The Trump administration has not been as vocal about the situation in Myanmar, where a massive crackdown by the Buddhist-dominated military more than a year ago killed thousands of Rohingya Muslims. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo Foreign Policy Some see Christian First bias in Trump foreign policy A White House official called any suggestion of religious favoritism 'demonstrably false.'

Evangelical Christians came out aggressively for Donald Trump in 2016. As president, Trump has returned the favor, delivering for the Christian right — not just at home, but also overseas.

Trump defied international opinion and recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The White House rattled relations with NATO ally Turkey by imposing sanctions over its detention of an American pastor. Trump’s initial travel ban included exemptions for Christians. Senior administration officials have eagerly taken up a cause that happens to be a favorite of the Christian right: global religious freedom. And the State Department was quick to call the Islamic State’s persecution of Christians a “genocide.”


But for human rights activists, Democrats and even some Republican staffers in Congress, these and other policies appear to have come at the expense of other religious groups — especially Muslims.

Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem upset many Muslim leaders in the Arab world. Trump’s travel ban has been condemned for largely affecting Muslims overseas. The administration also has not yet applied the “genocide” designation to another well-documented slaughter of a religious minority — the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar.

“The sense that human rights apply universally doesn’t carry weight with most people in this administration,” said Sarah Margon, Washington director for Human Rights Watch.

Playbook PM Sign up for our must-read newsletter on what's driving the afternoon in Washington. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Even some supporters of the administration concede that its actions have created the impression that the Trump government favors Christians over other faiths, a perception fueled by the powerful influence Christian evangelicals wield in Trump’s electoral base.

“A lot of these policies and stances they’ve taken have been politically motivated to support the agenda of the Christian right,” said one person close to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “The perception issue — that should be a concern of theirs, yes.”

A White House official called any suggestion of religious favoritism “demonstrably false.” The official pointed out that Vice President Mike Pence — a main public face of the administration’s work on battling religious persecution — has decried the plight of numerous religious groups, not just Christians.

“Helping persecuted religious minorities abroad is a top priority of the Trump administration,” the White House official said.

For human rights workers, though, the case of the Rohingya has been a crystallizing moment. Some saw a stark contrast between the administration’s response to the atrocities in Myanmar and its response last year to the persecution of Christians by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

In the case of ISIS, top Trump aides were clear early on: They believed Christians were the victims of genocide, a designation with legal and political implications. While other groups, including Shia Muslims, were also covered by the designation, administration officials put a heavy emphasis on Christians.

“I believe that [the Islamic State] is guilty of nothing short of genocide against people of the Christian faith, and it is time for the world to call it by name,” Pence told a summit of Christian evangelicals in May 2017.

Although the Obama administration first declared that ISIS was carrying out genocide against Christians and other groups, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reaffirmed that verdict after word spread among Christian activists that the Trump administration might be reneging on the Obama-era declaration. Tillerson said he wanted to remove any “ambiguity” about where the new administration stood.

The administration has not been as vocal about the situation in Myanmar, where a massive crackdown by the Buddhist-dominated military more than a year ago killed thousands of Rohingya Muslims and forced 700,000 of them to flee to nearby Bangladesh.

A U.N. panel has already said that Myanmar military leaders should face genocide charges. Canadian lawmakers have reached the same conclusion. And the International Criminal Court is seeking ways to hold Myanmar responsible.

But Pompeo, who controls the administration’s deliberations on the subject, has not yet said whether he agrees that Myanmar’s military committed genocide. He has also not said whether the Rohingya were victims of the lesser, yet still serious, charge of “crimes against humanity.”

In theory under international law, declaring a genocide commits the U.S. to intervene or take punitive actions against Myanmar, but in reality U.S. officials have wide leeway in what they choose to do, if anything. Still, human rights activists say such a declaration can help the international community build a long-term legal case against the perpetrators and enhance efforts to funnel humanitarian aid to survivors.

“The fact that they haven’t made a determination yet on the Rohingya could add to the perception that they’re motivated more by their political base, in this case Christians, than the suffering of others,” Margon said of the Trump team.

“Every day that goes by that they don’t say this is genocide puts into question their claims that they’re not biased,” said Wa’el Alzayat, chief executive of Emgage, a Muslim activist group.

The Trump administration has not ignored the atrocities in Myanmar, where the Rohingya have faced decades of persecution. The State Department commissioned an investigation into the Myanmar military’s latest crackdown on the group, which began Aug. 25, 2017, with the bulk of the violence lasting several weeks.

The 21-page report , based on interviews with more than 1,000 survivors, described a litany of horrors Myanmar’s military inflicted on the Rohingya, including throwing children into fires. The violence, it said, appeared “well-planned and coordinated.”

But when it comes to placing a formal designation on the violence, the State Department is sticking with “ethnic cleansing,” a term that has little weight in international law.

Aides to Pompeo, who replaced Tillerson in late April, dispute the notion that the State Department’s different approaches to Christians under ISIS and Muslims in Myanmar indicated a religious bias.

“These are human beings with tragic experiences, not numbers on a scale from 1 to 10,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement to POLITICO.

And while Pompeo has taken flak from Muslim groups for past remarks they deemed offensive, the person close to the secretary insisted he’s not biased against the religious group. Instead, this person said, Pompeo is likely caught up in the legal nuances as well as the geopolitical implications of making a “genocide” declaration, knowing, for instance, it could undermine U.S. efforts to woo Myanmar away from China.

Some U.S. lawmakers are tired of waiting for Pompeo. Last week, a bipartisan group of House members, led by Republican Steve Chabot of Ohio, introduced a resolution recognizing the plight of the Rohingya as a genocide.

“Pre-planned murders, gang rapes, the burning of villages and many other gruesome and heinous crimes that cannot be discussed in a civilized setting make this self-evident,” Chabot said in a statement.

Activists trying to raise support for the Rohingya — among them some Christian evangelicals — note that Muslims don’t wield the same kind of political power in Washington as the Christian right. In their communications with the administration, many of those activists make sure to mention that Myanmar’s military also oppresses some Christians.

A senior Republican congressional aide said he couldn’t dispute that there’s a perception that the administration prioritizes Christians. He added, however, that the issues at stake are complicated, and that even for Christians to get the U.S. recognition of genocide under the Obama administration took months of political pressure.

Critics said that while Pence, Pompeo and others in the administration may mention a range of religious groups in their speeches, they tend to emphasize Christians in the language they use, the actions they take and the settings they choose. Few administration officials visit U.S. mosques to announce policy moves, for instance.

The critics also note that, in addition to being friendly toward Christian causes, Trump has expressed hostility toward Muslims, even proposing during the 2016 presidential race that they be banned from the United States. The president’s various versions of his travel ban, which also paused refugee admissions, affect primarily Muslims; the first one included a provision that effectively gave preference to Christians and other religious minorities abroad.

But Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, countered that the perception that Trump aides prioritize Christians might be spreading because past administrations rarely talked so openly about the plight of Christians abroad.

“It’s different because it’s never been done before,” Perkins said.

Pence, himself an evangelical Christian, has earned a reputation for appeasing that part of the Republican base.

“The vice president does not have an opinion about foreign policy unless it has to do with Christians,” quipped one Democratic congressional aide.

Last year, Pence vowed to speed up aid to endangered Christians in Iraq. When the vice president later drew criticism from lawmakers and Christian activists who said the aid hadn’t arrived, Pence leaned on the U.S. Agency for International Development to quickly announce new measures to help those groups. A career USAID staffer was reportedly kicked out of her position on what some colleagues suspect were orders from Pence.

The White House official described the $150 million in aid to Iraq as intended for Christians as well as other “persecuted minority groups.” The official also stressed that Pence was sympathetic toward all oppressed religious groups.

In a speech Thursday denouncing China, Pence mentioned the Asian power had created “a new wave of persecution” that “is crashing down on Chinese Christians, Buddhists and Muslims.”

The administration’s heavy focus on religious freedom happens to be a key priority of Christian conservatives, who fear for their brethren in places like the Muslim-majority Middle East.

Top aides like Pence and Pompeo speak regularly about the issue, often in settings dominated by evangelicals.

Pompeo recently discussed the subject at the conservative Values Voter Summit.

In his remarks, Pompeo raised the case of Andrew Brunson, the Christian pastor detained in Turkey over questionable charges of aiding terrorists. His case is a rallying cry for the GOP’s evangelical wing. Even though other Americans are detained in Turkey, the administration is most fixated on Brunson.

At the Values Voter Summit, Pompeo mentioned the persecution of groups such as Uighur Muslims to Baha’is and Zoroastrians. But the most significant chunks of his speech focused on the repression faced by Christians in places such as North Korea and Iran.

One group Pompeo didn’t mention? The Rohingya.