President Donald Trump’s declaration that the federal government now deems churches “essential” and they must be allowed to re-open immediately was unexpected, and a stunning display of yet another presidential power grab.
Asked to respond to the President’s remarks moments after being announced, Rhode Island’s Democratic Governor Gina Raimondo replied, “It’s been a while since I’ve been in law school but I don’t know of any executive fiat that he would have to overrule a particular governor, so I’ll have to look into that.”
She was correct: Trump has zero authority to order governors to allow churches to re-open, and zero authority to personally allow them to re-open.
But his impromptu appearance at Friday’s White House press briefing, during which he made his declaration that appeared to be plucked out of thin air, served an important goal: getting his religious right base back.
Politico reports that internal and external “polls paint a bleak picture for Trump, who has counted on broadening his religious support by at least a few percentage points to compensate for weakened appeal with women and suburban populations.”
Declaring there is “alarm inside his campaign,” Politico cited a “person close to the campaign” who “described an April survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, which showed a double-digit decline in Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals (-11), white Catholics (-12) and white mainline protestants (-18) from the previous month, as ‘pretty concerning.'”
Double digit drops from the most dedicated members of Trump’s base must be alarming for the Trump re-election campaign and the President, and that led to his Friday demand to allow churches and other houses of worship to re-open.
It hasn’t gotten better.
Politico notes that the “Pew Research Center released new data last week that showed a 7-point increase from April to May in white Catholics who disapprove of Trump’s response to the Covid-19 crisis and a 6-point decline among white evangelicals who previously gave him positive marks.”
All these developments mean non-Trump supporters may be about to go through an even greater period of difficulty.
“Part of the strategy Trump allies have adopted to protect his relationship with conservative Christians is to frame the novel coronavirus — and church closures in response to social distancing restrictions — as a threat to religious freedom,” Politico notes. “The president’s religious supporters routinely cite religious liberty as one of their top priorities and an area in which they believe the Trump administration has been exceptionally receptive.”