http://time.com/4529433/inside-donald-trump-total-meltdown/?xid=newsletter-briefInside Donald Trump’s Total MeltdownAlex Altman @aaltman82 Philip Elliott @Philip_Elliott
6:48 AM ET
The call to gather went out Sunday morning, arriving on cell phones before many of the pastors had left their congregations. These 23 men and three women, all members of Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory council, had long ago signed on to pray for his vision for the nation. But now a scandalous recording from Access Hollywood was threatening to blow up the prayer circle.
From California to Florida, members of the group joined a late-afternoon emergency conference call on Oct. 9 to ponder the ugly spectacle of a 59-year-old man boasting about trying to seduce a married woman, forcing himself on others and getting away with it all because he was “a star.” It had to be an awkward moment for the faithful: Trump was bragging about sexual assault. “Grab them by the p-ssy,” the Republican nominee for President, now 70, was heard saying. “You can do anything.”
Seeking guidance in Scripture, they found a Bible abounding in useful scoundrels. One participant on the call noted that Jesus had befriended tax collectors and sinners. Another invoked the Old Testament figure Nehemiah, who served a pagan king, Cyrus of Persia, but leveraged the relationship to accomplish the holy mission of rebuilding the ancient walls of Jerusalem. Even an imperfect ruler might be the means to a righteous end.
And so the panel overwhelmingly stuck with the sinner, according to four people on the call. It was Hillary Clinton, not Trump, who worried them. “Can anybody say she is morally superior to Donald Trump? I don’t think so,” said Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, days later. “This election is not about Donald Trump’s past, it is about America’s future.”
This cold calculation induced cringes among many of their fellow church leaders. The editors of Christianity Today, a leading voice of evangelicals founded by Billy Graham, weighed whether it would profit the movement to gain the world at the cost of its soul. “Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater,” the magazine intoned, “and a singularly unrepentant one.”
As the 2016 campaign moved into its final weeks, Trump had put the whole country on the rack alongside the Christian conservatives, stretching the sinews of American politics to the breaking point. While some voters were tugged toward the wincing sophistry of the conference call, a larger number pulled disgustedly into the ranks of #nevertrump. The candidate himself was consumed by petty grudges. The furor over the leaked recording seemed to liberate him. Free of the “shackles”–his own tweeted word–Trump reduced his campaign to a primal grunt.
It sounded, at times, like the last gasp of the angry white man. Trump threatened to throw his opponent in jail, bragged of avoiding income taxes and peddled an empty conspiracy theory about undocumented immigrants’ being given voter-registration cards. He insisted he was right to stoke the racial tensions of New York City during the Central Park jogger drama in the 1990s, refusing to accept the DNA proof that he had the case wrong. He promoted a fiction that Muslim friends of the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorists knew their plans but failed to alert authorities, and he injected a crude Russian propaganda effort into one of his rallies without a care about its inaccuracy. Another tape (it wasn’t easy keeping track) caught him agreeing as a radio shock jock labeled his daughter Ivanka “a piece of ass.” Having congratulated himself for keeping the first presidential debate slightly above the muck, in Round 2 he plunged into the wallow, deflecting attention from his own vulgarity by saddling Clinton with the alleged sexual sins of her husband and trying to seat Bill Clinton’s accusers in the front row.
Trump once said on the campaign trail that he would approve of torture as President, “even if it doesn’t work.” With four weeks left to Election Day, he seemed to be testing the proposition on the public. Unshackled, he flirted with unhinged and erased the emollient line between a campaign aimed at the base and one intended to debase..........
