John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Charlatan or saviour: What will Trump’s controversial new pastor [Paula White] bring to the White House?”

 

Oh, please, there is only one thing a “pastor” like this woman brings to the White House of a “president” like Trump.

America has an entire subculture of empire-building televangelists and monster-church pastors who really are in the business of creating illusions to scam people out of their money in the Name of the Lord. It’s a rather unique American institution, at least on the scale it exists in America.

This woman’s background puts her in the same camp as much grander past operators, such as Pat Robertson, Robert Schuller, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and Oral Roberts. So, of course, she’s very comfortable with a shabby figure like Donald Trump, just as he is with her.

Her sole purpose is to provide plenty of opportunities for stagey photos like the one you have at the top of the article. She’s a hired, roving photo-op for Christ.

Such images go down like cotton candy with the Religious Right, a group Trump counts on fairly heavily for political support.

In the case of this appointment, the pubic relations folks managed to hit two targets at once, the Religious Right and women, at least some women.

Trump has always been an irreligious man. Almost grotesquely so. That’s just an established fact.

But photos of this slight woman with her well-practiced sympathetic expressions looking up into his looming hulk of a face give pathetic believers something to fantasize over, her bringing him “to the Lord.”

Most of America’s huge flock of offering plate-chasing evangelists or pastors, like this woman, wouldn’t be able to contribute much of anything to anyone, except claptrap.