The first crack in Donald Trump’s support among America’s so-called evangelical community emerged in January as a prominent Christian magazine called the President’s conduct ‘profoundly immoral’ and said that he should be removed from office.
Up to a quarter of US voters identify as evangelical Christians and they have been a foundation of President Trump’s support. He took over 80% of these voters in the 2016 election.
Leading figures have stood by him ever since, as he appointed conservative judges to the US Supreme Court.
But in an editorial supporting impeachment, Christianity Today, which was founded in 1956 by the late Billy Graham, said: ‘The facts in this instance are unambiguous: the President of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the President’s political opponents.
‘That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.’ Trump, it said, was ‘morally lost and confused’.
The Illinois-based publication, which has 80,000 print subscribers, has been described as the ‘flagship magazine’ of evangelicalism.
On Twitter, Trump responded that it was a ‘far-left magazine’ which ‘hasn’t been involved with the Billy Graham family for many years’ and would ‘rather have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion and your guns … as President’.
He added: ‘No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close.’
Trump was backed by Franklin Graham, Billy Graham’s son and himself a prominent evangelist. He said it was ‘unfathomable’ and his father, who died in 2018, would have been ‘very embarrassed’ that the magazine had become a ‘leftist elite within the Evangelical community’.
The row came as a former White House official claimed Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, had personally convinced Trump that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the 2016 US election.
Fewer than half of Americans want President Trump removed from office, a Reuters/Ipsos poll claimed.
