President Trump's achievements on life, faith and freedom

So, why and how did the USA elect the wrong person - both in 1976 and again in 2020? The exact reason for this was the focused public voter reaction on a single and very specific set of circumstances, rather than as an endorsement of a generalised political agenda.

Specifically, in 1976, it was the collective negative reaction to the Watergate scandal, the resignation of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon. The earlier resignation of Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew - as part of a separate scandal - also contributed. Result? A single negative issue set, and Mr. Carter was elected.

In 2020, USA was - and still is - amid a pandemic that has killed millions worldwide and hundreds of thousands of Americans. As such it was understandably the most central and single significant issue of the election, and it alone, primarily determined its outcome - ergo Mr. Biden.

Doubt this? Just consider this very specific question: Had there been no COVID-19 pandemic - none at all - who would have won the 2020 election? Answer: Donald Trump by a huge landslide, as he was the architect of the most significant short-term economic prosperity in USA's recent history whilst the media failed to report this (deliberately) and still refuses to acknowledge it.

The reality of Trump's economic wins was proven over and over in continued and improved employment and income statistics for all aspects and sectors of the economy - especially workers and more especially women, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and the other measurable demographic groups.

So, what about 'spiritual politics' given the end of the pro-Christian presidency of Donald Trump? No president in American history has so overtly devoted himself to appealing to evangelical Christians as Trump but it wasn't enough. In the iconography of Trump's presidency, the place of religion can be captured in two photographs. There's the one of him hefting a Bible in front of St. John's Episcopal Church across Lafayette Park from the White House during the George Floyd protests on June 1, 2020. Then there's the image of a supporter erecting a wooden cross in front of the Capitol on what has been called Insurrection Day, January 6, 2021.

To repeat, no president in American history has so overtly, by word and by deed, devoted himself to appealing to evangelical Christians as Trump. And never have Christians - that is, the subset he's assiduously appealed to - responded with such devotion.

We identify that subset as 'white evangelicals' who constitute a quarter of the national electorate and who vote Republican by margins of 3 or 4-to-1 according to election surveys. But it's important to understand that the surveys do not create this religious grouping by identifying and collecting people according to their evangelical denominations - Baptists, Pentecostals, and the like - and grouping them with non-denominational Christians who by and large belong in the evangelical fold. They simply cross-tabulate those who say they're white and those who say they're 'evangelical or born again'.

These days, research from Christianity Today says that 40% of mainline Protestants and 28% of Catholics say they're born again. In other words, a lot of 'evangelical Christians' are not evangelicals the way religion scholars or even many laypeople understand the term. A more accurate term for 'white evangelicals' as a political bloc would be 'white conservative Christians'. Which is not to say that Trump didn't focus most of his attention on actual evangelicals.

He proclaimed himself pro-life and said he'd appoint justices who would overturn the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade abortion decision (Trump: I will appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade abortion case published October 19, 2016)

He also appointed an evangelical advisory board comprising 25 prominent pastors and political operatives on the religious right. So, despite Trump's obvious moral shortcomings and lack of personal piety (personal view), 'white evangelicals' turned out in droves and gave him 80% of their vote - as high a proportion as they'd ever given a presidential candidate.

After the election, Trump delivered. He reinstated the so-called Mexico City policy, barring federal funding for international family planning agencies that so much as discussed abortion. Going beyond previous Republican presidents, he extended the policy to cover all global health organisations.