In a column that appeared on Townhall, former CBS News correspondent and current Fox News analyst Bernard Goldberg ran through a cluster of bad polls for President Trump proving he "embarrassed the country," and then championed a "good question" from Trump-bashing "conservative" columnist Bret Stephens, who recently joined The New York Times:
Trumpism wasn’t just some bottom-up movement. It, too, had its professors, politicians and journalistic commentators – the theoreticians, enablers, sanctifiers, excuse makers and Never Never-Trumpers – who gave the movement a patina of intellectual respectability and moral seriousness that Trump himself had done nothing to earn.
They are our new Antinomians, who believe the president and his administration are bound by no law, even the Mosaic one, because they have already been saved by a new version of grace – in this case, the grace of defeating Hillary Clinton. Thought exercise for Trump’s media defenders: If the president were to sexually assault a woman in the Oval Office tomorrow, would you still justify your vote on the view that Neil Gorsuch’s elevation to the Supreme Court made it all worthwhile?
Goldberg and Stephens are furious that conservative Catholics and Protestants voted for and defend President Trump. But they both miss the same thing that the Clintons did. They fail to understand how Trump's crass Access Hollywood tape was cancelled out by an opponent who tolerated a repeated pattern of sexual harassment (and even accusations of rape) by her husband. Conservatives were capable of decrying that tape and supporting the women who say Clinton harassed them. Conseratives are also capable of denouncing this president if it was proven he assaulted a woman in the Oval Office.
Goldberg and Stephens didn't ask the liberals how they could justify being angry at charges of a Republican president assaulting women in the Oval Office, when they supported Bill Clinton at every turn.
These Trump critics didn't quote any Christian leader proclaiming Trump was "bound by no law." But the religious right did believe that the dramatic erosion of religious liberty under Obama and the advances of a new LGBT orthodoxy in public policy might require them to choose a morally imperfect candidate who promised to resist the rapid changes sought by the libertine left.
