Trump’s Headache from the Right
“WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT RACE,” PHIL VISCHER says in a video posted June 14 on YouTube. The evangelical creator of VeggieTales, a children’s show that tells Bible stories using animated vegetables with names like Junior Asparagus and Pa Grape, tells viewers that Black households have one-tenth the wealth as white ones and delves into the history of Jim Crow laws, the “war on drugs” and “militarized police.” He talks about news media that scares Americans with images of Black criminals and teachers who favor white kids due to their “unconscious bias.”
Call Vischer the tip of the spear of what critics call a “woke” Christian movement whose members have not only embraced the language of the left but also its chief goal of defeating Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election. They’ll do so, some say, if they can convince as few as 2 percent of the evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016 to vote for Joe Biden in November. After all, he won in swing state Pennsylvania, for example, by just 44,000 votes, courtesy of white evangelicals. Pew Research indicates that Trump got 81 percent of the vote nationwide from white evangelicals in 2016, and his support in that group as of three months ago was at 82 percent.
But Vischer’s video can help chip away at that support, given that it has been viewed 8 million times thus far, and Vischer told Newsweek 90 percent of the feedback he’s received has been positive.
