Donald Trump's appeal to Evangelical voters is perplexing and bizarre, and it has earned the attention of more than one political observer. Samantha Bee dug into the phenomenon and came to the conclusion that it boiled down to a kind of identity politics, and now legendary documentarian Ken Burns has weighed in. He sat down with The Daily Beast to discuss a retrospective of his films just released online, but the conversation quickly drifted to the 2016 election.
Burns did not mince words when it came to Donald Trump and the religious right, the culmination of what he sees as a long con:
"The Republican Party has been extraordinarily successful at getting many groups of people to vote against their self-interest. Evangelicals are voting for Donald Trump. What part of Donald Trump reminds you of Jesus Christ? Trump lusts after his own daughter on national radio, talks about women's bodies and breasts in such a disparaging way, and mocks them. How is this in any way Christian? When you make the "other" the enemy, how is that Christian?"
Much of Burns' work deals with "race as a central subtheme of American life," and that extends to The Central Park Five, a documentary about five black teenagers wrongfully convicted of raping a white female jogger in New York's famed greenspace. Burns believes that Trump's role in that fiasco is telling:
"He shamefully took out a full-page ad in all of the New York dailies asking for a restoration of the death penalty for two 14-year-old, two 15-year-old, and one 16-year-old innocent children. While New York State laws would not have permitted their execution, just the fact that there was a rush to judgment ought to be complete evidence of how temperamentally unsuited he is for the office he now seeks.
And when asked if his involvement was racially motivated:
"Of course it was [racially motivated]. I found no outrage at the "preppie killer." The problem was that the initial idea of the crime was that there were these "wilding" black youths—a wolf pack—that attacked this innocent blond woman, and that's always been the primal fear of Americans as they tolerated slavery and then tolerated Jim Crow. You had newspapers in a progressive northern city sounding like a southern racist newspaper from the 1880s gleefully reporting on a lynching."
You can catch the full interview here.
