US job growth continued to slow down in August, a sign that the labor market is deteriorating markedly.
The government also revised its numbers from earlier in the summer, and said the economy lost a net 13,000 jobs in June. It was the first such decline since December 2020.
I have mixed feelings about today's report. On one hand, it is distressing, a rapidly blinking warning sign against Trump's wrecking ball moves to the economy. But I am also somewhat relieved that it did not appear to have the MAGA, partisan bent I had been fearful that EJ Antoni, the Project 2025 architect Trump picked to run the BLS, would start applying to future reports. After all, Trump's firing of the former BLS head marked our official entry into his mad king era.
Of course, this could be temporary; Antoni may very well start meddling, say, next month. But for now, it appears he is reluctant, and I'll take any modicum of good-ish news these days.
Unfortunately, he is wreaking havoc in the real one.
BY KIERA BUTLER
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In October 2016, when an audio recording surfaced of Donald Trump bragging to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush that he could kiss and grope the genitals of any woman he pleased because he was a star, one of America’s most venerated evangelical scholars withdrew his endorsement of Trump’s presidential run. It’s impossible to overstate the impact of Wayne Grudem’s reversal. Pastors, theologians, and academics revered the Harvard and Cambridge-educated ethicist, co-founder of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and translator of the English Standard Version of the Bible.
Just three months before the tape was released, Grudem had penned an essay for the politically conservative publication Town Hall titled “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice.” In it, he wrote, “I did not support Trump in the primary season. I even spoke against him at a pastors’ conference in February. But now I plan to vote for him. I do not think it is right to call him an ‘evil candidate.’ I think rather he is a good candidate with flaws.” His first reason justifying this support was what Clinton would do to the Supreme Court. Three months later, after the tapes were released, he told the same publication that Trump’s remarks were “morally evil.”
Fast forward to 2020, and Grudem would do another U-Turn and re-endorse Trump. This whipsaw would become a pattern for evangelical giants.
Still, way back in 2016, evangelicals did hold to certain standards. Those were the days before the president of the biggest evangelical institution of higher learning, Liberty University, was caught literally with his pants down (well, unzipped) aboard a yacht and next to a woman not his wife. It’s worth mentioning that the disgraced Jerry Falwell, Jr., was also an early religious adviser to Trump. Both Trump and Falwell would feel the heat of evangelical opprobrium—and then be subsequently reinstated.
Trump did face a day of reckoning immediately after the release of the Access Hollywood clip. Pastor James MacDonald, then of the enormous Harvest Bible Church in Elgin, Illinois, and a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Committee, condemned what he heard on the tape as “lecherous and worthless.” What’s more, he publicly resigned from his coveted role on the campaign. The next day, the hugely popular Christian Post would report that a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll revealed that Trump’s evangelical support had “plummeted” by 11 points. Clearly, this wasn’t the end. Both Grudem and MacDonald would return to the fold and applaud Trump’s accomplishments. In a post-election interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Pat Robertson, Evangelical publishing titan, Steven Strang, of Charisma Media, pointed out that “God intervened” and evangelicals voted for Trump in record numbers, even though Trump was a guy “we didn’t even necessarily like.”
And so it all began. One of the maddening—and seemingly unanswerable—questions for many concerned Americans is how deeply religious Christian voters have remained so loyal to President Donald Trump despite his many divorces, relentless vulgarity, flagrant dishonesty, and conviction for sexual assault. And now with the recent controversies around the Epstein files, Trump’s friendship with the convicted child trafficker, and the vast conspiracy theories surrounding it all, this question seems even more urgent and baffling. How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?
How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?
To understand this frustrating phenomenon, one must appreciate that for white American evangelicals, Trump’s MAGA movement is, at its core, religious, which is how deeply religious voters experience it. Religious commitments don’t die or even change quickly or easily. What drives the MAGA-religious is passion, identity, and even something so transcendent that it elevates a believer’s consciousness to unshakable sublimation to the leader—there are no unforgivable transgressions, and that includes pedophilia and sexual violence. For them, the Epstein affair is a ruse ginned up by God-haters who want to bring down the man who embodies their hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, and their country. I know because, for much too long, I helped lay the groundwork for what is taking place today.
For over 40 years, I’ve been an evangelical minister, educated in evangelical institutions, serving in evangelical churches and organizations, and occupying top posts in evangelical denominations. I know my people well. My life and profession were devoted to advancing the Christian Gospel, but for 30 of my 40 years of ministry, I was also convinced that conservative political activism was an essential part of my calling. I attacked “liberals” from the pulpit and worked tirelessly to end legal abortion in America. It was a matter of faith for me and my colleagues that we were engaged in nothing less than a religious war, pitting right against wrong, the righteous against the godless, the Republicans against the Democrats.
But a few years before Donald Trump became president, I recognized how mistaken my fellow Christian nationalists and I were in conflating our religion with our politics. Some deep research for my late-in-life doctoral dissertation about the role of the German Evangelical church in supporting Hitler was the catalyst for a new conversion. I found myself almost looking in the mirror when reading about the unholy marriage of faith and politics and the catastrophic results of these compromises. I broke with my religious tribe and co-conspirators. Since then, I have been part of two very different worlds. One is occupied by (lower case “o”) orthodox Christians who believe the Bible is God’s infallible revelation to humankind and holds the keys to temporal and eternal happiness. The other is dominated mainly by skeptical secularists, who see some positive elements in religion but have concluded that American Christianity has mostly damaged efforts for social justice and undermined fundamental human rights.
Nothing since Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape was released has underscored the deep hypocrisies within my community as its reaction to Bondi’s Epstein decision, defying her earlier promise to disclose the perpetrator’s client list and everything else about him in the government’s possession that had been a hallmark in conspiracy theories about the so-called deep state. She made that promise to none other than Fox News, the top news source for white American evangelicals. There was also FBI director Kash Patel’s assurance included in an official DOJ news release that “we will bring everything we find to the DOJ to be fully assessed and transparently disseminated to the American people as it should be.”
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