Vote for me this year, and you won’t have to vote ever again, Donald Trump told a group of evangelical Christians July 26.
The Republican presidential nominee was speaking at The Believers’ Summit, an event hosted by Turning Point Action, in West Palm Beach, Fla. Turning Point USA is among the most extreme of the Christian nationalist advocacy groups aligned with Trump and Trumpism.
“Christians, get out and vote. Just this time,” Trump told the group. “You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
He added: “I love you, Christians. I’m a Christian. I love you. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
“We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
Earlier in the speech, Trump said conservative Christians do not vote in large numbers: “They don’t vote like they should. They’re not big voters.”
That claim is dubious, according to years of polling research.
Roll Call reported in 2023 that white evangelicals made up an average of 25.4% of the electorate in the past 10 election cycles going back 20 years. That percentage of the electorate has held fairly steady, even as the percentage of the population that identifies as evangelical has been shrinking.
Roll Call also explained that the “high-water mark” for white evangelicals voting came in the 2020 presidential election (28%) which Trump lost.
Many other demographers and pollsters have explained that the white evangelical vote should be shrinking because there are fewer white evangelicals, so the steady rate of voter participation actually indicates more of them are voting, not less.
Trump’s comment that Christians never would have to vote again if he’s sent back to the White House this year set off alarms nationwide among those already warning that Trump intends to become a dictator.
Reuters published this paragraph that drew immediate derision from those warning of Trump’s desire for an autocracy: “It was not clear what the former president meant by his remarks, in an election campaign where his Democratic opponents accuse him of being a threat to democracy, and after his attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat to President Joe Biden, an effort that led to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”
Social media was ablaze Saturday with video clips of the speech and comments linking Trump’s odd claim to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-driven blueprint for putting conservative evangelical Christians in charge of everything if Trump is elected.
The New York Times asked Trump’s campaign for a clarification of what he meant. Trump spokesman Steven Cheung replied: “President Trump was talking about uniting this country and bringing prosperity to every American, as opposed to the divisive political environment that has sowed so much division and even resulted in an assassination attempt.”
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