Trump would be ineligible to run for president in 2028 due to term limits (File)
Washington:
Former US President Donald Trump urged evangelical Christians on Saturday to vote en masse for him in November, promising to “aggressively” protect their religious freedom if he is elected.
The former leader, who rarely appears in church, built a crucial base among the religious right by promising — and delivering on — some of their biggest priorities, including appointing justices to the Supreme Court who helped overturn the federal right to abortion. .
“Evangelicals and Christians don’t vote as much as they should,” Trump told hundreds of supporters at a conference in Washington organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a conservative advocacy group.
“They go to church every Sunday, but they don’t vote,” he said, adding, half-jokingly, that “in four years, you won’t have to vote. I don’t call.”
Trump would be ineligible to run for president in 2028 due to term limits.
Evangelical voters were crucial to Trump’s victory in 2016 and again in his failed 2020 campaign, when 84 percent of white evangelical Protestants voted for him, according to the Pew Research Center.
Trump pledged to protect their interests on Saturday by promising to “aggressively defend religious freedom.”
“We will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, in our hospitals and in our public square,” he told his supporters.
He also promised to create “a new federal task force to combat anti-Christian bigotry” that would investigate alleged “unlawful discrimination, harassment and persecution” of U.S. Christians.
Nearly half (49 percent) of Americans believe that the influence of religion is declining in the United States and that this is a bad thing, according to a Pew Research survey published last month.
The number of Americans who identify as Christian has fallen from nearly 90 percent in the 1990s to less than two-thirds of the population in 2022, largely due to the growing number of people who are religiously unaffiliated.
For many white evangelical Christians — a conservative denomination that represents about 14 percent of U.S. voters — it is crucial that religion remains relevant in public life.
Trump told the crowd that the political left wanted to “silence you, demoralize you, and want to keep you out of politics.”
“They don’t want you to vote, that’s why you have to vote,” he said, adding, “If you vote, no, we can’t lose.”
Trump will face his Democratic rival, President Joe Biden, in the first presidential debate of 2024 on Thursday.
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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