 "Former US president Donald Trump. Reuters File")
Days after Louisana became the first state in the United States to make the display of Ten Commandments in public schools mandatory, former US President Donald Trump lauded the move and endorsed the idea.
While addressing a group of evangelicals, Trump said that influential evangelicals “cannot afford to sit on the sidelines” of the upcoming 2024 Presidential Elections. “Go and vote Christians, please!” he chanted, CBS News reported.
“Has anyone read the ‘Thou shalt not steal’? I mean, has anybody read this incredible stuff? It’s just incredible,” Trump said at the gathering of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. “They don’t want it to go up. It’s a crazy world,” A day before Trump made the proclamation, he endorsed the idea on his social networking app TruthSocial.
“I love the Ten Commandments in public schools, private schools, and many other places,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday. “This may be, in fact, the first major step in the revival of religion, which is desperately needed, in our country,” he added.
Trump’s strong base among the evangelicals
According to the Associated Press VoteCast, 8 in 10 white evangelical Christian voters supported Trump in 2020 and nearly 4 in 10 Trump voters identified as white evangelical Christians. In 2020, White evangelical Christians comprised about 20% of the electorate.
During the Saturday address, Trump pointed out that evangelicals and Christians “don’t vote as much as they should,” and joked that while he wanted them to vote in November, he didn’t care if they voted again after that. He went on to claim that Christianity was under threat by what he suggested was an erosion of freedom, law and the nation’s borders.
He also touched upon the migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border. At one point, the former president joked that he told his friend Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), to enlist them in a new version of the sport.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts“‘Why don’t you set up a migrant league and have your regular league of fighters? And then you have the champion of your league, these are the greatest fighters in the world, fighting the champion of the migrants,’” Trump described saying to White.
“I think the migrant guy might win, that’s how tough they are. He didn’t like that idea too much,” he added. Later that day Trump also held an evening rally in Philadelphia.
With inputs from agencies.