During a Sunday, September 21 memorial for Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, a speech from his widow, Erika Kirk, was followed by a speech from President Donald Trump — who told attendees that unlike her, "I hate my opponents."
The following day on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," host Joe Scarborough discussed Trump's call for revenge with one of his guests: New York Times columnist and fellow Never Trump conservative David French, who warned that the obsession with revenge is one of the things white evangelical Christians like about Trump.
French told Scarborough, a former GOP congressman, "You have, on the one hand, a church that will rise and rightly applaud the incredible words of Erika Kirk and then turn around and happily go to the polls not in spite of Trump's vengeance, but because of Trump's sense of vengeance….. If you've been paying attention to American religion and American politics over the last decade, it wouldn't surprise you to see that Erika Kirk speech and to hear the applause and then to hear the Donald Trump speech and hear the laughter and applause to that as well — and realize that, in many ways, that is what politics is doing to American Christianity."
French continued, "It is creating this face of vengeance. Because Americans know he has the power to work his vengeance because of the church. It is the church that put him into office — the evangelical church — more than any other American constituency. And so, what we watched unfold in front of us — when he spoke like that, this wasn't in contradiction of what so many Christians wanted out of their president here. It is exactly why so many Christians voted for this president…. That is the frustrating complexity of what is happening in this moment."
Scarborough, who was raised Baptist in the South, argued that the vengeance theme of Trump's speech was a major contrast to what former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) — a vehement critic of Trump — said about the U.S. president.
Scarborough told French, "This takes me back to practicing Catholic Nancy Pelosi saying that she prayed for Donald Trump every day. As Jesus commanded us in Matthew 5, you love your enemies. You pray for those who persecute you."