Donald J. Trump, a twice-divorced worshiper of Mammon, called for “Christian unity” in an address at Liberty University on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“Christianity, it’s under siege,” the GOP front-runner said at the Evangelical college’s morning convocation. “We don’t band together. Other religions, frankly, they’re banding together … we have to unify. We have to band together, we have to do really, in a really large version, what they’ve done at Liberty.”
Trump promised that if American Christians unified behind his candidacy, they would never again suffer the indignity of having a Sears employee wish them “happy holidays.”
“If I’m president, you’re going to see ‘Merry Christmas’ in department stores, believe me,” Trump said.
The mogul further argued that “the Bible is the best,” though he had some difficulty in trying to quote it.
“Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame. ‘Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,’” Trump said, inspiring chuckles from an audience that knows that chapter of Scripture by its god-given name of “Second Corinthians.”
Trump’s preaching to Liberty’s choir comes as Texas senator Ted Cruz is narrowly out-polling him in Iowa, where Evangelical voters tend to pick the winner of the state’s caucus. While Cruz is a lifetime social conservative who launched his campaign at Liberty last year, the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., showed no lack of affection for Cruz’s formerly pro-choice rival.
“In my opinion, Mr. Trump lives a life of loving and helping others … as Jesus taught in the New Testament,” Falwell said on Monday.
But not all of Falwell’s students agree that the billionaire developer is Christlike.
“I’ve seen him talk the talk but not walk the walk,” senior Josh Neubauer told Politico. “How can you call yourself a Christian and denigrate other religions?”
Still, the New York Times notes that there were “a few scattered red ‘Make America Great Again’ hats among the students in attendance.”
While many presidential candidates have spoken at Liberty this cycle, including Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and amateur Egyptologist Ben Carson, only Trump could boast of drawing a record crowd — not because Trump’s crowd was actually larger, but because only Trump had the stones to take credit for attracting the school’s 10,000 students to a mandatory assembly.
But at least Trump had the decency to donate his fake achievement to a fellow man of faith: “We’re dedicating the record to the late, great Martin Luther King,” Trump said.
