: a megalomaniac tied to a foreign enemy about to become president. And in a you-couldn’t make this stuff-up twist it turns out that the Billy Graham family has a lot to do with the rise of America’s most mentally challenged and morally unfit president in history.

Wednesday’s events add up to a weird moment in the lurching transition of federal power. The president-elect — for the first time (!) — acknowledged Russia’s role in last year’s election, but he denied that the leaks were intended to boost him. He also furiously denounced reports that Russia had obtained intelligence that could compromise him. And no evangelical leader who worked to get Trump elected has yet said they changed their mind. In fact…

Franklin Graham, who used his “Decision America Tours” to mobilize Trump voters will read a Bible passage at Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Graham joined Trump in Alabama during the president-elect’s “Thank You” tour on Dec. 17. “Having Franklin Graham, who was so instrumental, we won so big, with evangelical Christians,” Trump said.

After the election there was lot of discussion about how Trump won, Graham told the crowd. “I believe it was God,” Graham said, adding that God had answered the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people. If so then is God also a Russian useful idiot, or does Putin have something on God too to blackmail him with?

The reports connecting Trump to the Russian government and the Russians having blackmail-type information on Trump are still (as of yet) not fully verified but do prove one thing– that FBI director Comey is a two-faced study in total hypocrisy. They also prove that in hitching his family name to Trump Franklin has destroyed his father’s name forever.

Knowing Trump’s past proven (and self-admitted and bragged about) sex-scandal and abuser of women “reputation” there’s every reason to believe that the alleged Russian scandals probably happened. They were investigated by a former British MI6 agent regarded as reliable.

Nevertheless the FBI director was right not to reveal this material prior to the election BUT he completely ignored that principle when it came to Hillary Clinton. There can be no doubt that it made a difference in the outcome. The fact that Comey clearly knew at the time it was highly probably that Trump had been compromised by a hostile enemy foreign government makes his decision even more shameful. After all Trump was clearly and bizarrely in Putin’s pocket. His odd pro-Putin (and anti-CIA) statements now make far more sense in the light of potential blackmail than they do on their own.

The FBI’s director is shamefully compromised by his double standard. (What a pair of disloyal unpatriotic traitors to American democracy itself Trump and Comey are. We’re in for a rough ride.)

Even more shameful is Franklin Graham’s relationship with Trump. Comey only claims to be working for America. Franklin says he’s working for God.

It goes back to 2011, when in an interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour, Graham gave fuel to “birther” claims by suggesting that Obama should produce his birth certificate. He also floated the idea of Trump as president, saying he thought the businessman had some good ideas for the country.

As the Washington Post notes:

A few days after that interview, Trump called him, Graham said, the first time the two had talked.

Graham says he believes that the president-elect has chosen a strong team, “maybe one of the strongest our country has seen in recent years.” He said he does not believe Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon is a white supremacist, despite Bannon’s strong connection to the alt-right movement. He also does not believe that white supremacy is on the rise in this country.

“I’m more concerned about ‘fake news.’ We live in this age where people can create news and create issues when they’re not issues,” he said.

Graham endorses the idea Trump promoted through his campaign that Muslims should be vetted before coming to the United States.

He has questioned Obama’s openly Christian faith, saying that Obama’s frame of reference is Islam since his father was Muslim.

And Trump’s faith? “The times I’ve been around him, he has expressed his faith, no question,” Graham said. “I have to take the man at his word.”…

Few observers of the evangelical movement anticipated that Franklin Graham’s older generation of followers would be able to wield influence like they did in the 2016 election, said Darren Dochuk, a historian at the University of Notre Dame.

“I think people had assumed evangelicals had moved into a new dispensation, that younger evangelicals were shifting the balance in evangelicalism, becoming slightly more progressive on issues,” Dochuk said.

Trump is not what he seems. The supposed master of media manipulation stumbled so often at his first press conference, it is hard to recall why anyone thought the TV star was good at this stuff in the first place. It is even harder to think that Franklin Graham and the other evangelical Trump shills won’t regret backing this sad little man.

Since Billy Graham’s leadership, evangelicals have largely defined themselves by stressing a conversion experience, faith-driven activism, a regard for the Bible as the ultimate authority and a stress on Jesus’s death and resurrection. Does Franklin Graham even self-identify as an evangelical, a part of the movement his father helped shape?

“I’m just a follower of Jesus Christ,” the Washington Post quotes Graham as saying. “It’s hard to know what the word evangelical means anymore.”

Just so. It is also hard to know what the word “president” means anymore or for that matter the word “America.”

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Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

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Please read about my journey through then out of the religious right and Republican Party.

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