The first month of 2020 has been filled with infighting over Trump among prominent evangelicals. “How do we pick up the pieces of the conservative party once he is out of office?”

It was the Monday before Christmas and Napp Nazworth was the only editor left on duty at the Christian Post. He was nearing the end of his nearly 10-hour shift, getting ready to go on his two-week family vacation, when he got sent one last piece to edit: an op-ed in support of President Trump written by two of the evangelical news outlet’s top editors. The op-ed by executive editor Richard Land and senior managing editor John Grano was a response to an editorial published at the Christian Post’s rival, Christianity Today. That editorial, by now-retired editor-in-chief Mark Galli, was titled “Trump Should Be Removed From Office,” and argued just that. Land and Grano disagreed. “One might well ask Mr. Galli how his obvious elitist disdain and corrosive condescension for fellow Christians with whom he disagrees … might well damage evangelical witness to an unbelieving world,” the Christian Post op-ed reads. “CT’s disdainful, dismissive, elitist posture toward their fellow Christians may well do far more long-term damage to American Christianity and its witness than any current prudential support for President Trump will ever cause.” This defense of Trump was a 180 from what Nazworth and his fellow Christian Post editors wrote together a few years before, when they published their first-ever editorial, titled “Donald Trump Is a Scam. Evangelical Voters Should Back Away.” Grano himself had published a piece before the last presidential election titled “5 Reasons Why Trump Is Dangerous for Evangelicals.” But Nazworth had watched this shift happen over the past few years, so he was not surprised. He sighed and began to edit the piece. “I didn’t agree with it, but I was fine with publishing it. I publish op-eds I disagree with all the time,” Nazworth, a self-described “Never Trumper,” told BuzzFeed News. But then his phone rang. It was the managing editor telling him they wanted to publish the piece as an editorial, as the Christian Post’s official stance. “I said, ‘You know I can’t support that,’” Nazworth told BuzzFeed News. “If you publish this as an editorial, it's like you're announcing to the world that the Christian Post is joining Team Trump.” The managing editor responded that that, more or less, was their intention, Nazworth said. (The Christian Post did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment). In response, Nazworth resigned.

Joe Raedle / Getty Images Faith leaders pray over President Donald Trump during an "Evangelicals for Trump" campaign event held at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami, Jan. 3.

From the beginning of Trump’s political ascent, influential religious leaders have taken issue with his character.

The man had never seemed particularly religious in his previous, very public life. He notoriously fraternized with socially liberal figureheads, porn stars, and Jeffrey Epstein, and donated to influential elected Democrats. Many prominent evangelicals believed he could not be trusted, that he was posing for their vote. “Trump claims to be a Christian, yet says he has never asked for forgiveness,” the February 2016 Christian Post editorial reads. “Trump is a misogynist and philanderer. He demeans women and minorities. His preferred forms of communication are insults, obscenities and untruths. While Christians have been guilty of all of these, we, unlike Trump, acknowledge our sins, ask for forgiveness and seek restitution with the aid of the Holy Spirit and our community of believers.” Over the course of his term, as Trump appointed conservative anti-abortion judges and justices and enacted versions of the policies he promised them in his campaign, many of the once-wary evangelicals kept quiet, and many have changed their tune. But now as the 2020 election approaches, the arguments of those skeptics have started to resurface. The questions faced by evangelicals who distrust or disapprove of Trump (anywhere from 36% to 42% of evangelicals of all races, depending on the poll) are about what he would do with a second term and how beholden he’d be to evangelicals who make up a good chunk of his base. “Trump has a long history in the public eye, his circle is well-known, and in that long history, he has only very recently included this large group of self-identified evangelicals, who now happen to form a large part of his base,” a prominent figure in the political conservative movement (who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely) told BuzzFeed News. When Trump doesn’t need them anymore, what’s to stop him from abandoning the issues important to conservative voters and handing the reins over to those members of his administration who are even less conservative than he is? It’s practically a given that Trump will have strong support among white evangelicals. Even if they disapprove of Trump’s character, the Democratic party’s stance on social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights mean many of them feel they have no one else to vote for. The question they are asking now is not how to defeat Trump but “how do we pick up the pieces of the conservative party once he is out of office?” as one conservative lobbyist put it. Some prominent conservatives who spoke to BuzzFeed News said that one of the first issues they could see Trump abandoning was anything related to the LGBTQ community. While his administration has enacted and pushed for policies that would disproportionately, negatively affect LGBTQ people, such as allowing government-funded institutions such as hospitals, schools, and adoption agencies to deny service or otherwise discriminate due to “religious or moral beliefs,” they see the issue as unimportant to Trump. “One thing Trump has been consistent about throughout his life is desire for acceptance. It’s an innate flaw he has — he has to be a strong man, he has to be the smartest man,” Shermichael Singleton, a conservative political strategist said in response to a question about Trump relaxing his stance on LGBTQ issues. Singleton’s sentiment was echoed by several of the people who spoke to BuzzFeed News. When the day comes that Trump is near the end of his presidency and preparing to return to civilian life, Singleton, who organized evangelical voters for Ben Carson’s presidential campaign, continued, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he softened his stances on some issues in a way that wouldn’t totally isolate the evangelicals, but would help him rebuild a rapport with some of his old friends on the other side.” Two of the people who spoke to BuzzFeed News pointed to a specific piece of legislation they believe Trump will allow through if he is reelected: the Equality Act, which would ban LGBTQ discrimination. The bill, which passed the House in May but stalled in the Senate, would "prohibit discrimination on the basis of the sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition of an individual, as well as because of sex-based stereotypes.” One influential conservative lobbyist, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to affect business relationships, said that if Democrats gained any seats in the Senate, the Equality Act would be an easy win for the left, and that Ivanka Trump would encourage her father to turn a blind eye to or even support the bill. “The Trump Administration absolutely opposes discrimination of any kind and supports the equal treatment of all,” a spokesperson for the White House told BuzzFeed News when asked for comment on this theory, “however, [the Equality Act] in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to undermine parental and conscience rights.” On the other hand, Nazworth told BuzzFeed News his opposition to Trump was not about what he might do in the future, but what he has already done. “He hasn't really done much for evangelicals other than the judges, which are very important, can't deny that,” Nazworth said, referring to the appointment of conservative Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and the more than 100 federal judges now confirmed by the Senate. “But the evangelicals are getting scammed — they're not really getting what they elected him for.” Trump made several promises to evangelicals when he was courting their vote in 2016, most notably that he would appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court, defund Planned Parenthood, and “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment, a provision in the tax code that prevents nonprofit organizations from endorsing political candidates. In Trump’s recent speeches to evangelicals, he has claimed to have accomplished all three of these goals. In reality, he has only accomplished one of them. While the Trump administration enacted a rule that prevents Planned Parenthood from receiving federal family planning grants, the organization and others like it still receive federal funding through Medicaid reimbursements. And though Trump has repeatedly claimed that he “got rid” of the Johnson Amendment, what he actually did was sign a somewhat vague executive order in 2017, which Trump’s own Justice Department confirmed in a court filing had no effect on the Johnson Amendment and was essentially symbolic.

Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images Trump arrives with Brett Kavanaugh for his swearing-in ceremony as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court at the White House in Washington, DC, Oct. 8, 2018.

In 2016, as Trump began winning over some evangelical leaders, earning the nomination and choosing evangelical Vice President Mike Pence as his running mate, several evangelical opponents stood strong, identifying themselves publicly as “Never Trumpers” and even having several in-person meetings to try and build support for an independent candidate. After Trump won the election and was sworn into office, much of that contingent grew quiet, waiting to see whether he would fulfill his promises to their socially conservative community. Some of them stayed in touch via a Google Group, sharing news stories and columns and having heated debates, but as they grew more divided in their opinions on Trump, the president became a topic they avoided.

In December, however, this changed. The discussion turned from whisperings at Christmas parties to a public battle after the Christianity Today editorial. In it, Galli argued that the impeachment hearings made it clear that Trump had abused his power by asking Ukraine to investigate a political opponent, and that he deserved to be removed from office, whether by impeachment or through the 2020 elections. “If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?” Galli wrote. “Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?” That strong statement coming from an elite member of a powerful religious and political group — one that is frequently cited as Trump’s main stronghold — was enough to spark some outrage, but the sentiment coming from Christianity Today, a magazine founded in the 1950s by powerhouse evangelical preacher Billy Graham, seemed, to some, almost sacrilegious. The response was an uproar. Nearly 200 evangelical leaders wrote a stern letter to Christianity Today opposing the anti-Trump editorial and saying it did not represent their beliefs. Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham wrote on Facebook that his father had supported Trump and would be “disappointed” in his own publication. And in typical fashion, Trump took to Twitter, inaccurately calling Christianity Today a “far left” magazine. The next day his team announced plans to host an Evangelicals for Trump rally, where he launched a coalition to solidify and expand evangelical support.

....have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President. No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close. You’ll not get anything from those Dems on stage. I won’t be reading ET again!