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A Look Back: How Did America Set About 'Choosing Donald Trump'?

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Watch the entire CBN News interview with author Stephen Mansfield above.

President Donald Trump's first year in office is coming to an end.  It's been a year full of challenges and criticisms for the first time businessman turned politician. 

But out of a field of several Republican candidates, he was the one elected to the nation's highest office in the 2016 election.  An election that according to some political analysts, has not been accepted by many Americans.

Best-selling author Stephen Mansfield's new book Choosing Donald Trump examines Trump's unlikely rise to the Oval Office. 

So how did America set about choosing Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States? 

"The average religious conservative felt terrorized by the Obama years and terrified of the possibility of a Hillary Clinton presidency," Mansfield told CBN News. "Largely, because they had felt there had been a war on their conservative religion. Lawsuits against the Hobby Lobby family, for example, the Green family, and even lawsuits against small orders of nuns, things of that nature. So really, they were looking for somebody who could win."

"Though he didn't gain evangelical or conservative support during the primaries, he certainly did during the general (election). So that explains the rallying to him at the time," he continued.

CBN News asked Mansfield if he thought Trump's support from evangelicals was a backlash against Obama's years in office?

"I don't think there's any question," Mansfield replied. "If you were a religious conservative during the Obama years, you not only saw the Green family of Hobby Lobby be sued for not wanting to offer abortion as a part of their insurance coverage, you saw a strident LGBT agenda.  A strident pro-abortion agenda. You saw repeated lawsuits by the Obama Justice Department against people of traditional faith."

"And so there was a desire to fight back, to push back and no one had no spirit to fight back or push back than Donald Trump," he explained. "Even if you didn't like his rawness and his crassness, the fact is - by the time the general election came about, you believed he could win and that's what you were focusing on at the time."

So how did a man who was a real estate mogul, who's been married a number of times, known for his beauty pageants and gambling casinos become the champion of conservative religious voters?

"Let's just remind ourselves for a moment, he (Trump) won 81 percent of white evangelicals, half of all church attenders in America and half of all Roman Catholics. That's an astonishing number," Mansfield said. "What really happened  was, he began to understand the concerns of and champion the concerns of religious voters."


 

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