November 25, 2019

Rick Perry and “The Chosen One”

Tia Dufour/White House via ZUMA

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My Twitter feed has been full of mockery this morning aimed at Rick Perry for calling Donald Trump “the chosen one.” I finally got curious enough to find out what Perry actually said:

“Barack Obama didn’t get to be the president of the United States without being ordained by God. Neither did Donald Trump,” he said in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday, adding that God has used “individuals who aren’t perfect all through history.”

….The former Texas governor said he told Trump that some people “said you were the chosen one.”

“And I said, ‘You were.'”

“‘You didn’t get here without God’s blessing,'” he said he told Trump….Perry said he also cautioned Trump, “‘Don’t get confused here, sir. This is not a reflection that you’re perfect, but that God’s using you. And he uses all of us that way.‘”

So Perry is saying that Trump was “chosen” in the sense that God chooses all of us for our tasks on Earth. God is using Trump, and Trump needs to understand what that means.

One might hope that Perry could have been a little more direct about Trump’s imperfections, but this is just the way evangelicals talk. Perry is only repeating pretty conventional evangelical theology, not suggesting that Trump is the second coming of Christ or something.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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