Christianity Today Chief Editor Mark Galli said on Sunday that his call for evangelical Christians to back impeachment was “hyperbolic” admitting – to support the claim – that “the pro-life issue is just one of many” where President Donald Trump sees eye to eye with the faith group.
“In one sense my call for his removal was on the order of hyperbole in this regard: the odds of that happening by election or by the Senate are actually probably fairly slim at this point”, Galli told CBS News’ “Face the Nation”, admitting later, “I don’t have a strategy” and telling journalists: “You guys figure that out”.
In a disparaging piece published in the Illinois-based magazine on Thursday, the editor made the case for pushing Donald Trump out of his White house office for his “profoundly immoral” behaviour, just a little over a day after the president was impeached by the Democratic House majority. Mark Galli went still further, portraying Donald Trump’s Twitter feed as a “near-perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused” and “unfit for office.”
The scathing editorial served as an alarming signal to the president, who considers evangelicals to be among the core of his electorate.
According to exit polls, 81 percent of evangelicals (mainly white) voted for him in 2016, when they made up around one-third of all GOP voters and around one-fifth of all registered voters in the United States.
To address the controversy caused by the opinion piece, the presidential campaign announced on Friday that it would launch an “Evangelicals for Trump” coalition in early January to “bring together evangelicals from across the nation” who back his re-election.
POTUS, in his turn, addressed the claims on Twitter, in a typically outspoken manner branding the evangelical periodical a “far-left magazine” and claiming that “no president has ever done what I have done for Evangelicals, or religion itself”.
“I guess the magazine, ‘Christianity Today’, is looking for Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or those of the socialist/communist bent, to guard their religion”, he assumed with quite a bit of sarcasm.
“I won’t be reading ET again!” he added, misspelling the name of the magazine.
Donald Trump’s impeachment proceedings, after they were approved of by the Dem-dominated House, are expected to stretch well into the final year of his presidential term and coincide with POTUS’ unfolding 2020 campaign.
For the time being, the next stage of the impeachment process is due to take place in the Senate, with the upper chamber of the Congress due to either give what Trump has referred to as “a new round of a witch hunt” a green light or block it.