President Donald Trump’s religious-right allies are predictably responding to his impeachment by the House of Representatives with howls of outrage. Samuel Rodriguez and Johnnie Moore, two of Trump’s informal advisers and vocal evangelical defenders, were among the first to cry foul.
In a joint statement released after last night’s vote and reported by the right-wing site Newsmax, Rodriguez and Moore claim that “millions of Americans recognize that the House leadership is not actually impeaching the president of the United States but the policies and people that he represents.”
“The Democrats in the House impeached millions of God-fearing, family-loving and patriotic Americans from the Democrat and Republican parties,” the Rodriguez-Moore statement said. “God bless our country as we endure this political drama on the eve of the most sacred occasion of our envied democracy, the year of the presidential election.”
The letter from Rodriguez and Moore is a particularly florid version of a religious-right talking point: that the impeachment inquiry was really an attack on religious voters’ values. As Right Wing Watch reported in November, at one of the many gatherings of conservative evangelical leaders at the White House, Moore said, “Evangelical leaders see this, not as impeaching Donald Trump, but they’re trying to impeach me and my values.”
Rodriguez, who spoke at Trump’s inauguration, leads the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Last year, he and Moore teamed up to form another organization, the Congress of Christian Leaders, which has an international board and a vague public agenda. Moore is president of the group.
