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Closing with ‘values,’ Trump and Harris stand in contrast

In this election, invoking religion does not necessarily equate to caring about your fellow man

Protestors and supporters of Donald Trump gathered outside Madison Square Garden on Sunday, as the Republican nominee brought his closing message to New York City.
Protestors and supporters of Donald Trump gathered outside Madison Square Garden on Sunday, as the Republican nominee brought his closing message to New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The candidates for president of the United States and their surrogates are talking a lot about values, and demonstrating their very different interpretations of what exactly that word means.

It was a setting that recalled a horror many Americans have tried to forget, the place where former president Donald Trump incited a crowd that morphed into a mob to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In her closing argument in Washington on Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris, flanked by the Stars and Stripes, instead ended her speech talking about the values instilled in her by “family by blood and family by love,” the values of “community, compassion and faith.”

The Democratic nominee repeated her belief that “the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what separates us.”

Looking at the gulf that is the partisan divide in America, that may indeed take a leap of faith. However, it is a lot sunnier than the vision Trump, the Republican nominee, conjured up at his weekend Madison Square Garden rally in New York City.

When Trump said early in his first campaign for the presidency that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” it turns out he was right. It was appropriate those remarks were made at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa, a Christian college, since Trump’s most loyal constituency has been white evangelicals, who’ve stuck with him since then, no matter what.

“Compassionate conservatism” is so George W. Bush, a former president effectively banished from Trump’s GOP and replaced with a new brand of retribution and revenge.

It’s just proof that having religion does not necessarily equate to caring about your fellow man.

The nightmarish lineup at Trump’s New York rally offered insults toward Puerto Ricans, Jews, Muslims, Black Americans — every group except white, heterosexual, Christian men and I wonder why. Women, one woman in particular, came in for most of the bile. Harris was called the “devil” and the “anti-Christ,” in addition to the usual denigration of her race, morals and intellect.

Also taking the stage at Madison Square Garden was Speaker Mike Johnson, who wears his piety proudly, and he would be the first to tell you so.

Values? Well, it was clear that many in the cheering crowd, following leader Trump, see little value in Americans who disagree with their worldview.

Will it matter? At a rally in Charlotte, N.C., last week, headlined by Harris supporter former president Barack Obama, Latachia Coe told me, “If I don’t know what you stand for, how can you be the leader for the future?” The 51-year-old from Charlotte said she doesn’t let herself think of Trump at all. “His values do not align with who I am.”

Obama went down that road when he said: “One of the most disturbing things about this election, about Trump’s rise in politics,” he said, “is how we seem to have set aside values, basic values, not Democratic values or Republican, just basic values that we were taught.”

What’s especially disturbing is the way two failed assassination attempts have been used as divine proof that God is on Trump’s side, with profane rallies alternating, and sometimes sharing the same qualities with what seem like the tent revivals of old. Trump even has branded Bibles for sale.

In Concord, N.C., where Trump recently stopped after lying about the federal response in the storm-ravaged western part of the state, he said, “I like to think God saved me for a purpose and that’s to make our country greater than ever before,” linking the Almighty to a version of his campaign slogan.

In this, a secular country where people of all faiths or no faith are welcomed as equals, Trump promised a federal task force to root out anti-Christian bias. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham added his own prediction: To win the election, he said. “It’s going to be God.”

Instead of yelling, “Shame,” at the mixing of church and state, the crowd shouted, “Jesus!”

It’s striking that the one group often left out of these rallies is the least of these. It’s power not poverty when Trump goes to his kind of church, a place where the always-deserving wealthy rule.

It was quite the different message in a recent press briefing hosted by the Poor People’s Campaign, exploring the connection between poverty and extremism and the impact that low-income voters could have on the 2024 election.

The Reverend Dr. William J. Barber II, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, pointed out that low-wealth citizens would be the largest potential swing vote, if they voted at the same levels as other groups of Americans. But so many, he said, feel ignored by most politicians. He said that no one talks to them, they are not discussed in debates, they don’t hear their issues in ads or stump speeches.

And that criticism was for every party.

What’s important to them? Low-wage workers from West Virginia, North Carolina and Michigan talked about a federal minimum wage that is now stuck at $7.25 an hour, affordable and available child care and health care among the issues critical for them and their families.

Pam Garrison, tri-chair for the West Virginia Poor People’s Campaign, said being middle class, something she aspires to, would be a step up. “I’m sick and tired of these culture wars,” she said, distractions from what counts.

We still have mostly Republican politicians stalling an increase in the minimum wage, blocking summer programs that provide for children when the school break means an end to regular meals, and failing to consider environmental regulations when it’s poor neighborhoods that are most affected by that failure.

Those are a few of the reasons why Barber, despite his dissatisfaction with some of the Democratic Party’s policies, has, in his personal capacity, endorsed Harris. He told CNN: “There just comes a point that you have to say, ‘I’ve got to be clear as an individual and hope that other moral and religious leaders will do the same.’”

In the choice over whose faith and whose values, that’s the choice for all of us.

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, as national correspondent for Politics Daily, and is a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. She is host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. Follow her on X @mcurtisnc3.

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