Donald Trump Is Playing the Religious Right for Rubes

By James Kirchick, The Daily Beast

05 September 16

as there been a remark more illustrative of this wretched election than Donald Trump’s avowal, “I love the poorly educated!”? Uttered on the evening of his victory in the Nevada primary, this astonishingly candid admission went both ways, suggesting not only that Trump’s campaign is dependent upon a bottomless well of public ignorance, but that he is himself the most ill-informed major party presidential nominee in American history. Rare is the politician who would ever freely acknowledge the credulity of his own supporters.

Not all Republicans have fallen for Trump’s con job. The conservative movement in America can largely be characterized as an alliance of three interest groups: national security hawks, economic free marketers, and religious conservatives (mostly evangelical Christians). In different ways and to varying degrees, Trump has brazenly repudiated the core beliefs of all three. His denunciation of the Iraq War as having been predicated upon “lies,” repeated claims that NATO is “obsolete,” and coziness with Vladimir Putin’s Russia rightly render him unpalatable to Reaganite hawks. His mercantilism, protectionism, and opposition to entitlement reform are all major turn-offs for the party’s small government wing. Finally, Trump’s squalid personal life and vulgar character constitute a full-frontal assault on the “values” deemed so important by social conservatives.

Despite these many heresies, however, Trump has only been rejected by two of the movement’s three constituencies. With few exceptions, national security hawks and free marketers have stuck to their principles and refused to associate themselves with a campaign that has renounced decades of Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy and economics. By contrast, a bevy of religious right personalities have declared their support for Trump, a remarkable development when one considers the vast gulf separating their purported principles and those of the sybaritic former reality television show host. Nor is it just evangelical leaders who have endorsed Trump; according to a July Pew poll, 78 percent of white evangelicals have expressed support for him, compared to just 73 percent who backed Mitt Romney at the same time in 2012. The very voices who once bemoaned “the death of outrage” over Americans’ opposition to criminalizing Bill Clinton’s sex life now want us to believe that Donald J. Trump is morally fit to occupy the Oval Office.

Which is odd, because Trump is a living repudiation of everything religious conservatives claim to believe in. A thrice-married, epically greedy, congenitally dishonest serial adulterer who brags about his sexual conquests and exalts the rich and powerful while heaping scorn upon the weak and vulnerable, Trump is the villain of Sunday school parables made real. He worships not the Lord but material wealth. His entire life is a rejection of the Judeo-Christian nostrum that God put us on this earth to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Watching social conservative leaders line up to endorse this man’s presidential candidacy has the aura of religious allegory, a pageant of disingenuously virtuous fraudsters selling their souls for riches and power with Trump occupying the part of wealthy nobleman who purchases indulgences to absolve himself of worldly sin. A purported concern of many conservative evangelicals is that leaders have a personal relationship with the Almighty; Trump says he’s never asked God for forgiveness, which should hardly come as a surprise considering that he has probably never asked anyone for forgiveness, let alone a higher power.

To most leaders of the American religious right, however, the character of Trump, a 70-year-old man, is a work-in-progress. Gary Bauer, who as president of the Family Research Council in the 1990’s attacked Bill Clinton’s “virtue deficit,” has enthusiastically endorsed Trump (who, by Bauer’s standard, would have long ago defaulted on his virtue debt). Pat Robertson, who railed against Clinton as “debauched, debased, and defamed,” now fawns before an Orange god, telling him, “You inspire us all.” Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, who said Clinton should be impeached because he set a bad example for children when it came to “respecting women,” has joined the Trump train (stating that, because the nominee is only a “baby Christian,” evangelicals should “cut him some slack”) as has former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed. Jerry Falwell Jr., who recently tweeted a photo of himself and his wife standing alongside the nominee in his office next to a framed Playboy cover featuring Trump cavorting with a scantily clad woman, says that “Donald Trump is God’s man to lead our nation,” which goes to show that Christopher Hitchens’ observation about Falwell Sr.—that if “you gave [him] an enema you could fit him in a matchbox”—applies just as much, if not more so, to his son.

All politicians engage in insincerity, telling people things they want to hear and making promises they have no intention of keeping. Trump, however, does this to a ridiculous—one might even say, unprecedented—degree. And his latter-day conversion to social conservatism has been perhaps the most transparently craven aspect of the entire campaign. Perhaps the greatest whopper of the election (no mean feat) was Trump’s claim that the Bible is his favorite book. Once a man who boasted of being “very pro-choice,” during the primaries,Trump insisted (only to walk it back a few hours later) that women who have abortions should be punished, an extreme position that even hard-core pro-lifers are reluctant to endorse (paradoxically, Trump supports continued government funding of Planned Parenthood, a heresy social conservatives were unwilling to tolerate in every other presidential candidate).

Trump, a longtime supporter of gay civil unions, expects his social conservative followers to believe that he will appoint Supreme Court justices who will repeal last summer’s decision legalizing gay marriage. While evangelicals have welcomed Trump’s promise to protect “religious liberty,” their endorsement of him looks utterly self-serving in light of the fact that he has no respect whatsoever for the religious liberty of Muslims. Given his highly selective view of which Americans are entitled to freedom of religion, what makes Christians think they’ll be safe under a Trump presidency?

Thankfully, some religious conservative leaders and thinkers have proven resistant to Trump’s charms. Mormons, by and large, find Trump repulsive, a view that probably has something to do with their once having been a violently oppressed religious minority. Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore is an outspoken Trump critic, calling his campaign “reality television moral sewage,” as has Republican White House veteran Pete Wehner, who flatly says Trump “embodies a worldview that is incompatible with Christianity,” more specifically a “Nietzschean morality…characterized by indifference to objective truth (there are no facts, only interpretations), the repudiation of Christian concern for the poor and the weak, and disdain for the powerless.”

Wehner’s observation about Trump also serves as a damning verdict against his fellow social conservatives, whose embrace of the Republican nominee suggests they ultimately care more about power than anything else and are willing to sacrifice their dignity and principles in its pursuit. “I’m used to being the moral scold, but Trump is winning fair and square, so why should the nomination be grabbed from him?” says Bill Bennett, author of such titles as, The Book of Virtues, The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Collapse of the American Family, and The Devaluing of America: Fight for Our Culture and our Faith. Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently told Kirstin Powers of USA Today that, over time, “evangelicals were converted from values voters who care about the character of candidates to nostalgia voters,” upset over increasing secularization and racial diversity. Trump, while far from a model Christian, at least promises a return to this idyllic, mythologized past.

No doubt some religious right leaders would respond that, unlike hawks and libertarians, Trump has actually embraced their policy agenda by at least stating on the record he is now pro-life and would appoint conservative judges. Trump, however, is an inveterate liar and there’s no reason for social conservatives to expect he’ll keep his promises. Furthermore, by backing a candidate so obviously flawed according to their own standards (let alone those of mental health professionals), social conservatives have put a sectarian political-religious agenda before country.

That Trump would accede to the religious right’s dictates while refusing to compromise with GOP hawks and libertarians isn’t testimony to social conservative political power, however, so much as a demonstration of Trump’s correct reading of them as easy marks. In his Republican National Convention speech, Trump slyly acknowledged just how much he was getting away with in garnering the endorsement of “the evangelical and religious community.” “The support they’ve given me, and I’m not sure I totally deserve it, has been so amazing,” he said to some laughter. Trump appears to have concluded that the religious right is largely composed of hypocritical, power-hungry rubes. They’ve done nothing to prove him wrong.

Ignoring the Pentagon's Multi-Trillion-Dollar Accounting Error

By Dave Lindorff, FAIR

05 September 16

n 2014, the New York Times (10/12/14) ran a major investigative piece by reporter James Risen about several billion dollars gone missing, part of a shipment of pallets of $12 billion–$14 billion in C-notes that had been flown from the Federal Reserve into Iraq over a period of a year and a half in an effort to kickstart the Iraqi economy following the 2003 US invasion. Risen reported that about $1.5 billion of the cash, somehow stolen, had been discovered in a bunker in Lebanon by a special inspector general appointed to investigate corruption in the US occupation of Iraq. The article got front-page play.

Earlier that same year, the Washington Post (4/7/14) ran a story reporting the US State Department inspector general’s finding that during Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary, the State Department had lost records for or misreported some $6 billion in government contracts. (State claimed the money was not lost, just not accounted for.)

These stories are basic Journalism 101, the kind of bread-and-butter reporting on government that one expects from a major news organization. So how to explain that neither of these prestigious and influential newspapers—or practically any of the corporate media in the US, for that matter—bothered to mention it when the Pentagon’s inspector general this year issued a report blasting the US Army for misreporting $6.5 trillion (that’s not a typo; it’s trillion with a T) as its spending total for the 2015 fiscal year.

Now, clearly that number cannot be correct, since the entire Pentagon budget for 2015 was a little over $600 billion, or less than 10 percent of what the Army was saying it had spent.

Even if this were just an outrageous accounting error, it would certainly seem to merit a news article. But the IG’s office did not see it as a laughing matter. The 63-page report, released July 26 at the direction of Principal Deputy Inspector General Glenn A. Fine (the last IG left office in January and hasn’t been replaced), concludes:

The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management & Comptroller) (OASA[FM&C]) and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis (DFAS Indianapolis) did not adequately support $6.5 trillion in year-end JV adjustments made to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation. The unsupported JV adjustments occurred because OASA(FM&C) and DFAS Indianapolis did not prioritize correcting the system deficiencies that caused errors resulting in JV adjustments, and did not provide sufficient guidance for supporting system?generated adjustments.

In addition, DFAS Indianapolis did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System?Budgetary (DDRS-B), a budgetary reporting system, removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter FY 2015. This occurred because DFAS Indianapolis did not have detailed documentation describing the DDRS-B import process or have accurate or complete system reports.

As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and year-end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.

There’s a lot of jargon and a lot of use of DOD acronyms in there, but the key point that makes this story newsworthy is the last sentence (as well as the alarming bit about 16,500 missing records). If the Army is making up numbers—and that’s exactly what “unsupported adjustments” means to an accountant—then nobody, not a reporter, not a congressional oversight committee, not even an inspector general, can tell what allocated funds are actually being spent on, where the money really went, whether programs are cost-effective, or even whether funds were misused or stolen. And we’re talking about the single biggest department in the US government, which accounts for more than one-half of all discretionary federal spending each year.

When I called the Pentagon’s public affairs office for a response to the IG’s report, it was a week in coming. Finally Bridget Serchak, chief of public affairs for the DOD Office of Inspector General, emailed me this:

For clarification, these numbers reflect changes made in Fiscal Year 2015…. These adjustments do not adjust the budget amount for the Army. The dollar amounts are possible because adjustments are made to the Army General Fund financial statement data throughout the compilation process for various reasons such as correcting errors, reclassifying amounts and reconciling balances between systems. The general ledger data that posts to a financial statement line can be adjusted for more than the actual reported value of the line. For example, there was a net unsupported adjustment of $99.8 billion made to the $0.2 billion balance reported for Accounts Receivable.

Remember, this is just a report on the Army’s budget. It turns out that the same kind of indecipherable, fantastical and unauditable accounting is being done by the Navy, the Air Force and the Marines.

One news outfit that did report on this scandal is Reuters. Journalist Scot J. Paltrow first reported on the DOD’s doctored ledgers and inscrutable accounting in 2013 in a series of stories that culminated in an article published on November 18, 2013, headlined “Special Report: The Pentagon’s Doctored Ledgers Conceal Epic Waste.”

Paltrow also wrote a report on the latest IG’s report, published by Reuters on August 19, headlined “US Army Fudged Its Cccounts by Trillions of Dollars, Auditor Finds.”

Where the rest of the media took no notice of the Pentagon IG’s scathing report, preferring to focus instead on the report of another IG over at the State Department who had investigated Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s improper and illegal use of a private server in her home to handle her official State Department business, Paltrow homed in on the reason this is a big story. He went to a major Defense Department critic to explain:

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning.

The significance of the accounting problem goes beyond mere concern for balancing books, Spinney said. Both presidential candidates have called for increasing defense spending amid current global tension.

An accurate accounting could reveal deeper problems in how the Defense Department spends its money. Its 2016 budget is $573 billion, more than half of the annual budget appropriated by Congress.

The thing is, the Pentagon has been at this dodgy game for decades. In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring all federal agencies to comply with federal accounting standards, to produce budgets that are auditable and to submit an audit each year. At this point, two decades later, the Pentagon has yet to comply with that law, and therefore cannot be audited.

It is the only federal agency that is not complying or, the IG’s report suggests, even trying to comply.

One would think that would be newsworthy, but apparently for the major newsrooms of the US, not so much.

Edward Herman, noted media critic and co-author with Noam Chomsky of the book Manufacturing Consent, says the media love to report on Pentagon waste—things like the epic cost overruns on the F-35 boondoggle that still can’t fly in combat or a $600 toilet seat. That kind of story, he says “is something the media and public grasp easily.” Such reporting, he argues, “shows the Pentagon makes mistakes but not that it is massively looting the public coffers.” It also “shows that the media is on the alert in protecting the public interest.”

Herman says, “Repeated failure to report on a refusal by the Pentagon to allow an audit represents a major media failure, and one that is almost surely very costly to the general public.” He adds:

The failure to take up this important story reflects, at a deeper level, the power of the Pentagon and the unwillingness of the media or politicians to challenge it. Only power and the derived conflicts of interest can explain this remarkable ability of the Pentagon to avoid a legally required audit.<

Requests for comment from the New York Times and the Washington Post about their non-coverage of this $6.5-trillion Pentagon scandal went unanswered as of press time.