I’m not sure how much more Trump-evangelicals conversation there is to be had

Plus: Mouseman furniture, the pink scandal of the evangelical mind, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.

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1. the rest of the first item

2. whodunnit? I don’t remember

3. Mouseman furniture

4. some recent work

5. the pink scandal of the evangelical mind

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1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

I’m not sure how much more Trump-evangelicals conversation there is to be had

(via)

I should start this with an admission of what is arguably hypocrisy: I have a Trump-evangelicals piece half-written right now, and the next time I email, or the time after that, you may well find a link to it in my list of recent work. But part of my argument there is the same as what I’m saying here, which is that this (currently) strikes me as a conversation that has (mostly) run its course.

My thinking may be colored by the fact that I am, personally, tired of this topic, as I wrote for Reason over the summer. I think I’ve mentioned … here? somewhere? (This uncertainty is an occupational hazard of airing one’s opinions for a living.) Anyway, I’m reasonably sure I’ve somewhere, sometime observed that an under-appreciated part of the media’s fixation on former President Donald Trump c. 2015-2021 was that he raised legitimately interesting and novel questions in a way that other politicians in recent memory did not.

This is basically the “horse in the hospital” theory of Trump’s relationship with the press: “It’s never happened before. No one knows what the horse is gonna do next,” and lots of stuff the horse does is undeniably thought-provoking, albeit rarely intentionally so. Trump’s various shenanigans produced a steady stream of can he do that? and how will X respond? and and they what? and he didn’t!—and one of the stream’s strongest eddies was anything to do with evangelicals.