Tony Perkins: Trump gets ‘a mulligan’ on Stormy Daniels and other past indiscretions (REPRISE)

POLITICO's Off Message

POLITICO

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4.5 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2018

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A reprise episode: Donald Trump is still the answer to many conservative evangelical leaders’ prayers. Or at least to their continuing grievances. They embrace Trump the policymaker, despite being uneasy about Trump as a man, says Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a prominent evangelical activist group. Perkins knows about Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who claimed, in a 2011 interview, that in 2006 she had sex with Trump four months after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. He knows of the reports that Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford) was paid off to keep the affair quiet in the waning weeks of the 2016 election. He knows about the cursing, the lewdness and the litany of questionable behavior over the past year of Trump’s life or the 70 that came before it. “We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Perkins said in a January 2018 interview for Off Message. POLITICO's Off Message podcast is hosted by Isaac Dovere and is part of the Panoply network. Produced by Zack Stanton. Executive Producer is Dave Shaw. Theme music by Podington Bear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone. We're off this week, but I wanted to pull one of my favorite old episodes out of the archives.
0:04.8	Enjoy. Welcome to OffMessage. I'm Isaac Dover.
0:11.0	Conservatives, I think they're finally glad that there's somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.
0:19.1	Even though punching the bully, what happened to turn in the other cheek?
0:22.8	No, you only have two cheeks.
0:25.7	Today's guest, Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and one of the leaders
0:30.0	of evangelical politics.
0:32.5	Most of our guests know their way through an interview, but Perkins goes one better.
0:35.8	He's a radio host, and we even recorded in the radio studio at the Family Research Council offices in Washington. Strange place
0:42.6	to be to talk about porn stars, but hey, as part of what everyone in Washington is talking
0:47.2	about, everywhere in Washington. In all the clashes between principles and power over the last
0:52.9	year, evangelicals can seem like they've made one of the biggest and more confusing trade-offs.
0:58.1	After all, they say they root who and what they support and beliefs that go beyond politics.
1:04.2	I cover a lot of this struggle in the article up on the Politico website,
1:07.9	including how some members of President Trump's evangelical advisor at
1:10.9	counsel went for a meeting about immigration on the Hill last week with Nancy Pelosi,
1:15.4	the House Democratic leader, and then did a press conference with her and other Democrats,
1:20.8	pushing for Congress and the president to address the dreamer program that President Trump
1:26.0	himself threw into confusion. So please go check that
1:29.1	out too. Perkins started out as a supporter of Ted Cruz in 2016. He'd thought about it, planned for it,
1:35.6	was really behind it. When Cruz collapsed, he told me it was an awkward path to Donald Trump and one
1:40.2	that he wasn't quite expecting to get to. But by the end of it, he was speaking at the Republican
	...

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