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If “garbage” refers to ordinary Trump voters — including many conservative evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox Jews — then news consumers who have been alive during recent campaigns are probably going to connect this episode with similar moments of candor by other Democratic candidates.
Remember this 2008 classic from Barack Obama, care of The Guardian?
Referring to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses, the presidential hopeful said: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
That evolved into “God, guns and gays.”
Or how about this 2016 New York City fundraiser line from Hillary Clinton?
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Jump in the time machine of your choice (I suggest this option, or this one) and check how religious conservatives responded to the content of those quotes.
Now, we have that vague “garbage.” Will this gaffe inflame any religious, moral and cultural conservatives who — after Trump team’s efforts to soften GOP stands on abortion and some other issues — may have been considering voting for a third-party nominee or even staying home?
This leads me to an essay that I recently wrote for the new website created by the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi: “Evangelicals again likely to give overwhelming support to Trump.” In that piece, I reused a typology that I created several years ago, while describing various “white evangelical” approaches to Trump.
In the podcast, I argued that the Biden rukus may affect SOME of them. Here is the key part of the Oberby essay:
Truth is, millions of white evangelicals will vote for Trump — again. But this doesn’t mean that their views of him are identical. After the 2016 election, I created a typology describing six kinds of “white evangelical” voters in the Trump era. Here is an updated version of those camps:
(1) Many evangelicals have supported Trump from the get-go. He’s their man and, if he is reelected, they believe everything will be GREAT.
(2) Others may have supported Trump early on, but they have always seen him as a flawed leader but the best available. They see him as complicated and evolving and are willing to keep their criticisms of his character and actions PRIVATE.
(3) Many evangelicals returned to the Trump tent when it became obvious that he would be the GOP nominee, again. They believe he is flawed, but they believe he can be trusted — at the very least — to protect their interests on First Amendment issues.
(4) There are many lesser-of-two-evils evangelicals who, while intensely skeptical about Trump, say that they cannot back Harris, with her fiercely liberal track record, under any circumstances. They remain convinced that religious conservatives must be willing to criticize Trump in public, for all the world to see.
(5) There are evangelicals who never backed Trump, and they never will. Many voted for third-party candidates in previous elections and will, again, or simply stay home.
(6) Finally, as illustrated by the press-friendly “Evangelicals for Harris” coalition, there are voices on the evangelical left who say, “No Trump, ever.”
No way that the “garbage” gaffe affects folks in the first two camps or the final two.
But what about the reluctant Trump voters trapped in the middle?
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