First up from the God Machine this week is a prominent religious leader who appears to have competing moral standards for presidents, depending on which party they belong to.
The Rev. Franklin Graham, a prominent Donald Trump supporter, told the Associated Press this week that he’s aware of the scandals surrounding the president, including the Stormy Daniels story, but he’s unconcerned.
“…I don’t have concern, in a sense, because these things happened many years ago — and there’s such bigger problems in front of us as a nation that we need to be dealing with than other things in his life a long time ago. I think some of these things — that’s for him and his wife to deal with. I think when the country went after President Clinton, the Republicans, that was a great mistake that should never have happened. And I think this thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody’s business. And we’ve got other business at hand that we need to deal with.”
The references to the Clinton impeachment scandal was of particular interest, because Graham’s current belief that the campaign to tear him down “was a great mistake that should never have happened” appears to be a recent revelation.
In fact, in August 1998, Graham wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he presented a very different message. Rather than dismissing the personal allegations as something “for him and his wife to deal with,” Graham argued at the time that allegations such as these were very much the public’s business. “[T]he God of the Bible says that what one does in private does matter,” he wrote.
Graham added, in reference to the then-Democratic president, “If he will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?”
And yet, here we are, nearly 20 years later, watching Graham’s ally in the Oval Office confront a sex scandal, and wouldn’t you know it, he appears to have had a change of heart. Now, evidently, the “thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody’s business.”
In the Associated Press interview, Graham added, “This isn’t behavior that has taken place since he’s been president. These things happened long before he became president. That doesn’t make it right. And I don’t defend those kinds of relationships he had. But the country knew the kind of person he was back then, and they still made the decision to make him the president of the United States.”
And that’s likely what much of the religious right and other socially conservative evangelicals tell themselves: Americans knew all about Trump’s lax standards, and so long as one overlooks the fact that he received fewer votes and relied on the intervention of a foreign adversary, Trump nevertheless became president. And so, bygones.









