Joy Reid accuses white Christian Iowa Trump voters of wanting people of color to ‘bow down’ to them
MSNBC host Joy Reid responded to former President Donald Trump’s victory at the Iowa caucuses Monday by condemning “White Christians” who support him.
As the results came in, Reid told the panel of hosts she wished to discuss a specific data point about “White Christians,” one she had discussed with Robert “Robbie” Jones, the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and author of “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy.”
She recounted that he had told her that Iowa is about 61% white Christian, whereas the country as a whole is approximately 41% white Christian.
She asked him why this specific demographic supports Trump, despite his history of electoral losses, and read Jones’ response, “They see themselves as the rightful inheritors of this country, and Trump has promised to give it back to them.’”
Reid expanded and told her co-hosts, “All the things that we think about, about electability, about what are people gaming out, but none of that matters when you believe that God has given you this country, that it is yours, and that everyone who is not a White, conservative Christian is a fraudulent American, is a less real American. Then you don’t care about electability. You care about what God has given you.”
Later in the show, she argued that this ideology cannot be separated from its religious ties.
“It is religion,” she said. “And I think what we have to actually confront – and this is what the Democrats are going to face – is this is now what white evangelicalism is. It is Christian nationalism. That’s the name of it, right?”
She then reiterated her earlier rhetoric from her talk with Jones that “white evangelical Christians of a certain mindset” think “that they own this country, that immigrants, that brown people, that Hindus like Vivek Ramaswamy and his wife are illegitimate Americans. They are less legitimate Americans than they are.”
She went on to say, “They’re not trying to convince people and win people over through politics. What they’re saying is, ‘We own this country, and everyone will bow down to us.’”
