Paul Manafort is famous for, among other things, working to rehabilitate the image and career of Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych is the authoritarian, pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who was ousted in that country\u2019s Orange Revolution<\/a>. Manafort is the guy who was hired to get Yanukovych back in power. He overhauled Yanukovych\u2019s image from clothes and haircut to people-skills, as this Slate article details<\/a>. Surely, the idea went, if Manafort \u00a0could sell Yanukovych, he could also sell Trump. Well, apparently not.<\/p>\n As for Stephen K. Bannon, he\u2019s the guy who took over Breitbart after Andrew Breitbart died in 2012. Breitbart is a right-leaning Internet news\/opinion site that\u2014under Bannon\u2019s leadership\u2014has been heavily invested in Trump since the early days of his campaign. The most notorious example came from March, when a Breitbart reporter (Michelle Fields) claimed she\u2019d been pushed and shoved by Trump\u2019s then campaign manager. Bannon sided with the Trump campaign against his own reporter. As a result, Fields, her editor, and at least two more Breitbart employees quit in protest.<\/p>\n An illuminating article by Clare Malone at FiveThirtyEight<\/a> details just how closely the fates of Bannon and Trump have been linked, crediting Bannon\u2019s decision to turn Breitbart into essentially the PR arm of the Trump campaign with a marked increase in the site\u2019s Internet traffic:<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear\u2014to say the least\u2014if Bannon\u2019s leadership in the campaign\u00a0will actually help Trump in the general election at all. In fact, the decision to retrench instead of reach out seems so counterproductive that many\u00a0are speculating that Trump\u2019s not even trying to win. Instead, he and Bannon are more interested in creating a news media empire to take on Fox News from the right. (This angle has been covered by CNN<\/a>, the LA Times<\/a>, Quartz<\/a>, and others.)<\/p>\n So what does this have to do with American Mormons?<\/p>\n Although it\u2019s highly unlikely that Utah, of all places, will end up being one of the deciding votes in this election, the fact that such a reliably Republican state has proven to be so reluctant to get behind Trump is making big news and embarrassing the Trump campaign. The mere fact that Trump\u2019s victory in Utah is in question\u2014a state where Bill Clinton finished third in 1992\u2014is a thorn in the side of Trump supporters everywhere. When you add in the fact that the #NeverTrump candidate, Evan McMullin<\/a>, is Mormon from Utah you can see why the Bannon\/Trump axis would consider Mormons as traitors to the cause.<\/p>\n And so we get articles like this one from Breitbart\u2019s Joel B. Pollak: Blue State Blues: Trump\u2019s \u2018Mormon Problem\u2019 is Mitt Romney\u2019s Fault<\/a> or this one from anti-immigration hawk Tom Tancredo (writing for Breitbart): Will the Mormon Church\u2019s Support for Muslim Immigration Block Trump\u2019s Victory?<\/a> The articles are not really coherent. Pollak blames Trump\u2019s \u201cMormon Problem\u201d on the fact that \u201cRomney\u2019s sway with fellow Mormons cannot be underestimated.\u201d Romney\u00a0attacked Trump and\u2014like lemmings\u2014we all fell in behind him. (Pollak condescendingly explains that this happens because \u201cEvery minority group has such icons, and rarely questions them.\u201d So, at least we’re not dumber than other minority groups out there, for whatever that’s worth.)<\/p>\n On the other hand, Tancredo\u2019s piece hinges on\u00a0the idea that Mormons won\u2019t<\/em> just follow their leaders. As he puts it: \u201cProbably 99% of Mormon citizens and voters can make that logical connection [see that \u201cradical Islam is the number one enemy of religious liberty in the world today\u201d] \u2014 even while their church leadership suffers an episode of moral incoherence.\u201d So there\u2019s no common theme about why<\/em> or even whether<\/em> Mormons will reject Trump in Utah. There is, however, some pretty clear groundwork being laid about where to place the blame if (as seems quite likely) Trump is defeated in November. (It won’t matter any more then than it does now that the actual impact of the Mormon vote on the general election is likely to be small.)<\/p>\n A lot about Trump\u2019s presidential run has been unprecedented. Frankly, it ordinarily wouldn\u2019t really matter at all if his followers adopted a particularly dim view of Mormons. That’s not going to be a new experience of us. But\u2014stepping back and looking at the larger picture of American politics\u2014the ascendance of the Trump\/Breitbart machine seems entirely emblematic of the increasing polarization (and deteriorating\u00a0seriousness and reasonability) of public discourse in American\u00a0society. If any of the speculation about Trump\u2019s long-run interests in competing with Fox turn out to be true, then\u2014even if he loses the election\u2014it could very well mean that we\u2019ll see a rising media conglomerate drawing a bulls-eye on Mormonism from the right<\/em>\u00a0of the American political spectrum.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s what I find most interesting. For decades\u2014much longer than I\u2019ve been alive\u2014American Mormons have maintained ostensible political neutrality while overwhelmingly finding allies on the right rather than on the left. Of course there have always been Mormons in American who found their faith led them in the opposite direction, but by and large the connection between Mormons and the conservative wing of the Republican Party has been\u00a0a given. It\u2019s too early to call that state of affairs\u00a0dead and buried,\u00a0but the arrangement had already come under stress before the rise of Trump as General Authorities\u00a0increasingly diverged from the right wing on the issue of immigration. Even if Breitbart\/Trump don\u2019t amount to much in the coming months and years, it may very well be that the underlying frictions between Mormons and the GOP continue to grow.<\/p>\n One way to look at this is pessimistic. Mormons are already, because of their staunch social conservatism favorite targets on the left. It fits with our never-distant fears of persecution to foretell an imminent future when we take just as much fire from the right.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s also an optimistic way to look at it. It\u2019s entirely possible that the alliance between American Mormons and the Republican Party has fostered a sense of complacency over issues where Mormons should not be complacent. There are areas where our theology and Republican policies seem to naturally fit (for example: emphasis on individual liberty and responsibility along with general social conservatism), but there are also areas where there is no such harmony. Two examples that come immediately to my mind are the environment (where Mormon doctrine emphasizes stewardship<\/em> as opposed to notions of dominance or exploitation) and mass incarceration. We live in a country that locks up an astounding proportion of our citizens and does so as a result of a War on Drugs that is racist and exploitative. I think Jesus had some pretty strong things to say about prisoners and “grinding the faces of the poor,” but the seemingly comfortable fit between Mormons and the GOP has (perhaps) prevented us from looking beneath law-and-order rhetoric to see what has really been going on.<\/p>\n I do not foresee a shift in alignment. American Mormons are not going to be driven en masse<\/em> by Trump from the GOP into the Democratic Party. The differences are too stark for us to find a home there. But we might start to question whether we ever should have taken it for granted that we had a home with the GOP, either. And\u2014if the result is a greater awakening among Mormons to divine injunctions to fight injustice and build a society with more protection for the poor and vulnerable\u2014then that won\u2019t be a bad development at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Believe me, no one wants to write about the Trump campaign (yet again) less than I do. However, events last week might have long-term consequences for the position of Mormonism in American society, and I thought it was worth a little bit of a look. The story starts with a major shake-up in the Trump campaign. As the NYT reported last week: Paul Manafort is out; Stephen K. Bannon is in. So, who are these two folks, and what do they have to do with Mormons? Paul Manafort is famous for, among other things, working to rehabilitate the image and career of Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych is the authoritarian, pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who was ousted in that country\u2019s Orange Revolution. Manafort is the guy who was hired to get Yanukovych back in power. He overhauled Yanukovych\u2019s image from clothes and haircut to people-skills, as this Slate article details. Surely, the idea went, if Manafort \u00a0could sell Yanukovych, he could also sell Trump. Well, apparently not. As for Stephen K. Bannon, he\u2019s the guy who took over Breitbart after Andrew Breitbart died in 2012. Breitbart is a right-leaning Internet news\/opinion site that\u2014under Bannon\u2019s leadership\u2014has been heavily invested in Trump since the early […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1156,"featured_media":35651,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/clare-malone-breitbart-market-share-11.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1156"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35652,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35650\/revisions\/35652"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"clare-malone-breitbart-market-share-11\"](\"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/clare-malone-breitbart-market-share-11.png\")
<\/p>\n