Jerry Falwell Jr. is a Religious Leader Alright, But for What Religion?

Jerry Falwell Jr. and Jeff Sessions speak to students at Liberty University in November, 2016.

On Thursday morning, Jerry Falwell Jr., apparently fresh off a night on the town with the other Jr., launched a tweet attack on Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It… did not go well for him.

Here’s the original tweet.

Strangely @jeffsessions appeared unannounced at @LibertyU the night before the 2016 election on a bus tour. I told students but could get almost none of them to come hear him. Could it be our students were the first to see he was a phony pretending to be pro- @realDonaldTrump ?

— Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) August 2, 2018

Obviously, this was prompted by President Donald Trump‘s own spleen-vent on Wednesday as he applied intense political pressure on the AG, deliberately and with intent, to step in and fire Robert Mueller and the rest of the investigators conducting the Special Counsel’s probe. It was pressure he exerted while skirting any legal ramifications, ass-covered by his lawyers, and firmly executed and propagated by surrogates like Newt Gingrich, who all but came right out and said that the only thing preventing Sessions taking action was a lack of loyalty.

And thus we come to pseudo-surrogate Jerry Falwell Jr., President of Liberty University by title, lapdog of President Trump in function.

Falwell Two considers himself an evangelical leader, if not a man of the cloth, though it is a struggle to see on what front he is leading anything religious in the United States other than the rhapsodic devotion of Trumpist true believers. His pastime simulating a University head barely breaks into the public sphere, but his Fox News hits and many, many quotes in right-wing and Trumpian blogs get him the attention he craves from the public, if not quite the doggy treat he is desperately seeking from Master.

Let’s break down the tweet.

“Strangely @jeffsessions appeared unannounced at @LibertyU the night before the 2016 election on a bus tour.”

“Strangely,” he says. At the time, Sessions was a top Trump supporter and a major face of the campaign. He was among the first of the prominent Republicans to endorse Trump. He was stumping for Trump on that bus tour. The campaign considered evangelicals, correctly, to be one of their core bases of support. Stopping at Liberty was an endorsement of the University as a leading evangelical platform. Why would him stopping by be strange? What exactly is strange about it?

“I told students but could get almost none of them to come hear him.”

So wait, his assertion is that *gasp* college students didn’t show up to hear a previously unannounced political speech on a school night?

OH. MY. WORD.

“Could it be our students were the first to see he was a phony pretending to be pro- @realDonaldTrump ?”

And here we get to the meat, and the true heart of the matter. In fact, it is the beating heart of every dyed-in-the-wool Trump zealot. What Falwell Part Deux is accusing Sessions of is being a “phony” supporter. Well, what is a real one? What makes one not phony?

Again, Sessions was instrumental, even pivotal, in getting Trump into office. He was also, ironically, one of the biggest influences on that very evangelical vote that he came to Liberty that night to address. Sessions is a big part of the answer to the question “Why is Trump the President.”

But Falwell the Sequel says he was phony all along. And not just today, but previously. Earlier this year, he called Sessions a coward, also over the investigation. Also as a result of the President tweeting something first.

I couldn’t agree more. @USAGSessions must be part of the Bush/Romney/McCain Republican Establishment. He probably supported @realDonaldTrump early in campaign to hide who he really is. Or he could just be a coward. https://t.co/9D1ppRTSyp

— Jerry Falwell (@JerryFalwellJr) February 28, 2018

He was hiding “who he really is.”

This is an important point. Part of the rationale that many evangelicals and conservatives offered for their own support of the womanizing, morally questionable reality star was that he was means to an end. “You don’t have to like him,” they would say. “Just support him to get [judges/tax cuts/the wall/insert agenda item here].” But for conservatives who genuinely disliked him, or who still do, it’s obvious now that this was not an honest rationale.

You do have to like him. And what’s more, serve him. And not just by fulfilling your duty in your job or task, but fully and with the absolute devotion to take a bullet for him.

Sessions, no prize himself, recused himself from the investigation because it was, in his legal judgment, the proper execution of the job to which the President had appointed him. From that moment, he was the disloyal man. Because he chose his legal rationale over the needs of The One.

And Jerry Dos hates him for it. So it is that none of the actual real things Sessions did that ensured a Trump victory amount to a hill of beans. Note that Falwell and Friends don’t say that Sessions turned against Trump, or abandoned him. They have retroactively purged him from the good list. A rotten apple all along. A bad guy. Soon they will call him “nevertrump,” their catch-all pejorative.

That term is the ultimate insult because that is the ultimate bad thing you can be: un-Trump. Non-Trump. In Sessions’ case, simply having made a judgment call that Trump didn’t like. And now, for the added crime of failing to fall on a sword on the President’s behalf.

Sessions is being purged because that’s how this kind of operation functions. Kellyanne Conway touched on it this week in naming the gone people unwanted, and Newt and Jerry the Lesser are doing the same. There is only one crime in Trumpville, and that is offering anything other than total and unquestioning devotion.

That’s how religion works. And we are all perfectly clear which religion Junior calls his own. It is Trumpism, and for him it is absolute. In that church, he is definitely a man of the cloth.

Like many, but not all, of his fellow travelers, Falwell the Extraneous is proof of the new but soon to be classic adage that there is nothing worse than Donald Trump except for every Donald Trump devotee.

[Featured image via screengrab]

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.