The Daily Signal - Eric Metaxas on Faith and Supporting Donald Trump

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

Conservative Christians have been a core constituency for President Trump, and one of the more visible Christians supporting the president is best-selling author and radio host, Eric Metaxas. Our editor-in-chief Kate Trinko recently got to sit down with Metaxas to discuss why he supports the president, as well as his latest book. Today, we’ll share that exclusive interview. We also cover the following stories: Vice President Mike Pence announces a ceasefire deal with Turkey Rep. Elijah Cummings dies at age 68 Prime Minister Boris Johnson seeks to win backing for a Brexit deal The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet,iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, October 18th. I'm Rachel Dutas. And I'm Daniel Davis. Conservative Christians have been a core constituency for President Trump. And one of the more visible Christians supporting the president is best-selling author and radio host, Eric Metaxis. Our colleague Kate Trinco recently got to sit down with Metaxis to discuss why he supports the president as well as his new book.

Today we'll share that interview. And don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. Vice President Mike Pence announced a temporary ceasefire deal with Turkey on Thursday. giving Kurdish forces time to withdraw from northern Syria. Here's what he said, speaking at the ambassador's residence in Ankara, Turkey. Turkish side will pause Operation Peace Spring

in order to allow for the withdrawal of YPG forces from the safe zone for $120. All military operations under Operation Peace Frame will be paused. and Operation Peace Spring will be halted entirely on the completion of the withdrawal. That announcement came after emergency talks between the Vice President, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Turkish President Erdogan. President Trump hailed the deal as an amazing outcome that saved millions of millions of lives. Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings passed away on Thursday at the age of 68. his office says he suffered from long-standing health issues.

The congressman had served in the House since April of 1996 and most recently chaired the House Oversight Committee, giving him a major role in the current impeachment inquiry. Cummings was also a civil rights activist whose death has prompted an outpouring of goodwill from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat, said Cummings' death leaves an irreplaceable void in our hearts.

in our Maryland and in our Congress. Quite possibly no elected official mattered so much to his constituents. White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney spoke to reporters on Thursday, and during the Q&A, he appeared to confirm that the White House did hold up aid money to Ukraine, in part over a request to investigate whether foreign actors helped the Democrats in the 2016 election. Mulvaney said the president was chiefly concerned about giving money to Ukraine's government, which is notoriously corrupt. But then he added this.

That was, those were the driving factors. That he also mentioned to me in past the corruption related to the DNC server? Absolutely. No question about that. But that's it. And that's why we held up the money. Now, there was a report. So the demand for an investigation into the Democrats

was part of the reason that he ordered to withhold funding to Ukraine. The look back to what happened in 2016 certainly was part of the thing that he was worried about in corruption with that nation. And that is absolutely appropriate. We're holding the funding. Yeah, which ultimately then flowed. By the way, there was a report that we were worried.

One reporter followed up and asked this. Reason not to do it. And that was the legality of the issue. But to be clear, you just described is a quid pro quo. It is funding will not flow unless the investigation into the democratic server happened as well. We do, we do that all the time with foreign policy. We were holding up money at the same time.

for, what was it, the Northern Triangle countries. We're holding up eight of the Northern Triangle countries so that they would change their policies on immigration. By the way, in this... The stars just might be aligning for Prime Minister Boris Johnson to deliver on Brexit, a process which has been four years in the making. On Thursday, the British Prime Minister

and the European Union reportedly agreed to the draft text of a Brexit deal which members of Parliament will vote on on Saturday. If Parliament doesn't pass the measure, Johnson could call a general election, bringing the issue directly to the British people for a vote, according to the New York Times. Well, in keeping with recent trends, P. Research reports that Christians are making up a smaller portion of the population. A new report released Thursday shows that Christians have shrunk to 65% of the U.S. population as the number of so-called nuns increases. In the last 10 years, Protestants have gone from 51% down to 43% of the population, while Catholics have shrunk from 23% down to 20%.

Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated now make up 26% of the population. Among the youngest cohort, the millennials, only half say that they're Christians, while four out of 10 say they have no affiliation. Well, speaking of faith, even though it's shrinking, it still plays a major role in our public life, including in politics. Eric Metax says about that next. Well, as you may know, the Daily Signal is housed at the Heritage Foundation, the most influential think tank in America.

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and look for the section in the bottom right corner that says subscribe to email updates. Joining us from the Values Voters Summit is Eric Metaxus, the host of the Eric Metaxus show and the author of Many Books. Thanks for joining us today. It's my joy to be here. having me. Okay, so I know you get this question a lot, but there's been a lot of Christian support for President Donald Trump, and you've been very open about how you're a supporter of the president. What do you like about him? I like almost everything about him. He's, I would say, a very

refreshing figure in American politics. And of course, that's what makes him a disruptor. I guess his ability to see things slightly differently is what's most refreshing. His ability to look at an issue and say, why don't we do this? And everybody says, well, you can't do that. And he says, well, why not? You know, he has that side to him. And I think it served him very well in a number of ways. I guess for me, basic conservative values, you know, low regulation, low taxes, the life issue, the unborn, freedom generally. Those are things that I think are very quickly being pushed away because we have a culture that we've been so blessed with these things that we don't really know what they are. And I think under the last administration, under eight

years of Obama. I think a lot of people realized, holy cow, we're drifting very far from the Constitution and from basic American values simply because we're, you know, it's like the fish who's in water. He's unaware of the water. And I think that's part of the reason a lot of Christians turned to Trump because they somehow, they saw that somehow he gets this. This is not somebody we might have picked first, and there are still maybe many issues that we would quibble with. But honestly, getting that is so big. I think that his willingness to say things that you shouldn't say, to be politically incorrect, it's just so refreshing because we've been drifting in a certain direction.

I think Americans are usually very polite, and they put up with this kind of thing, just because they don't want conflict. But it eventually gets to a point where you say, holy cow, I have to call Bruce Jenner, Caitlin Jenner now, and I have to pretend that I don't even think that it's a man that I watched growing up as a great athlete. And that kind of thing, I think, has made some people uncomfortable. And especially when you get to the issue of religious liberty, that's actually the core. If you really want to know why a lot of Christians have supported him, is because to lose religious liberty in America is not simply to lose rights. It's not about

Christians are going to lose Christian rights. That's nonsense. It's about losing something so foundational, so central to the Republic, that you will eventually lose everything. It's like pulling a thread, and it's going to unravel the whole thing. And I really think that Christians have been the canary in this coal mine. They've seen that there's effectively the attempt to impose to establish a religion. It's a secular, humanist religion. But whenever you're talking about all, ultimate issues. You're talking about things like personhood. You're talking about sexuality. You're talking about marriage. These are foundational things that get right to the core of people and cultures. And when the government suddenly feels that it has the right to impose certain views, it is departing from the Constitution very radically. And we've seen that in the last 20 or so years. I think that part of the turn to Trump is, or the biggest part of it, is a reaction to that in a sense that we're losing something which we will lose forever. It's not the sort of thing that, you know, we can get back. It's not like the stock market. It's going to bounce up and down.

When you lose that, effectively, you know, it might be 100 years before you climb back out of that ditch. What I thought was really interesting about your answer was you brought up, of course, Trump's policies, which most conservative Christians would agree are good. But you also seem to really like his personality. And is there a time that you think in his presidency that his character or his way of approaching things came through in a very crystallizing way, a way that helped a lot? Yeah, well, I think for me it's a little weird. I grew up in Queens, New York.

So I'm a New Yorker. I'm a Queens New Yorker. I was raised in a working class environment. I grew up with people kind of rough around the edges like Donald Trump. So I really feel like I speak that language in a way that a lot of people don't. People in the belt way. people in certain social circles in Manhattan where I have traveled in certain educational environments.

I graduated from Yale do not speak that language and it's horrifying to most of them to try to make sense of what he says because it's like you're listening to somebody who talks like a comedian who talks completely differently in cartoon phrases and things and then you try to parse it as though it was spoken by an aide to Eisenhower. You really can't do that. You have to be able to hear him

correctly. But I'll tell you, I used to really despise this president. I was, you know, horrified by him culturally. I just thought that this is a man who is contributing to the vulgarization of the culture. And to some extent, I think that that was true. But when he was in the primaries, I began to listen to him on the stump. A friend of mine kind of rebuked me and said, hey, you need to give him a listen. I think you're missing something. He's like a folk hero. And I began to listen and I was shocked to hear him making sense on a level that was so simple that I thought, nobody talks like that. Nobody talks to the common man. People are always, you know, virtue signaling to their super intelligent, educated friends that are, you know, going to blog about it tomorrow or something like that. And I

thought that's really refreshing. But then I actually wrote a humor piece for the New Yorker magazine. Donald Trump was being asked about the Bible, and he gave some answers that were, it was kind of like the seventh grader who's trying to fool the teacher. And like somebody on CNN said, so if you had to go with the Old and New Testament, which one do you prefer, which is a completely idiotic question? And Trump looks at this person seriously and says, you know, I'd have to say, you know, I think about even. And I thought that's like the perfect smoke-blowing, you know, like the seventh grader who just wants to. And I laughed and I thought to myself, this is so funny because people are actually expecting this guy from Queens who grew up in the rough and tumble world of New York real estate to be conversant in the Bible.

And so it just the whole thing was funny. So I wrote a piece for the New Yorker called More Trump Bible Verses. And it was basically tweets in his voice of his version, his misunderstood version of Bible verses. And while I was doing that, because I've written a lot of comedy, you almost find a voice. It's almost like someone writing for a comedian. Like you find their voice and their rhythms. And so in writing, you know, I'm kind of a mimic. And so here I found myself kind of mimicking his rhythms and his voice.

and writing these Bible verses, which were Trump Bible verses, you know, silly stuff. I don't even know if I can remember any of them, but something like there's a Proverbs scripture, a good wife who can find, I found three. Like, stuff like that. Or, you know, where Jesus talks about, a man will leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife for a season, you know, like just kind of dumb jokes. But the reason I'm saying this is because in the course of writing this article for the New Yorker magazine making fun of Trump, I found myself having a kind of affection for him, almost like because he's a New York figure like Jackie Mason or Ed Koch or just this kind of New York schick. And that I kind of turned a corner where I allowed myself to like him.

It doesn't mean I approve of everything. I didn't suddenly decide I think adultery is okay. But I think when you vote for a president, you're often voting in spite of things. I mean, people who voted for JFK didn't know that he would routinely be bringing prostitutes into the White House. Presidents, you know, if they could be like Mike Pence, that would be a wonderful thing. But sometimes they are very rough on the edges. And I think you have to make a mature decision. You cannot be petulant and insist that you're, you're not.

you're going to get a candidate who gives you everything you want. And in case, I would say this, in case it's difficult, all you have to do is really fathom what a Hillary Clinton presidency would have looked like and would have meant for America. And I think at that point, you know, it's like sticking your head in a basin of ice water. You wake up and you say, look, I have no choice. I'm going to bet on this candidate. And if things go bad with him, it certainly couldn't go worse than it would,

with Hillary Clinton. I mean, I really think that that was a fact, and I think that there's serious danger to liberty in America on a whole number of levels. And so I allowed myself to have an affection for him, which I still do. To say, you are probably the first and only person who's become more fond of Trump when writing a New Yorker article. Isn't that bizarre?

That's amazing. Isn't that crazy? They're probably very sorry they commissioned it. Yeah, me too. Okay, so I want to talk about your book. We've got a copy out here in front of us. Donald builds the wall. And one of the things that I love about the cover is you have Trump.

You call him Donald the Caveman, and he's portrayed as such. So tell me about this book and how you got this Donald the Caveman character, who's also in another book of yours, I understand. I have to be clear. Well, first of all, and I'm large. I contain multitudes. And I've written a lot of comedy. I've written 30 children's books.

I'm known mainly for these large biographies that I've written. But I've written a lot of kids' books. I wrote for Veggie Tales. And when Trump was in the primaries, the friend of mine, who actually is the illustrator of these books, that's why the illustrations are brilliant, because he's brilliant. And he was the one that kind of convinced me to kind of take a look at Trump. And he kept saying he's sort of like a folk hero.

And I thought, wow, he's right. And so when Trump was elected, I thought Tim and I, have got to do another children's book based on Trump. And so we'd done other children's book in the past, children's books in the past, but we kept thinking, well, what would it be like? What would a children's book be like? And we settled on this idea of him as a caveman character,

and the first book is called Donald Drain's the Swamp. And ultimately, it's like a humor book for adults in the shape of a kid's book. Although it works as a kid's book because there's nothing nasty in it, it's not a vicious political book. But there's humor in it. There's characters in the swamp. You know, one of them has half glasses and cries a lot. Obviously, that's a Chuck Schumer type.

The central figure in the whole swamp, it's all dinosaurs. And the biggest, baddest figure in the whole swamp is the George Osoros. Feel free to laugh. But it's like there's all kinds of characters in here. It's a bipartisan swamp, so there's a turtle that looks a little bit like Mitch McConnell. You know, it's kind of, it's goofy. But what it does is it illustrates on the simple level of a fable, what does it mean to connect the people back to their government? What does it mean to be out of touch?

What does it mean to have a king that lives in the middle of the swamp? And he never talks to the people he represents. And he only talks to the people who live in the swamp and the people live in the swamp because they want to be near the king. And so Donald is this caveman. And they go to him and they say, hey, we never get to talk to the king anymore. He doesn't care about us. And so Donald says, well, yeah, I got some time tomorrow.

I'll walk down there. I'll check it out. So he goes down there. He talks to the swamp people. And of course, he discovers that the swamp doesn't look like a green swamp just because it's a green swamp, it's made of money. And he realizes that there's only one solution. They've got to drain the swamp.

But he's a builder of caves, and he says, it's no big deal. You just dig a big ditch, and the water drains out, and drain the swamp. So I'm giving you the basics. But it really is funny in the sense because it's so simple and so true, because you drain the swamp, everybody follows the money to the horizon. You know, flowers bloom, and the people now, of course, and here's the Philip for which you were not prepared. The people say, of course, hey, Donald, the king and everybody left, would you be our new king?

And Donald says, no, you are a free people now. You don't want a king. A king tells people what to do and they have to do it. A free people governs themselves. And they say, well, do you mean like they'd have a leader like a president? And he goes, well, yeah. And he goes, and if that's what you're looking for, I'm your caveman. And so he becomes the president who is elected to do the will.

of these people and the money is drained out of the swamp and you know so it's it's there's a lot of really goofy humor in it but there's a central basic concept of what is freedom what happens when money corrupts uh politicians and they're no longer in touch with the people so it's really basic so the sequel donald builds the wall they've been so successful the land of the free as it's now called is thriving uh the cavemen have invented the wheel they've invented uh fire they're starting to cook their food And so, of course, people want to come there because it's so wonderful. And some people come there who are not in love with freedom. They're just there to kind of get what they can get.

And they say, well, you know, you can't stay here. So they carry them to the border and say, until you're ready to be part of this liberty thing, you can't be. But the people keep coming back. And finally, Donald says, I've got a solution. Let's build a wall. There's a vicious gang called MSNBC 13. And there's a, see what you did there.

There's an orange triceratops that looks remarkably like Brennan. It's really weird. So there's a lot of goofy stuff, and there's an AOC character who says that the smoke from the fires is going to cause everyone to be extinct soon. And so she comes up with a plan called the Green Raw Deal. It's really silly, and I recommend it highly. So I have to ask, did you reject any other ideas before you got to caveman for Trump? Actually, no, I'll tell you why. Tim Raglan and I are real students of classic kids' books.

And there are some books from the 50s, I think, featuring kind of a happy go lucky caveman character. And he's just sort of funny. And there's something about, there was something about that that appealed to us. And of course, once we hit on that, we thought it's so perfect. Because he is kind of like a caveman. He's sort of rough around the edges, but he gets stuff done. Like he moves stuff around, you know, he's not, it's the opposite of, you know, the Hamlet-like Obama.

He's like, you know, brilliant and he says things, whatever. But this guy just gets stuff done. He sees a simple solution and he makes it happen. So, you know, it really is oddly apt, but we hit on it immediately. So to switch gears a little bit, I read during the 2016 election, which I don't recommend, your Bonhoeff for biography, does not put you in a good mindset for the election, but I wanted to ask you, how do you think we will view this period of time in 50 to 100 years from now? We'll all be dead in five years. Don't you pay any attention to the climate change stuff? We're not going to, we're not going to be lucky to get out of this podcast alive. Are you kidding me?

No, seriously, I think it's interesting because when I was writing the Bonhofer book, I got, I had a different takeaway. The reason I initially didn't like Trump was because I thought clearly in terms of his style in terms of his love of winning and power and that, you know, that kind of stuff. As a Christian, I don't find that appealing. There are elements to it. I mean, you have to be careful not to be, you know, sloppy about how you perceive things. But it did strike me that it was possible that he was what all of his detractors say that he is. But as I looked at it more closely, I realized if you know history, if you have any sophisticated sense of history, and of what totalitarianism is and what the Nazis were,

you must reject that idea as patently absurd. We have people cursing this president every day in the streets. If he were an authoritarian, he would squash them like bugs. Some of them ought to be squashed because they're very, very nasty people. But I have to say, no, we're in America. We have a separation of powers. People have liberties. and we have, you know, so many checks and balances that the idea that somebody could just, you know,

stumble in and suddenly take over and being authoritarian and stuff, it's ridiculous. And I would be the first to denounce that person. So on the contrary, I think the parallel that I see in the Bonhofer book has to do with, you know, what we would see today as cultural Marxist forces, people that don't agree even slightly with the American, experiment in self-government. They don't agree with it. They reject it. They think that it was founded on lies and slavery, and they really want to burn it down. And I think that those people don't play by the same rules. In other words, they're genuine fascists in the sense that they will do whatever it takes because they don't believe in quaint, antiquated ideas like civility and

liberty and due process. They don't believe in those things. And so I think that they're a real threat. And I think that in the same way in Germany in the 30s, the way there was this creeping cultural pressure that if you don't go along with this, if you don't reject plastic straws, if you don't if you don't go along with that, you're part of the problem, you're a bad guy, you'll lose jobs and you'll, you know, I think that that has come to America and it has increased under the last, in the last year with the Democrats sprinting leftward, it really is horrifying to see in the United States of America. But when people say, how could that happen in Germany?

Look, I'm not saying that we're going to get the death camps here, but I'm saying that there's a kind of thing that happens in a culture, and if you're sensitive to it, you see parallels. And I'm very sorry to say that most Americans are as ignorant of biblical values or the Constitution, as Germans were of biblical values and how a dictator might be dangerous. And all you need to do is take your eye off that ball for a few years, and horrible things can happen.

And so it strikes me right now, like with the NBA, being not even having the scintilla of a spine or the scintilla of any values to stand. up to totalitarian China, it tells you how important it is for us to teach what we know is true to our kids and to rehearse it in our culture and to remind ourselves over and over and over again how important these things are. Because if you're not sure what it is, someone will come in who is quite sure of what he believes and they will impose those values. And you basically see it happening in America today. I didn't mean to go on and on, but I had too much coffee. Well, and maybe I should clarify when I meant that reading the Bonhoeffer book was troubling during the 2016 election,

I think it was realizing that over the course of a relatively short lifetime, you can go from a secure country to a country that has, as you said, death camps and thinking about, wow, do I have the courage of my convictions if God forbid America slides that way? But things are looking up. But as you mentioned, there are a lot of cultural war things. You've brought up the plastic straws. I know you recently tweeted about the gender neutral dolls at Mattel. releasing feels like every week a Daily Signal we have a new topic to discuss on some political correctness and toys

or the like. Big picture here, what do you think we need to do on the future wars? Well, look, first and foremost, I'm a Christian and I think that there is something undeniable about this country

in terms of the connection between serious faith and freedom. I don't think I think it's wishful thinking that you can separate the two utterly. You certainly cannot legislate religion, and in fact that's the irony and the amazing thing at the heart of this democracy is that the strength of the faith in America,

the strength of virtue in this country, in the virtue of the American people, comes precisely because our founders were smart enough to know that you must keep religion free. You must not put the thumb on the scale. Nonetheless, they understood that. They do that in part because they're trusting the people when they're free to be virtuous

and to express their faith robustly. And so I have to say that ultimately that to me is the greatest hope for this country that people of faith will say, listen, this is real, this is, this is, what it's all about and all the freedoms we have and all that, they will go away unless we are able to practice our faith and to be free. It sounds a little bit like a tautology, but it is circular and cyclical in the sense that the two feed into each other. And look, Tocqueville talked

about it. We're not teaching that in American schools anymore, certainly not in public schools. and you think, well, why aren't we? Is this suddenly not true anymore that these things are inextricably intertwined? If we don't understand what religious liberty is, if we don't understand how freedom works, if we don't understand how self-government works, if we don't understand how the checks and balance works,

if we don't go over and over and over that, as we have done for nearly two and a half century so that people know what it is to be an American and value it and prize it and fight against those who are trying to destroy it, We are doomed, but I think that we've been given a reprieve in a sense. I think that this president, for all of his complicated issues, gets these fundamental things. And I think somehow, because he's such a disruptor, he's forced the other side to show its colors much more vividly so that we know what we're fighting.

And so I am hopeful. I wrote a book, which is not here called If You Can Keep It, where I deal with this very directly. I think that we have to be very intentional now, having almost lost most of this and understanding what it is that we have, what it means to be an American, why it's a precious, wonderful, rare, fragile thing. And I think we're beginning to do that. We've got a long way to go. But I am generally very hopeful. Okay. Eric Metaxis, the host of the Eric Metaxus show, and the author of Donald Builds the Wall. Thanks for joining us.

My pleasure. Thank you. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please do be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or PIPAA. And please leave us a review or a rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. Rob and Virginia will be with you on Monday. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

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