Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover.

Conservatives, I think they're finally glad that there's somebody on the playground

that is willing to punch the bully.

Even though punching the bully, what happened to turn in the other cheek?

You know, you only have two cheeks.

Today's guest, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and one of the leaders of evangelical politics.

Most of our guests know their way through an interview, but Perkins goes one better.

He's a radio host, and we even recorded in the radio studio at the Family Research Council offices in Washington.

Strange place to be to talk about porn stars, But hey, that's part of what everyone in Washington

is talking about, everywhere in Washington. In all the clashes between principles and power

over the last year, evangelicals can seem like they've made one of the biggest and more confusing

trade-offs. After all, they say they root who and what they support and beliefs that go beyond politics.

I cover a lot of this struggle in the article up on the Politico website, including how some members of President Trump's evangelical advisory council, went for a meeting about immigration on the Hill last week with Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, and then did a press conference with her and other Democrats,

pushing for Congress and the president to address the dreamer program that President Trump

himself threw into confusion. So please go check that out, too.

Perkins started out as a supporter of Ted Cruz in 2016.

He'd thought about it, planned for it, was really behind it.

When Cruz collapsed, he told me it was an awkward path to Donald Trump and one that he wasn't quite expecting to get to.

But by the end of it, he was speaking at the Republican convention just before Trump

took the stage, and he's been a frequent visitor to the Oval Office since.

How does he reconcile all this?

What does he tell his 10-year-old son?

...