“Pro-family” activists worked hard to elect Donald Trump and other GOP candidates this fall. The nonprofit Family Policy Alliance, which partners with Focus on the Family, says it mobilized voters through 12 million emails in swing states and brought 850,000 new Christian voters to the polls.
“It was Christian voters who were the decisive factor in Trump’s win,” said evangelical pollster George Barna.
Now, those who labored to put Trump back in power are working to advance their social agenda.
James Dobson, who founded Focus on the Family, said he was “euphoric” and “very elated” over Trump’s win, and his ministry, the James Dobson Family Institute, “has high hopes that 2025 will see God restored to the center of our public life” and that Trump can bring about “the reformation of America’s government.”
“What’s happening here is an absolute flipping of the culture in a way that has not happened before.”
“What happened here is not just that our side won and the other side lost,” Dobson said in a post-election broadcast. “What’s happening here is an absolute flipping of the culture in a way that has not happened before.”
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said Trump’s governing trifecta — Republican control of the White House and both houses of Congress — should help in “making America strong and morally whole,” “making the world safe again” and “rooting out” deep state control of the State Department, the Department of Justice and the military.
A ‘mandate’ to shake things up
With some votes still being counted, Trump now has 49.9% of the popular vote compared to Kamala Harris’ 48.3%. Pro-family groups describe Trump’s 1.6% win as a “landslide” that brings with it a “mandate” for “disruption” and radical change.
PBS documented that Trump’s margin of victory is “smaller than any winner since Bush in 2000, when the margin was 0.51%. Going back further, only John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Nixon in 1968 won the popular vote by smaller margins, 0.17% and 0.7%, respectively.”
President of the Heritage Foundation Kevin D. Roberts (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Nevertheless, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, said: “The American people elected Trump again so that he could break what needs to be broken. So that he could get to the root of the problem and take on Washington’s bureaucracy directly.”
The Heritage Foundation is the creator of Project 2025.
Roberts said Trump has a mandate to clean house: “‘You’re fired,’ a phrase the president-elect made famous, should be his second term’s motto.”
Among the main shaker-uppers already are Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom Trump has named to leaders of a new Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE) for shot — which aims to cut federal spending by nearly one-third. Among their cost-cutting targets is any funding for Planned Parenthood.
“The organization may finally have met its match,” said Focus on the Family’s Daily Citizen. “Planned Parenthood, meet Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.”
“Trump could consider using executive action — instead of seeking Congress’ approval — to defund Planned Parenthood,” said Focus, which published a positive profile of Musk, whose PAC spent $200 million to elect Trump.
Planned Parenthood does not receive federal funding for abortions because of the Hyde Amendment.
Planned Parenthood reports that every $1 invested in public family planning funding saves taxpayers $7 in Medicaid costs. And currently, Planned Parenthood does not receive federal funding for abortions because of the Hyde Amendment, a rider attached to the annual appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services that prohibits the use of federal funds for abortion, with some exceptions. The exceptions include cases of rape, incest or when the life of the woman is endangered.
FRC’s Tony Perkins praised Musk and Ramaswamy’s plan in a post on X that suggested these cuts: “Defund Planned Parenthood. Defund international orgs at odds with our interests. Defund PBS/NPR. Mass rescissions of unconstitutional regulations that exceed the authority of the executive branch. Return the federal workforce to the office five days a week, which would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”
Restricting abortion
Restricting abortion remains a key issue for conservative Christian activists. Trump shied away from the subject in his campaign, and both he and Vice President-elect JD Vance said they would veto a national abortion ban.
Christan supporters are once again hailing Trump as the “most pro-life president in American history.” And they expect Trump 2.0 to deliver on unfinished business from his first term. Campaigning in 2016, Trump said this in a letter to an anti-abortion group:
I am committed to:
- Nominating pro-life justices to the U.S. Supreme Court
- Signing into law the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would end painful late-term abortions nationwide
- Defunding Planned Parenthood as long as they continue to perform abortions and reallocating their funding to community health centers that provide comprehensive health care for women
- Making the Hyde Amendment permanent law to protect taxpayers from having to pay for abortions.
FRC explained: “Now, eight years later, three of these four commitments remain unfulfilled.”
With access to abortion procedures restricted in many states, women have turned to abortion medications available by mail. Pro-family groups want to shut that down by reviving enforcement of the 19th-century Comstock Act and outlawing the shipment of any materials used for abortions, reported the Washington Post.
“Emboldened by the election results, antiabortion groups are planning aggressive new moves to end the procedure nationwide,” said the Post.
“Hysterical Feminists are Stocking Up on Abortion Pills Because Trump Won,” claimed one article written by FRC.
Education
Pam Bondi speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference meeting on February 23, 2024, in National Harbor, Maryland. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Policies governing America’s public schools and colleges may change under Trump’s nominee for Education secretary, Linda McMahon, who spent decades as CEO and president of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. and served as administrator of the Small Business Administration during Trump 1.0.
FRC says McMahon may be the leader who can help take steps toward their ultimate goal: shutting down the Education Department and “shifting more power to direct education to the states, thereby increasingly empowering parents:”
“I think that we need someone who is not a part of the educational industrial complex to be in charge of this department so that it can do the work that the American people want it to do until we try to shut it down,” said FRC’s Meg Kilgannon in an interview with Tony Perkins.
Transgender issues
This was an important issue for Republicans, who spent $65 million on anti-trans-themed ads that painted Democrats as wildly out of step with mainstream Americans.
Focus on the Family suggests Trump will strengthen the restrictions on transgender military members he put in place during Trump 1.0.
“During his first administration, the 45th president enacted a similar policy, but allowed other sexually confused military personnel to remain in their positions,” said an article on Focus’s Daily Citizen news site. “Sources suggest this latest order will be wider reaching, impacting upward of 15,000 individuals.”
The headline on that article read: “President Trump to Medically Discharge ‘Trans’ Soldiers.”
Pro-family groups also support the “Defining Male and Female Act of 2024,” a recently introduced Senate bill that would “codify the legal definition of sex.”
Trump’s appointees
So far, Trump’s cabinet appointees have received warm reviews from Focus on the Family, which has published positive profiles of three nominees:
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) answers questions outside the U.S. Capitol after successfully leading a vote to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the office of Speaker of the House October 3, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Focus never criticized Rep. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first nominee for attorney general, but supports nominee No. 2, Pam Bondi, who should be “more effective” that Gaetz. Bondi supports Trump’s efforts to use the Department of Justice to go after his enemies and has said, “Prosecutors will be prosecuted (and) investigators will be investigated.”
Focus says Fox News personality Pete Hegseth as defense secretary “will bring his military experience, educational accomplishments and his family and spiritual convictions to the Pentagon. Once approved, the veteran is also promising to rid the military of its increasing wokeness.”
Focus’ profile of Hegseth portrayed him as a model Christian, husband and father of seven but did not mention the extramarital affairs that destroyed his first two marriages or his support for service members accused of war crimes.
Focus supports Sean Duffy, a Catholic father of nine children nominated as transportation secretary. Duffy spent eight years in Congress and hosts a show on Fox Business.
“A strong proponent of parents’ rights, Duffy has opposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates, as well as any policies that infringe upon mothers’ and fathers’ absolute authority when it comes to the caring for and raising of their children,” said the Focus article.
‘Unhinged outcry’
Jim Daly
Dobson sees the 2024 election as a cultural flip that will help reform government and restore God to national life. But his successor, Focus CEO Jim Daly, claims liberals are the “radicals who practice their political ideology with religious zeal and fervor.”
“You can tell a lot about a person and their worldview by how they handle disappointment, especially the results of this past presidential election that saw former President Donald Trump defeat Vice President Kamala Harris,” Daly said.
He did not mention Trump’s perpetual lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, which resulted in his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
His article, “Unhinged election outcry reveals failed promise of secular salvation,” was published by both the Washington Times and Fox News, and described liberal responses as frenzy, rage, irrationality, meltdowns and hysterical outbursts. He claimed these responses illustrate liberals’ misplaced faith in political salvation: “The common denominator present in these titanic tantrums is that those having them have quite obviously placed all their hope in the hands of Big Brother. In other words, government, not God, is their savior. Politics is their religion — and they’re devout. For the radical activist, their dogma is not divinely inspired but legislatively drafted and crafted.”
Daly added: “They believe the right government policies will save us and solve all our problems.”
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