When Donald Trump launched his 2024 presidential campaign, many prominent evangelical leaders were wary of declaring their support. Others outright opposed him. But with just a few days to go before the Iowa caucuses, the former president seems destined to lock up the pivotal evangelical bloc in the Republican primary.
That likely outcome would erase more than a year of anti-Trump campaigning by Iowa’s Bob Vander Plaats, a conservative evangelical power broker who is backing Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Of course, disapproval from established evangelical leaders amounts to little when the laity so fervently backs Trump. A December poll from NBC News, TheDes Moines Register, and Mediacom found that 51% of Iowa evangelicals support Trump, nearly double the share backing DeSantis. And though Vander Plaats is hoping for something like a repeat of 2016—when Trump lost Iowa to the more evangelical-tinged Ted Cruz campaign—anything outside of a total Trump victory seems unlikely: He currently leads his closest competitors, DeSantis and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, by more than 30 points among likely Republican voters in the state.
Trump has also turned to a motley crew of loyalist pastors to boost his credibility, as noted by Axios. Opening for the GOP front-runner at a rally last month in Coralville, Iowa, Joel Tenney, a self-described evangelist who deems Christianity incompatible with the Democratic Party, told the crowd that reelecting Trump was “part of a spiritual battle” against demonic forces. “Judgment is coming,” he said. “When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”
Religious conflict is something that Trump has laced into his campaign rhetoric. He has said that if reelected, he will create a task force to combat “anti-Christian bias” in America. Jackson Lahmeyer, the Christian nationalist pastor of Sheridan Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has hailed Trump as the “best pro-Christian president.” Lahmeyer, who has compared Democrats to demons, is the founder of Pastors for Trump, a group that earned Trump’s blessing and adulation after it organized a national call to prayer ahead of his March indictment in the New York business fraud case.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, Ottumwa Baptist Temple pastor Travis DeckertoldThe New York Times he wants Trump “to get a second shot at it, another chance to just prove himself.” A 2020 election denier, Decker noted his dislike for “some of the language that Trump uses.” Still, he reasoned, “We’re not voting for somebody in church. We’re voting for somebody to lead a country.”
In California, we speak with NBA superstar Steph Curry and his wife Ayesha about their foundation, “Eat. Learn. Play.” which is giving millions of dollars to public schools. Then, in Washington, D.C., we meet a climate change activist who’s sharing her urgent message with her evangelical community. Watch these stories and more on “Eye on America” with host Michelle Miller.
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Hosted by Jane Pauley. In our cover story, Lee Cowan revisits a man who has beaten the odds on his diagnosis of ALS – and successfully lobbied for more research funding from Congress. Also: Mark Phillips sits down with Ridley Scott, director of the new epic film “Napoleon”; Kelefa Sanneh talks with 2023 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Chaka Khan; Seth Doane looks at the scourge of e-waste, exported from the West to the global South; Robert Costa interviews Atlantic writer Tim Alberta about his book on evangelical Christians and politics, called “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory”; and Martha Teichner checks out the art of gourd carving.
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Goodwill Church, in New York’s leafy Hudson Valley, is a special destination for The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta. This was where his family’s faith journey began. “There’s something so deeply familiar about this place, it’s hard to describe,” he said. “My parents always described this church as holy ground for our family.”
Tim’s father, Richard Alberta, was once a pastor on this pulpit, after becoming a born-again Christian here nearly 50 years ago. “I don’t know where he sat,” said Alberta. “I don’t know what the sermon was that day. But something happened: A guy who’d been an atheist for years, you know, decided that he was gonna give his life to Jesus.”
The Alberta family later moved to Michigan, where Tim’s father led Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church. “My life was completely wrapped up in the church,” said Tim. “It was the sun around which we as a family revolved. It was our whole world.”
Tim Alberta of The Atlantic, with CBS News’ Robert Costa.
CBS News
But Tim Alberta sought a career in journalism, writing about politics. His father urged him to stay grounded, including in a 2019 chat he’ll never forget: “He keeps saying to me, ‘Don’t spend your whole career around these people. There are so many other stories.’ And that was one of the last conversations we had.”
Days later, Tim’s dad suddenly died.
He recalled, “When I come home to my church, I’m expecting, I guess, something different from what I got.”
While some offered consolation, Alberta also got confrontation from some conservative church members objecting to his reporting on then-President Donald Trump. “A lot of folks right there at the viewing just wanted to argue about politics,” he said. “They wanted to know if I was still a Christian. And my dad’s in a box, like, 100 feet away.”
Costa asked, “The church wasn’t a sanctuary from politics; politics was now part of the church?”
“That’s right. I knew that, to some degree. And in fact, I willfully ignored it.”
Alberta’s reckoning with faith and politics is the basis for his new book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” which documents what he calls an “age of extremism” for evangelicals. “There was a real crisis in the American church, specifically a crisis in the white evangelical church,” he said.
CBS News
According to Pew Research Center, about a quarter of American adults (24%) identify as evangelical. And as the Republican presidential race heats up, 68% of white evangelicals are supportive of Trump. Alberta says that reflects a shift away from norms — in the GOP and in the church.
“We should think about the American church almost in parallel to American politics,” he said. “When it gains enough influence, when it gains enough power, the fringe can overtake the mainstream. And that’s what we’ve seen happen in the church.”
The convulsions in today’s churches come after decades of evangelicals gaining influence, from Billy Graham’s stadium crusades, to the stadium rallies of Donald Trump. In recent years, evangelicals have had heated debates over the response to COVID and to Trump, all while many key Republicans (like House Speaker Mike Johnson) count themselves as one of them.
At Goodwill Church, Senior Pastor John Torres (who used to work with Tim’s dad) is uneasy about the shadow of politics over his church and others.
Costa asked Torres, “What do people say about politics?”
“That it’s bad. That it’s dirty.”
“What do they say to you about politics?”
“Don’t get involved,” Torres replied. “I don’t want somebody who’s sitting there, listening to me preach, whatever their views are, I want them to stay put. I wanna talk to them about Jesus. I don’t want to talk to ’em about politics. ‘Cause I don’t really know what I can offer them in terms of politics.”
Other evangelicals don’t mind politics — and see this moment as an affirmation of hard-won power.
Worshippers attend a concert by evangelical musician Sean Feucht on the National Mall on October 25, 2020 in Washington, D.C.
Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Costa asked, “What do you say to evangelical leaders who might hear your argument and say, ‘You missed the point: Trump wins for evangelical Christians, he wins for conservative America’?”
“Wins what?”
“Supreme Court seats, a seat at the table at the White House?”
Alberta responded, “Show me where in scripture any of that matters.”
But it does matter to many of those standing with Trump as he once again seeks the White House. Alberta said, “You have millions of evangelical Christians who voted for Donald Trump and just sort of gleefully embraced his terrible rhetoric and his un-Christlike conduct.”
“Why did they ‘gleefully’ embrace it, to use your term?” asked Costa.
“Power,” Alberta replied. “Trump campaigned for president in 2016 promising that if he was elected, Christians would have power. He gave it to them. He gave it to them in ways that, arguably, no American president has in modern history. And when you have power, you can very quickly lose sight of your principles, your values and your beliefs.”
Alberta says that, regardless, today his faith has never been better. His faith in reporting is also strong, and he says that is his own calling.
“You and I, we’re reporters,” said Alberta. “We’re not supposed to be the story. I never wanted to be the story. [But] once you see this, you can’t look away.”
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Story produced by Michelle Kessel. Editor: Emanuele Secci.
When Tim Alberta, son of a born-again Christian pastor, was growing up, the church was a sanctuary from the world of politics. Today, as a journalist, he reports on how in recent decades political ideologies have divided the church, with white evangelicals becoming embroiled by politics and their support of Donald Trump. CBS News chief election and campaign correspondent Robert Costa talks with Alberta, author of the new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” who says the white evangelical church is in crisis, which coincided with the election of Donald Trump.
Former President Donald Trump called evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats a “scammer” on Saturday after he announced his endorsement of Ron DeSantis, noting payments the leader had received from the Florida governor’s 2024 presidential campaign and its associates.
Vander Plaats is an influential evangelical leader among Republican voters in Iowa, the first state to hold a race in the GOP primary cycle and a key target for aspiring candidates. On Tuesday, Vander Plaats became the latest notable Iowa public figure to endorse DeSantis for president over Trump, though the impact of the decision has been debated.
While DeSantis has long been Trump’s closest rival in the 2024 race for the GOP nomination, the former president has regularly secured 50 percent support in national polls, while DeSantis has lingered in the low double-digits.
In August, Reuters reported on the lengths DeSantis and his associates went in attempting to secure Vander Plaats’s endorsement, finding that the campaign, a political action committee (PAC) affiliated with it, and a nonprofit backing the governor’s candidacy had collectively donated $95,000 to the Family Leader Foundation, a nonprofit organization Vander Plaats operates. For the money, DeSantis secured “three pages of advertisements in a booklet distributed at the July [presidential candidate] forum attended by 2,000 Christian conservatives,” Reuters noted.
Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats is seen. Donald Trump on Saturday decried Vander Plaats as a “scammer” after he endorsed Ron DeSantis for president in 2024. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
Following the announcement of Vander Plaats’ endorsement of DeSantis, Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday to decry the evangelical leader as a “scammer” backing “a candidate who is going nowhere.”
“Bob Vander Plaats, the former High School Accountant from Iowa, will do anything to win, something which he hasn’t done in many years,” Trump wrote in the post. “He’s more known for scamming Candidates than he is for Victory, but now he’s going around using Disinformation from the Champions of that Art, the Democrats. I don’t believe anything Bob Vander Plaats says. Anyone who would take $95,000, and then endorse a Candidate who is going nowhere, is not what Elections are all about!”
During a recent Fox News interview, Vander Plaats confirmed the donations, but said his endorsement “has never been and never will be for sale.” He added that he supported DeSantis because he thought he would win the election and had the requisite experience for the role.
In an X post on Tuesday, DeSantis thanked Vander Plaats for his endorsement.
“As I’ve made my way through 98 of Iowa’s 99 counties, Iowans have shared what a critical role @bobvanderplaats plays in engaging Iowa’s faith community in the key battles that matter. His support tells Iowans they can trust me to fight and win for them,” he wrote.
Newsweek reached out to the Family Leader Foundation and the DeSantis campaign via email for comment.
Speaking with The Des Moines Register after endorsing DeSantis, Vander Plaats acknowledged that such support can only go so far in terms of influencing voters, but nonetheless expressed optimism. DeSantis has also received the endorsement of the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds.
“Endorsements only go so far,” he said. “I hope I can influence others, but there’s no guarantee on that. But I do believe, with Gov. Reynolds, with my endorsement, and with some of the others that I’ve talked about—all the legislators and county chairs that he has—I think he’s tailor-made to win Iowa.”
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Ahead of September’s U.N. General Assembly in New York City, thousands of youth activists flooded the streets of Manhattan, calling for the end of the use of fossil fuels. Among them was Elsa Barron, 24, a young Evangelical Christian looking to make change in her community.
Barron, a climate research fellow at the Center for Climate and Security, a non-partisan institute of the Council on Strategic Risks, told CBS News that she is hoping to change the minds of those in her church who don’t believe in climate change. A Pew Research Center poll from 2022 found that 53% of Americans say human activity is responsible for a warming planet, but only 32% of Evangelical Christians agree. That’s the lowest amount of support from any of thereligious groups surveyed, 45% of Christians said that human activity is responsible for a warming planet, and 50% of Catholics said the same. In general, Evangelical Christians are the most skeptical religious group when it comes to climate change.
“There’s a lot of emphasis on sort of God’s divine care for the world and his good plan for the world,” Barron told CBS News. “But some people kind of take that and say … ‘If you think the world is at risk, then maybe you don’t have enough trust or faith in God.’”
Elsa Barron.
CBS Saturday Morning
Barron tries to speak to her community the best way she knows how: by quoting from the Bible. With passages like Genesis 2:15, which says that “the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it,” she hopes to encourage peers in the church to look seriously at the impacts of climate change.
“What does loving our neighbors really look like in a world where the sorts of decisions are directly impacting people’s ability to live in their homes across the world, or to manage their crops or have food or water to drink?” Barron said.
Barron isn’t the only Evangelical Christian trying to make a difference. In November 2022, Galen Carey, the vice president of government relations at the National Association of Evangelicals, issued a sweeping report urging members to help curb or mitigate climate change on a biblical basis. The Evangelical skepticism around climate change, Curry said, started when the issue became politicized. In the 1970s, Evangelical Christians were early leaders in raising concerns about environmental degradation, but in the 1990s, political conservatives began to emphasize economic growth over environmental concerns by casting doubt on climate science.
“Well, very sadly, this whole issue has become politicized in an unhelpful way,” Curry said. “And they say, ‘Oh, well, if I am conservative then, or if I’m Republican, or whatever, then I must be opposed to this stuff.’ … I think that’s unfortunately where the issue is wound up for a lot of people. But we still have the Bible. It hasn’t changed. And so we continue to call people back to that.”
Barron said she can understand the skepticism: It’s something she once experienced. Growing up in Wheaton, Illinois, where Evangelical Christianity is firmly rooted, she said she was known as the “Creation Girl” for her strongly held beliefs and literal interpretation of the Bible. However, she was “very passionate” about science, and soon began to question some of her beliefs about evolution.
“I was starting to really see the evidence behind things like evolution or even climate change,” said Barron, who now lives in Washington, D.C. to work at the Center for Climate and Security. “It was definitely a moment of questioning for me, in crisis of whether I could still hold on to my faith at all. … Do I stay or do I go, because I didn’t know if I should go find a faith community that was more in line with my values. That was very much a turning point for me trying to dig in my heels and really have these tough conversations that I hope will inspire the kind of change we need.”
Barron said that her beliefs and attempts to change the church’s attitudes from the inside have caused some friction with peers and loved ones, including her own family. While her father recognizes a responsibility to care for the planet, he has doubts about the cause of extreme weather. However, she said she just tries to “keep opening spaces for conversation to happen” and work to meet those who doubt her message with compassion and kindness.
“We can solve this crisis in multiple ways,” she said.
That’s the sign that greeted my family when we first moved to Topeka, Kansas, the summer of my 16th birthday.
SOLDIERS DIE 4 FAG MARRIAGE, read another that was striped red, white and blue.
Dozens of people stood on the side of the road hoisting bits of cardboard overhead. Confused by their zeal, I watched from the window of our green Ford Taurus.
“What’s that?” I asked as Mom braked for a red light.
“Westboro Baptist,” she scowled. “I’ve seen them in the news. They’re even more sickening in person.”
Careful to avoid eye contact, I scanned the picketers. Kids younger than my 11-year-old brother were pumping signs above their heads.
“Aren’t we Baptist sometimes?” I asked. Depending on where the military sent us, we were Baptist, Presbyterian, Alliance, Lutheran or non-denominational. Between two countries, four states, and nine houses, we joined whichever local church followed the Bible best.
When the light turned green, Mom laid on the gas. “We aren’t that kind of Baptist.”
My brother twisted in his seat and caught sight of a sign. “What’s a fag?” he asked.
Mom and I exchanged glances in the rearview mirror.
“It’s a mean name for men who like men,” she said. “The Bible says it’s wrong, but these people take it too far.”
Love the sinner, not the sin was our condoned alternative — a line of thought more palatable, but just as dangerous in its subtlety.
Mom and Dad defined my reality. Growing up, I didn’t think to question or escape it. From as early as I can remember, television and toys were carefully vetted to match our evangelical Christian worldview. Mom said Rainbow Brite’s magic was evil. Barbies would give me an eating disorder. For reasons unknown to this day, fantastical blue creatures living in mushrooms somehow made the cut. When Dad said my Cabbage Patch doll walked to the kitchen to eat a hamburger while I napped, I believed him. It was easy to accept the way things were because I didn’t know anything else existed.
If I had to pinpoint the moment I realized something was off with my family’s line of thought, I’d say it was shortly after our brush with Westboro Baptist. I’d enrolled in public school for the first time in my life, and my teenage brain, with its expanding capacity for critical thinking, couldn’t shake a nagging set of curiosities: What if I had been born in a country where the primary religion was Buddhism? Would I be a good Buddhist instead of a good Christian? If I had been raised in a church like Westboro Baptist, would I be in Topeka’s Gage Park pumping a hate-filled sign over my head?
From there, my religion eroded in a steady stream of questioning. I didn’t shape-shift into a heathen, careening into alcohol, drugs and sex. As a socially awkward, shy teenage girl, I rebelled in subtler ways. I resisted traditional dating, read books about other religions, and pushed the boundary of my True Love Waits abstinence pledge with my long-distance boyfriend. The further I strayed from Christianity, the more I suspected the world and my place in it was bigger than I’d been told.
Parallel to my spiritual liberation, my family members experienced a transformation of their own. My parents divorced. My younger brother revealed he was gay. A year later, my mom told me she was in a life partnership with a woman. Nearly a decade after that, just when I thought I’d contended with the ingrained homophobia left over from my evangelical Christian days, I noticed what I then thought to be a disturbing trend.
Whether in appearance, mannerisms, or both, many of the romantic partners I attracted throughout my life had more feminine traits than typical for the average straight, cisgender man. Some people even mistook them for gay men. Or had I mistaken them as straight? Even in hindsight, I have no answers. Their stories aren’t mine to tell.
Nor are their limits mine. The rule of three was not lost on me: my brother, my mom, my own partners. How had I missed such obvious, significant parts of the people who were closest to me? And why couldn’t I figure out the sexual identity of the people in my own bed? It would take getting married, a grueling divorce and countless misadventures in dating as a young, single parent before I flipped the mirror onto myself and reflected on the bigger question: my own sexual identity.
The author with her mom and brother. “We all came out of evangelical Christianity and into our queer identities in our own time,” she writes.
Two years after my divorce, I did what I thought I’d never do: I went back to church. The spiritual community at the Unitarian Universalist church I found seemed especially suited for former evangelical Christians. They didn’t care whether a person was atheist, agnostic, Buddhist or Catholic. Dedicated to their common search for truth and meaning, they accepted everyone. Even Mom and her partner followed me to the makeshift pews of stackable chairs.
American paraphernalia dotted the stage the week of Independence Day. You’re a grand old flag. You’re a high-flying flag. The choir burst into a rinky-dink tune.
“This song reminds me of that boy next door,” I whispered to Mom.
She was perched in a chair to my left. Back in fifth grade, the boy next door had belted out the same song during his stint in chorus. Back then, rumor had it, he had a crush on me.
Mom swallowed a laugh. “He was so gay.”
The smile drained from my face. She got an irreverent kick out of the comment, like the juvenile thrill I savored when I told Dad I joined a church with Buddhists and atheists. Even so, I took her words to heart. Was he so gay? I hadn’t noticed.
Mom raised me to believe a person’s surface characteristics, like voice and affinity for sports or musical instruments, had nothing to do with their sexual orientation. I was fine being a middle-of-the-road type girl, dating toward the center of the masculine-feminine spectrum. But two years after my marriage had ended with such spectacular speed and force, the refrain hit me like a head-on collision right there in the middle of church.
My mind spun as the song came to a close. Lesbian? That would be easier. The world would know what that means, and Mom would be so proud. I had never felt sexual attraction toward a woman, but I almost always had a female best friend. Was I gay and didn’t know it yet?
When you see a pattern in your life, eventually you realize the common denominator is you. Mom didn’t fully realize she was attracted to women until she met her best friend. Some of my exes seemed to still be figuring themselves out in their 30s and 40s. Maybe something more was wanting to be known in me, too.
Shortly after that Sunday, I decided to take a break from focusing on the emotional and friendship part of dating that came so naturally to me and vowed to pay attention to what turned me on. I started by watching lesbian porn. In hindsight, for a person of my particular makeup, porn was a poor first step. Outside the context of a relationship and zero past experience with any gender other than cis men, this was not my recipe for clarity.
When a vegetarian woman at a Unitarian barbecue sat next to me on a bench and asked, “So what’s life like for you right now?” I paid attention. She was one of those people who jumped out of her skin and straight into my soul. Our friendship blossomed. I tried to imagine. If she weren’t married. If we weren’t straight. Still nothing. None of my questions yielded answers in the time I allowed them, because I was too scared.
Opening myself to examining my sexuality was like being 16 and terrified God would call me to be a missionary in a remote part of Africa. I’d heard the sermons. People died out there. Would I really do anything for Jesus? For truth? Wasn’t it enough that I woke up out of my marriage and all the norms that come with being partnered? Accepting nontraditional sexual orientations and gender identities in other people was one thing. Allowing them in myself, if they were there, would be quite another. What dangers and discomforts would I encounter if I lived as anything different than a straight, cisgender woman?
When faced with a choice to move toward or away from truth, I inevitably choose toward. It may take a while to orient myself to which direction forward lies, but eventually I found the courage to go: from religion to spirituality, from biological family to chosen tribe, from society’s definition of love to the inevitable heartache and confusion of forging my own.
To love in a new way, I had to get ruthless with myself and my preconceptions. What gender roles had I accepted by default? How vulnerable was I willing to become? How deep into the unknown was I willing to go?
In the weeks ahead, I quit looking to men for validation and belonging and opened myself to the love of my chosen family: my mom and her partner, her partner’s daughter and her fiancé, my brother and his boyfriend. I allowed myself to be radically at home in a tribe where more of us were united by love than blood and where we cheered each other on in our struggle to be ourselves.
The author and her life partner on their wedding day.
Today, I’m in a life partnership with a person who was present in my journey from the moment I began questioning my sexuality. I’m still learning how to be myself out loud. Bisexual, pansexual, demisexual, gray ace — all of these labels point to pieces of me. Much like no religion has yet to articulate the breadth of my spirituality, no label has yet to define the whole of my sexuality.
Instead of clinging to my search for answers, I’m learning to embrace the questions. I haven’t exited heteronormativity overnight. It’s been an intense struggle, one that has involved reading memoirs by queer authors and coming out as questioning while planning a wedding with my current partner, who identifies as a straight, cis male.
Calling myself anything but a straight, cisgender woman may sound heretical. I’m a 43-year-old remarried mother of two. But more and more, I’m claiming the word queer, which by my understanding is radically undefined. As progress, or lack thereof, plays out in our nation’s courts, I’m ready to make it known I’m more than an ally. I see these cages, and I want out — out from the us-versus-them mentality that’s wrecking our political landscape, our most vulnerable kids, and our capacity to love from the fullness of who we are. It’s time to say gay and shout from wherever we are in our personal journeys: We are all so much more.
Melissa Gopp-Warner is a creative nonfiction writer focusing on human relationships and their intersection with sexual orientation and gender. Her articles and personal essays have appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Banyan Review, The Writer, and elsewhere. While working on her own memoir, she promotes the genre through bimonthly book reviews of diverse authors and life experiences. Learn more at melissagopp.com.
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As the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway, those running for the Republican nomination are heading to Iowa for the “Family Leader Summit,” a traditional stop to address evangelical voters. One notable candidate will skip the event. Caitlin Huey-Burns reports.
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Former President Donald Trump won’t be among the GOP presidential candidates gathering in Des Moines Friday for the Family Leadership summit, which is expected to attract over 2,000 Iowa GOP voters.
Bob Vander Plaats, the president and CEO of the Family Leader, told CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns that Trump is “making a mistake” by skipping the group’s annual conference.
“He is choosing not to show up, and I don’t think it is just a smart idea on his part,” Vander Plaats said.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds plans to sign the state’s new six-week abortion ban into law at the summit Friday. Trump is also feuding with her because Reynolds won’t endorse him before the Iowa caucuses. She has said she won’t endorse anyone during the primaries.
Trump recently lashed out at Reynolds on social media, posting that he “opened up the governor position for Kim Reynolds and when she fell behind I endorsed her….now she wants to remain neutral.” In addition to endorsing her, Trump appears to be claiming credit for enabling her to win the governor’s race because he appointed her predecessor, former Gov. Terry Branstad, to be ambassador to China during his administration.
Vander Plaats also called out Trump for picking a fight with Reynolds. He told CBS News that Trump poses the “biggest risk” for Republicans “to not win back the White House.”
He argues candidates who are “right on the sanctity of life” are “going to get a lot of other issues right” and believes Iowans want GOP presidential candidates to express their stance on abortion clearly.
“We believe there is a role for the federal government — the big thing we’re looking for from candidates is what is clarity and message that we can trust that you will be a champion for the sanctity of human life,” Vander Plaats said.
He went to praise Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “the clear alternative right now” to Trump. Vander Plaats predicted that “if Trump wins Iowa, that’s it” but “if he gets beat here, then I think whoever beats him here, it’s ‘game on’ [for] the nomination.”
Unlike Reynolds, Vander Plaats said he plans to endorse a candidate in December, ahead of the mid-January Iowa caucuses and indicated that Trump was unlikely to receive his support.
“My fear is too much of American has made up their mind on the former president. They want a new generational leader,” Vander Plaats said. “For me, I do believe it is probably time that we turn the page.”
Donald Trump was just about 6,000 votes shy of winning the Iowa caucuses when he first ran in 2016. One key demographic — evangelicals — helped Texas Sen. Ted Cruz claim victory. Amanda Rooker, chief political reporter for CBS affiliate station KCCI in Des Moines, joins to discuss the former president’s campaign stops in the state Thursday.
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