Mike Pompeo: A Case Study in "Evangelical Christian" Hypocrisy

Perhaps I am a cynic when it comes to supposed Christians once they enter the realm of politics, especially evangelicals who make great show of wearing their religion on their sleeves even as they grasps for power and throw the gospel message to the gutter. From my experience, whether elected to political office or running allegedly "family values" organizations, no one lies more or is more willing to engage in the personal destruction of others.  Indeed, the Pharisees of the Bible appear down right virtuous and and suffused with kindness in comparison.  Which brings me to loudly self-proclaimed "Christian" Mike Pompeo who could be the poster child for evangelical Christian hypocrisy (Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., white supremacist Tony Perkins of FRC are other strong contenders).  In his complete self-prostitution to Donald Trump, Pompeo seemingly has no limit to how low he will go and to the lies he will disseminate.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Pompeo's moral bankruptcy.  Here are excerpts: 

I would like to apologize to Rex Tillerson.  I’m not apologizing for writing that he was “quite possibly the most ineffectual secretary of state since America’s rise to global prominence in 1898.”. . . . But I am apologizing for underestimating his virtues. Now that his successor as secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is verbally assaulting a reporter and refusing to defend a career ambassador from character assassination — and possibly worse — I miss ol’ Rex and his Boy Scout ethos.

Tillerson was the only person with the guts to chew out Trump when the president denounced senior generals as a “bunch of dopes and babies” in a Pentagon meeting. “No, that’s just wrong,” Tillerson is quoted as saying. “Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.”

[A] former senior White House official described Pompeo as “among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump.” That’s saying something, because Trump is surrounded by more servile courtiers than a medieval monarch.

While Tillerson worked to restrain Trump from leaving the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord, Pompeo has been nothing but a smirking cheerleader for the president’s most pugnacious instincts. He is, in fact, the mastermind behind a standoff that has left Iran closer to having a nuclear weapon than when Trump took office.

Pompeo’s rise to preeminence has not served either [Trump] the president or the country well. The secretary of state had a front-row seat to Trump’s efforts to blackmail Ukraine into announcing an investigation of Joe Biden — and he did nothing to stop the unethical actions that have now gotten Trump impeached. Pompeo readily cooperated when Trump’s goon squad, led by Rudolph W. Giuliani, decided that Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch had to be ousted so they could carry out what John Bolton called their “drug deal.” Although he later played dumb, Pompeo was a participant in the July 25 phone call in which Trump threatened Yovanovitch (“She’s going to go through some things”) and asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to “do us a favor” by investigating Biden. Pompeo refused to come to Yovanovitch’s defense even after the release of text messages showing that one of Giuliani’s confederates, Robert F. Hyde, claimed to have a team surveilling her and even implied that she might be harmed. On Friday, Mary Louise Kelly, the host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” asked Pompeo if he owed Yovanovitch an apology. Pompeo didn’t like that question; he preferred to talk about Iran. He claimed (falsely), “I’ve defended every single person on this team,” and ended the interview. Afterward, Kelly reports, Pompeo “shouted at me for about the same amount of time as the interview itself,” dropping several “f-bombs” along the way. She said the secretary of state demanded, “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?” and had an aide bring a blank map to see if she could point out where it’s located. She says she did. (One wonders if Trump — who reportedly doesn’t know that China and India share a more than 2,000-mile border — could pass the same test.) In any other administration (or, for that matter, any major company), Pompeo would be reprimanded, at the very least, for his abusive behavior. In this administration, his incivility will no doubt win further favor with [Trump] a president who views rudeness as a virtue. Pompeo has become a Trump mini-me who emulates his master in boorishness, bombast, bullying — and dishonesty. Every day that Pompeo stays in office, he makes Tillerson — once seen as the worst secretary of state ever — look better by comparison.

Indeed, Pompeo makes the case as to why evangelical Christians should be barred from public office.  

The Evangelicals Who Pray for War With Iran

Most sane people, be it in America or around the world, are in no rush to see the end of the world. Nor are they eager to see the Middle East explode in war.  The term "sane people," in my view, rules out extreme evangelical Christians who cling to a bizarre reading of the Bible - a book totally composed by unknown authors who lacked any modern knowledge - that makes them want the world and life as we know it to end.  They want the "End Times" to Armageddon to come.   And to make this happen, they need a war in the Middle East involving Israel even though it would mean all but a few members of the Jewish nation perish.  Frighteningly, two such evangelicals are in positions of power that make their lunacy very dangerous: Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo.  Both are in tight communication with some of the most extreme Christian dominionists who, despite occasional disavowals when exposed by the media, want a theocracy in America.  These zealots are anti-LGBT, want women in subordinate roles to men, and would impose their beliefs on all Americans.  A piece in New Republic looks at Pence and Pompeo's disturbing alliances.  Here are excerpts:

Last Friday, a day after Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani and nine others were killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, the Christian Zionist advocacy group Christians United for Israel emailed its millions of supporters to praise President Trump’s move. “This Decisive Action Will Save Countless Lives,” read the subject line, echoing the assessment delivered that morning by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Fox and Friends.

Pompeo and Pence reportedly were the top officials pushing Trump to kill Soleimani. They’re also devout evangelicals and major allies of CUFI. This is not a coincidence. While the organization is best known for its unflagging “support” for Israel—that is, for Israel’s expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and protracted erasure of the possibility of a future Palestinian state—it has, since its founding in 2006, depicted Iran as an existential threat to Israel.

Televangelist John Hagee launched CUFI in 2006, calling for military action against Iran, then led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom Hagee compared to Hitler. At the time, Hagee had been claiming that Iran would soon “have the nuclear capability to make a bomb, a suitcase bomb, a missile head, or anything they want to do with it.” That was untrue, given contemporaneous expert assessments of Iran’s projected nuclear advances. But for Hagee, a more militaristic approach was necessary in order to avert “an American Hiroshima.”

In his 2006 book, Jerusalem Countdown, Hagee imagined an elaborate scenario in which a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran would trigger an “inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” Faced with scrutiny over his apocalyptic theology, he strained to create a discrete image for his new political organization, insisting that his extensive writings on biblical prophecy about the Rapture and Second Coming were distinct from CUFI’s lobbying agenda. But it was a rocky start for the organization. In 2008, while running for president, John McCain first accepted, then rejected, Hagee’s endorsement. The rebuff was seen as damaging to the political neophyte and a brave stance by McCain against fringe elements within the GOP’s evangelical base. At CUFI’s annual Washington Summit, held just two months later, only three members of Congress attended.

But one of those three members was a certain congressman from Indiana: Pence. He continued to maintain close ties with the organization, and in 2014 CUFI paid for then-Governor Pence and his wife to travel to Israel to celebrate Christmas. With Pence as vice president, Hagee’s star has risen even more. He has claimed a role in convincing Trump to move the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, . . . . Hagee delivered the benediction at the embassy dedication, a day Hagee described as “nothing short of a divine miracle!”

On matters of Iran, too, there has been a seamless relationship between CUFI and the Trump administration. In 2017, just a few months into Trump’s presidency, Pence addressed the CUFI Washington Summit, assuring attendees that “President Trump has put Iran on notice: America will no longer tolerate Iran’s efforts to destabilize the region and jeopardize Israel’s security,” and promising that under Trump, “the United States of America will not allow Iran to develop a useable nuclear weapon.” Trump’s subsequent actions have only elevated the specter of chaos in the region.  . . . . and yet, his evangelical supporters consider this one of his top accomplishments.

Pompeo, in a political career spanning three terms in the House of Representatives, a brief stint as CIA director, and now, as the country’s top diplomat, has promoted intertwining his Christian faith with his public service. But he has scoffed at charges that evangelicals promote theocracy. In a March 2019 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, while visiting Israel, Pompeo was asked whether Trump “has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?” “As a Christian,” Pompeo replied, “I certainly believe that’s possible.” . . . and then thanked God for President Trump—“an immovable friend of Israel.” “We’ve implemented the strongest pressure campaign in history against the Iranian regime,” Pompeo said, “and we are not done.”

Personally, if one is a science denying, theocracy supporting evangelical, you should not be allowed to hold any important political position, not because of your "faith" but rather due to you dangerous embrace of ignorance. 

The Republican Art of Selling One's Soul

Image by Ben Wiseman.

Moral bankruptcy and a willingness to prostitute one's self in exchange for fleeting power are now hallmarks of today's Republican elected officials. Honor, honesty, and adherence to basic morality no longer matter.  And then there is the putrid party base that is consumed with racism, hatred of those they deem "other" and pushing a hideous form of Christianity that flushes Christ's gospel message down the toilet.  As a former Republican, I continue to be dismayed at how many one time political colleagues have sold their souls and are making a mockery of the values they once claimed to uphold.  A column in the New York Times looks at some prominent Republicans - Mike Pompeo, an supposed evangelical Christian, in particular - who embody this total moral rot that has consumed the GOP.  Here are column excerpts:

There’s no way that Mike Pompeo actually venerates Donald Trump. I doubt he even likes the president much.

Pompeo graduated first in his class at West Point decades ago, a feat that suggests enormous reserves of discipline, a profound respect for tradition and a talent for self-effacement when the circumstances warrant it. Trump possesses none of those qualities.

Pompeo is an evangelical Christian, steeped in the very dictums that Trump has spent a lifetime mocking with both his words and his deeds. And Pompeo has long believed in the importance of American military intervention abroad, the kind of activist role that Trump railed against during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

In fact Pompeo, who was then a congressman from Kansas, supported Marco Rubio — and publicly praised him, while disparaging Trump . . . . he sounded an alarm that Trump would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution.” He urged Republicans to come to their senses and resist the lure of the surging Trump campaign. “It’s time,” he said, “to turn down the lights on the circus.”

But the lights continued to burn bright, so Pompeo just put on a clown suit, put away his ethics and finagled a big role under the Big Top.

He had plenty of company in that transformation. It’s the wonder of the Trump era and one of the saddest, scariest themes of the impeachment inquiry so far: the teeming crowd of sellouts and suck-ups who eagerly traded principle for position and are in some cases doubling and tripling down on that transaction, to a point where it’s fair to ask if there was ever much principle to begin with.

I’m looking at you, Lindsey Graham, who somehow decided that Trump was the new John McCain, which is like deeming tripe the new tenderloin. Hell, I’m looking at most of the Republicans in the Senate.

Pompeo, who first signed on as Trump’s C.I.A. director and then flattered his way to secretary of state, is a paragon of these lackeys-come-lately, and he’s especially vivid proof of how easily and completely the lure of power can overwhelm any call to conscience.

Pompeo had a heady shot at a vaunted job that almost surely wasn’t going to come his way any other time. So he lunged for it, then demonstrated with his obsequiousness that doing good and doing right were never high on the agenda.

He wrote an op-ed article that essentially broke with his fellow Republicans to promote Trump’s view that Saudi Arabia’s butchery of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi shouldn’t give anyone pause. What are a few severed body parts among allies?

He listened mutely to that July 25 phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, decided to ignore what he heard and then claimed — until a few days ago — that he was utterly in the dark about any pressure on Ukraine to kneecap Joe Biden.

Had he spoken up or pushed back, he would have risked ending up on the outside, among the swelling Trump administration diaspora. He preferred the inside, with its glossier trappings and cushier thrones. . . . Better to be a wretched part of history than no part at all.

The tale sounds familiar because it is. It’s the story of Faust, who sold his soul for renown, then endured the ugliness of that deal. It’s also the story of too many of Trump’s Republican enablers to count.

Few people remember anymore, but just years before she became the dark empress of “alternative facts,” Kellyanne Conway was a respected, reasonably mainstream, uncontroversial Republican pollster and strategist. Just months before she joined Team Trump, she correctly labeled him “vulgar,” said that he wasn’t presidential, called him a liar and demanded his tax returns. Then he offered her the lofty job of managing his presidential campaign — and all the television airtime that came with it — and she turned herself into a kowtowing cartoon. She’ll never be seen the same way again. Was the ride really worth it?

[Lindsey] Graham was oddly and briefly honest about this in an interview with The Times’s Mark Leibovich, framing his kinship with Trump, whom he once called “the world’s biggest jackass,” as part of his career-long quest “to try to be relevant.” This quest now involves the insistence that Trump, rather than abusing the presidency to dig up imagined dirt on a political rival, is the victim of some setup.

You can hear Graham’s version as predictably loopy illogic from a senator up for re-election next year in the deep-red state of South Carolina, but it’s more than that. It’s the fee for being able to get the president on the phone, for being invited to play golf with him, for feeling the rush of access, for crowing about your perch at the epicenter of the action.

He and Pompeo will have insider anecdotes to last the rest of their lives. They’ll need just as long to convince themselves that they didn’t overpay.

Trump’s Ominous Attempt to Redefine Human Rights

An idea Trump/Pence's new Commission would
seemingly like to bring back - gays
in concentration camps.

The Trump/Pence regime has established a "Commission on Unalienable Rights" that will use "natural law" to determine what rights matter.  Those appointed to the commission are a who's who of far right Christian extremists with documented histories of anti-LGBT animus and opposition to women's rights. By the composition of the Commission membership, it is clear from the start that some rights - and only some people - will matter.  The use of the term "natural law" - a favorite of the Christofascists - is a dead give away that the agenda of the Commission will be anti-gay and anti-modernity.  A column in the New York Times looks at this dangerous Commission and the farcical pretense that true protection of human rights of all people will be on the Commission's radar screen.  The move is a clear effort on Trump's part to shore up support among evangelicals who have shown themselves only too happy to look the other way from the near concentration camps Trump/Pence is operating on the southern border to deal with what lily white evangelicals view as the "brown menace."  Here are column excerpts:

For the Trump administration to establish a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” to examine the meaning of human rights, as it did this month, is a little like Saudi Arabia forming a commission on multiparty democracy or North Korea a commission on how to end famine. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so ominous.

Announcing the composition of the new body, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration “takes seriously the founders’ ideas of individual liberty and constitutional government.” He did so in the same week as President Trump demonstrated, once again, his contempt for the Constitution by tweeting that he’d leave office “in six years, or maybe 10 or 14 (just kidding).” Ha-ha.

In the same Twitter rant Trump called himself “a true Stable Genius.” Now the Genius in Chief, through his secretary of state, has determined that the time is ripe to sift through human rights claims and, in Pompeo’s words, determine “which rights are entitled to gain respect.”

Autocrats around the world, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to China’s Xi Jinping, have long cast human rights groups as Trojan horses for a liberal democratic agenda. It’s an attempt to deflect attention from their gross human rights abuses. Now it appears that Trump’s United States is preparing to join the club of human rights skeptics. A more complete disavowal of what America has stood for since Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 is hard to imagine.

This, remember, is the administration that has consistently relegated human rights in its valueless foreign policy; saw in the Saudi murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi no cause to reprimand Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; embraced North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un; kowtowed to every autocrat outside Iran and Venezuela; and separated migrant children from their families to hold them in appalling camps.

The administration has excised reproductive rights from the annual State Department Country Reports on Human Rights. It watered down a recent United Nations Security Council resolution on victims of rape in armed conflict. It has withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council. The United Nations Human Rights Committee and Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are both without a United States member.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, Mr. Secretary [Pompeo]. A lot of bipartisan and international consensus, consolidated over the postwar decades, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and other horrors, exists as to what human rights are and what America’s role in defending them should be.

Modern human rights are grounded on the dignity inherent in every human being. They are not God-given rights, or Trump-given rights, and they apply to people of all faiths and to those who have none. They include freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion, and the “right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law,” as the Universal Declaration puts it. They involve combating discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, disability, gender or sexual orientation.

The intention of Pompeo, an evangelical Christian whose beliefs infuse his policy, appears to be to turn back the clock.

In May, The Federal Register said the commission would provide “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.” These “natural rights” at the time, of course, included chattel slavery and the dehumanization of black people, as well as the disenfranchisement of women.

Today, the Trump administration’s war on reproductive rights and L.G.B.T. rights is pretty clear. On gay and transgender issues, it is hostile; its attempt to dehumanize the trans community is evident.

For Pompeo, religious rights are plainly human rights; as to the rest, it’s unclear. As head of the commission, he has appointed Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard professor known as a zealous opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Other political opinions are represented, but the body is predominantly conservative and religious.

No plausible reason for this strange initiative has been given. Trump, having shown willful neglect toward human rights, now wants to redefine them. The exercise can only reflect his contempt for the rule of law, a free press, an independent judiciary, gays, minorities, women’s reproductive rights, the safety of migrant children, truth and decency — as well as his boundless affection for human rights violators. It is, in other words, a disaster in the making.

Be very, very afraid.

Some U.S. Embassies Hoist Rainbow Flags in Defiance of Trump

The Trump/Pence regime has been steadily pushing to make right wing evangelical Christianity the de facto established religion in America.  The religious freedom rights and beliefs of others simply do not matter and, if they offend the self-centered, hate-filled, divisive views of Christofascists, they are subject to being undermined and trampled upon. Trump/Pence trumpets support for "religious freedom," but that freedom only applies to white, far right evangelicals who through policies and Department of Justice initiatives are being placed above the laws that bind the rest of the populace.  Nowhere is this more true than in the area of LGBT rights where Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, both far right "Christians," seek to convince Trump to roll back rights and to dish out slights wherever possible. Part of that agenda this year was banning U.S. embassies from flying rainbow flags during June, which is Pride month.  As the Washington Post reports, a number of embassies are defying the Trump/Pence regime's order.  Here are article excerpts:

Since the State Department began rejecting all embassy requests to hoist rainbow flags outside the mission buildings during LGBTQ Pride Month this year, some U.S. diplomats have been finding ways to defy, or at least get around, the new policy.

The facades of the U.S. missions in Seoul and Chennai, India, are partially hidden behind large rainbow flags, while the embassy in New Delhi is aglow in rainbow colored lights. The website for the embassy in Santiago, Chile, shows a video of the chief diplomat raising a rainbow flag last month for the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.

The Vienna embassy’s website features a photo of a rainbow flag flying below Old Glory on a mast jutting from the building, a statement by Diplomats for Equality and a story about a professor lecturing on the visibility and growth of LGBT rights.

U.S. diplomats in Jerusalem joined a March for Pride and Tolerance, and several ambassadors have tweeted photos of themselves in local Pride parades or standing outside the embassies surrounded by employees holding up letters spelling PRIDE.

“This is a category one insurrection,” said one diplomat, who like others interviewed about the sentiment over the rejections, which were not made in writing, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired.

A practice routinely approved for most of the decade at many embassies now requires top-level approval from the State Department. But this year, as first reported by NBC News, all requests were nixed.

In 2011, the Obama administration directed agencies involved with foreign policy to promote LGBT rights, a striking policy for an agency that, up to the early 1990s, considered homosexuality a security risk and cause for termination. . . . . By 2016, approvals were left up to each ambassador or chief of mission.

That process changed last year, after Mike Pompeo became secretary of state. An evangelical Christian who believes marriage should be defined as between a man and woman, Pompeo has said gay employees will be respected and treated like everyone else. But he has downplayed some symbols of LGBT rights, while introducing several new panels and envoys specializing in religious freedom issues.

The advisory cable that came out last year said diplomats are required to obtain top-level approval from approval from the State Department’s Office of Management to fly a rainbow flag.

Some gay employees in the foreign and civil service say the ban on flying the rainbow flag is just the tip of an iceberg of slights.

“Day by day, a death by a thousand cuts, our rights as lgbt+ Americans are being eroded with the removal of a guidance here, the rewriting of a policy there, or just the quiet disappearance of a web site,” Robyn McCutcheon, a transgender woman who has served in several posts abroad, wrote in her blog “Transgender at State,” lamenting what she has observed throughout the government in the past two years. “It should come as no surprise that this erosion would happen also at the U.S. Department of State.”

“We fly below the radar,” one employee said. “We survive because they don’t realize we’re here.”

Expect things to get even worse as Trump steps up anti-LGBT efforts to maintain the support from evangelicals and ultra-right wing Catholics, all of whom want to take America back to the 1950's, including new Jim Crow laws and gays being forced to hide from sight. 

Trump/Pence Panel Launches New Attack on LGBT Rights

As noted before on this blog, the only group that has consistently seen its agenda pushed by the Trump/Pence regime are the the Christofascists.  Trump/Pence has been relentless in its effort to roll back LGBT and women's rights to the delight of those who want a Christian theocracy and the to inflict their toxic form of Christianity on all Americans. The latest move is the establishment of a panel on international human rights and “natural law,” that seems aimed at narrowing protections for women and members of the LGBT community.  Christofascists and far right Catholics have long used "natural law" to argue against LGBT rights and to push for patriarchal control of families and the subjugation of women - the Catholic Church's "natural law" has not evolved since the 12th century - so it is doubtful the panel will be embracing modern knowledge and concepts of equality.  Politico looks at this disturbing development: 

The new body, to be called the Commission on Unalienable Rights, will advise Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to a notice the State Department quietly published Thursday on the Federal Register.

“The Commission will provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation's founding principles of natural law and natural rights,” states the notice, which is dated May 22.

Several human rights activists said Thursday that they were surprised by the move and trying to learn details. Some privately said they worry that talk of the “nation’s founding principles” and “natural law” are coded signals of plans to focus less on protecting women and LGBT people.

The word “natural” in such context is often interpreted to mean “God-given,” a phrasing that is less common in modern human rights literature but which could signal a religious component, experts said.

Activists and former U.S. officials noted that the Trump administration’s record on human rights so far is spotty at best.

The State Department already has an entire bureau devoted to the issues of human rights, democracy and labor, and it was not clear whether officials in that bureau were involved or even aware of the plans for the new commission.

The top State Department contact listed on the notice was Kiron Skinner, Pompeo's director of policy planning. . . . . Skinner drew criticism recently for seeming to suggest that China, a rising power, is such a fundamentally different culture from the United States that arguments about human rights may not have much effect in dialogue with Beijing.

Former top U.S. officials who dealt with rights issues expressed puzzlement over the commission’s creation.

“On the one hand it’s commendable that the secretary wants to place more emphasis on these issues, given that the administration to date has not been very outspoken on them,” said David Kramer, who served as the assistant secretary of State for human rights under the administration of Republican President George W. Bush. “On the other hand, I’m not sure what this commission is supposed to do that the human rights bureau doesn’t already do.”

Generally speaking, President Donald Trump and his aides have de-emphasized the role of human rights in their foreign policy, raising the issue only selectively — typically to raise pressure on countries considered adversaries.

The Republican administration has, for instance, highlighted the plight of female activists seeking more freedom in Iran, a longtime U.S. nemesis, but largely ignored similar challenges facing such activists in Saudi Arabia, a longtime U.S. ally.

The administration has made promoting religious freedom overseas a high priority, a move that has delighted Trump’s many evangelical Christian supporters.

But the administration also has rolled back domestic regulations aimed at protecting members of the LGBT community, especially those who are transgender.

It also has cut down sections about women’s reproductive rights in the State Department’s annual human rights report and made attempts to eliminate references to “sexual and reproductive health” in U.N. documents.

It is not clear who will serve on the panel or when their appointments will take effect, but activists and former U.S. officials noted that its composition will greatly affect the policies it promotes.

 If some of the who's who of Christofascists who have Trump's ear end up on this panel, it will be a sign that the panel will have a sinister agenda. As for Skinner, she is a former Fox News contributor, which does little to instill any shred of confidence.