David Quinn
President Donald Trump Every Republican president since and including Richard Nixon, with the possible exception of the first President Bush, has caused huge controversy.
Even before Watergate, Nixon was a controversial figure, in no small part because the US was embroiled in the Vietnam War, an entanglement begun under President Kennedy.
Reagan was controversial because of his hardline stance towards Communism.
The second President Bush was controversial because of his hardline stance towards Islamic fundamentalism, but also because he tore up the Kyoto climate change treaty very early in his presidency, something the Senate had rejected anyway.
You might see a commonality here. Republicans tend to deal with those they deem enemies of the US in a more aggressive way than Democrats typically do. Sometimes this has good results (Reagan’s anti-Communist stance helped to bring down the Soviet Union) and sometimes bad (Bush’s invasion of Iraq turned out to be totally misconceived).
Continuation
Donald Trump is to some extent a continuation of this Republican tradition of taking a harder line towards those perceived, rightly or wrongly, as America’s enemies. Thus, he wants to ‘destroy’ Islamic fundamentalism.
More controversially, he wants to defend America’s borders against illegal immigrants. He has temporarily halted immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries for security reasons (it’s an indefinite halt in the case of Syria), and he wants to build a wall along the border with Mexico and ‘make them pay for it’.
Protestors took to the streets in huge numbers against Nixon, Reagan, and the second Bush (each of them was re-elected despite this, Nixon and Reagan in landslides). They are doing it again, only earlier on, in the case of Trump.
Trump is the most controversial Republican president yet. This is not because of his policies only. It’s also because of his extremely provocative style and his very problematic temperament and personality.
What should Christians make of Trump? Certainly, it is extremely difficult to approve of his personal lifestyle. He is married for a third time having divorced his previous two wives, and his personal attitude towards women is deeply sexist and obnoxious as revealed by that notorious tape released a few weeks before his election victory.
However, this tape didn’t stop a majority of white American women, including very many Christians, voting for him, any more than Bill Clinton’s terrible behaviour towards women like Paula Jones, not to mention his wife, stopped women, including very many feminists, voting for him.
What explains this? I think it is partly because when voters assess a particular candidate they look at who else is available to vote for, and then vote for the one that is least bad in their view. Feminists voted for Bill Clinton despite his awful personal behaviour towards some women because they believed he would advance their agenda, especially on abortion.
Many women, and many Christian women, voted for Trump despite his appallingly sexist behaviour because they preferred his policies overall to those of Hillary Clinton. In particular, many liked his (newfound) opposition to abortion just as feminists liked Hillary’s staunch support for abortion-on-demand, in some cases right up to birth.
A little over half of Catholics voted for Trump. That is not to say they all voted for him, or against him, for purely, or even partly, religious reasons.
Economic factors
Many will have voted for or against him because of economic factors. For example, Trump won big support in blue collar, working class areas that have preciously voted Democrat.
This is because these voters believe the Democrats, and the Republicans up until Trump, have been happy to see their manufacturing jobs disappear to countries like China and Mexico. In fact, 80% of manufacturing jobs have been lost to machines, but blue collar voters still opted for Trump in the hope something would be done. Many of these voters would be Catholic.
If a Catholic was voting based on what their religion has to say about the common good, it would have been impossible to give whole-hearted support either to Trump or to Clinton.
Trump is now President, so let’s concentrate on him. On a relatively trivial level, few Catholics will approve of his overly provocative style, his lack of compromise on seemingly any issue, his win-at-all-costs approach.
Many will find his attitude towards climate change deeply objectionable.
All Catholics ought to approve of his support for the right-to-life, no matter how opportunistic it may be.
Many will approve of his desire to do the right thing by working class communities. If he manages to lift them up through his policies, it would be hard for Catholics not to applaud that.
However, as part of his efforts to help working class communities, he wants to curb illegal immigration, much of which is pouring over the border from Mexico. Christians believe in ‘welcoming the stranger’. Should this translate into support for open borders, no matter what effect open borders might have on the host society, including the poorest members of the host society? Christians can legitimately take up a variety of positions here.
Speaking for myself, I support strong border controls, I support a level of immigration that does not harm the receiving society, and I support controls on illegal immigrants. I believe Trump’s demand that Mexico pay for the wall is absurd, and absurdly provocative.
What about refugees fleeing conflict? The instruction to ‘welcome the stranger’ obviously applies here. But again, the rights and needs of the receiving society cannot be ignored. Care for the refugee has to be balanced with the safety and security of your own citizens.
Again, speaking for myself, I believe those claiming asylum should be properly vetted, but I don’t believe in Trump’s temporary ban. I think that was, like the demand to pay for the wall, unnecessarily provocative, not to mention unjust.
To sum up, I don’t believe any Catholic can offer whole-hearted and unqualified support to Trump. I think we have to take his policies on a case-by-case basis, and offer support or opposition based on our assessment of the merits or otherwise of his policies.
Sometimes Catholics in total good faith will disagree on what to oppose and what to support.
So far, I believe only his support for the right-to-life should enjoy our unqualified support.