Thank you for rooting for our country. Thank you for the support you give to our military and police who protect our country. You [sic] strength as a leader will hopefully bring the US back to the highest standing in the world has us as a country who has gained the world’s respect.
Dear Mr. President, I am grateful for the stance you’ve taken in our country to help make it great again. I appreciate the backbone and audacity you continually and tirelessly have. I am praying that you will continue to be surrounded by God’s best and that only decisions that have Him are made.
CATHOLIC CONSERVATIVES
The debates among the conservative Catholics in this moderated group sounded a lot like the debate in the country that moved many pro-life, socially conservative, patriotic Catholics to trek to the GOP, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast. That took me to Macomb County, Michigan, to talk with a group of Catholic conservative men.9 The participants reflected that history: seven in ten were fifty or older and held traditional blue-collar jobs in the auto industry, mechanics, and construction. But they also reflected the recent tumultuous changes in the Catholic Church.
Consequently, the dynamics among Catholics could not be more different from any other group that rallied to protect President Trump in the 2018 election and might respond very differently in a post-Trump era. Like other conservative groups, they applauded the president for appointing social conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court. But the Catholics were the only economic populists in the GOP base, and they cheered louder than all the others Trump’s calling out of corporations that failed to invest in America and trashing trade agreements that failed to put America first.
The conservative Catholics were the most fractured group and literally fell into a brawl that had to be mediated by the moderator. They were deeply divided by their brands of Catholicism, one aligned with Pope Francis and the other with Fox News. The differences played out in the open and heated disagreement flared on immigration, multiculturalism, guns, regulation, the environment and climate change, the special prosecutor, and 2020.
THE GOP’S LONELY ECONOMIC POPULISTS
The conservative Catholic GOP described an economy where jobs don’t pay like they did in the past, CEOs are greedy, and trade agreements are killing American jobs. That description of the economy sounds more familiar as a Democratic critique of the economy, but Democrats were not seen as battling for the working class in their world.
The conservative Catholics pushed back when the moderator played a video of Donald Trump touting job growth, stock market gains, and tax cuts at a campaign rally. They just refuted his assertions: these were not good-paying jobs and those new jobs don’t pay what they used to.
Some of the stuff is very positive. Speaking with [North] Korea is a fantastic achievement. 300,000 jobs back, though—if you’re out there looking for jobs, what you’re finding are not very good-paying jobs. And that’s part of the problem. Those are part of the numbers and there are jobs out there that younger people need to start off with. But I was laid off from a good job eight years ago, and the jobs and the stuff that’s coming back is a lot of the jobs that I was finding. They were $9, $10 an hour, and that was with zero benefits. And that’s where a lot of those numbers are coming from.
They sounded so much like voters I listened to in groups two years into the Obama presidency when they watched President Obama talk about the number of jobs that had been created, his saving of the auto industry, and the dependable recovery.
Like then, the Catholics focused on wages and the cost of living, especially the cost of insurance.
I’m concerned with the costs of living as opposed to the wage increases. I just think it’s getting way too out of hand. Back in the 80s, $4 got you so much more than what 12 dollars nowadays will get you. And there’s so much more back then.
I was talking to my mother about this the other week. We didn’t—they didn’t have to deal with high water bills, high utilities, cell phones, multiple cell phone bills, the higher car insurance. Just on and on and on. We’ll bundle for internet and cable—it’s just how it stacks up.
Just insurance in general, car insurance. We have the highest rates of any state in the union.
Health insurance is the same.
They pointed out that they had not received pay raises in many years and that the new jobs paid less than before.
When they heard the phrase “CEOs of large companies,” they blurted out “very greedy” and said they received “outrageous” bonuses, even when they ran their companies into bankruptcy. One man recalled in detail the employment history and compensation of Bob Nardelli from General Electric to Home Depot to Chrysler, bewildered how someone could fail up so spectacularly.
When it came to trade, they were Trump’s first audience for renegotiating NAFTA, “the biggest mistake out of the Clinton Administration.” They were relieved that Trump was the first leader to get serious about trade agreements that had taken such a toll.
THE FIGHT BETWEEN FOX NEWS AND POPE FRANCIS CATHOLICS
That is where their unity ended.
Half the group praised Donald Trump for fighting back against the liberal Democrats attacking their values. They were the most enthusiastic about Donald Trump and his policies. They sounded like base Republicans where Trump and Fox News are the defining dimension. They half sounded like they had Fox-crafted talking points ready when they needed to come to Trump’s defense on everything from the Mueller investigation and immigration to Trump’s treatment of women and kneeling NFL athletes. They were the ones who said the ugliest things about immigrants, people of different races and religions, and multiculturalism. They did not just disagree with Democrats and President Obama, they said they were evil: “I think that the Obama administration that was, it was the devil kind of party.”
The Fox Catholic half reacted with enthusiasm to Trump’s rallies and embraced the Fox News facts on issue after issue in his defense, and my moderator had to hold these Fox News Catholics back when they disagreed with their fellow Catholics in the group.
The other half, who might have been inspired by Pope Francis and his brand of Catholicism, expressed great concern about the level of social division in the country. The resulting partisan polarization had seeped down to their communities, workplaces, social media feeds, and even their families. And they faulted both parties for the polarization, though they wished President Trump would be more respectful and less divisive.
They condemned President Trump for his treatment of women and doubted he was a good role model.
They were open to centrist compromises on immigration, the environment, and gun control, most of all on the environment. The duty to be good stewards of the globe was raised early in the discussion.
I think our greatest threat is potentially the environment. If we’re not careful with it, and if you don’t protect the environment, then you don’t have life on the planet.
So it is a vitally important topic. So you gotta protect the trees and the water and the things that you actually need to exist on this planet. And without that, it’s the end of mankind.
They were united by their agreement on abortion and working-class economic populism, but both blocs argued bravely against the other’s arguments and facts. The moderator had to intervene in each, as the Fox Catholics in particular were not used to this argument among Trump voters.
THE ARGUMENT OVER IMMIGRATION AND MULTICULTURALISM
For many Catholic conservatives, Trump’s getting tough on immigration was the major reason for supporting him and one of his biggest accomplishments as president.
This was the only group in which people’s complaints about immigration centered on unfair competition with American contractors and workers for jobs. “Statistically, they go get jobs we don’t get, but it’s stereotyping that they will work for less wages,” said one man who “just got outbid out of a roof deal a week ago because of Mexican undocumented people did the roof $1,000 cheaper, but they wanted to use
my workman’s comp because they didn’t have it.” Several had read a story on social media that “refugees get funding for starting businesses here in the U.S.,” and complained, “us Americans that already live here, born and raised here, don’t get the opportunity.” That is one reason it was so important to them that immigrants come here legally:
There’s paperwork and we know about some of them. The other ones, we have no idea about. There’s a big difference.
And they take jobs away from us. That’s just one piece of it, and create crimes and other things.
But legal immigration, the child-separation policy, and multiculturalism were flash points in these groups. The Fox News Catholic conservatives were uncomfortable with the growing diversity in the country, wanted less immigration period, and repeated the Fox lines about child separation at the border. They were responsible for most of the ugliest quotes about immigrants and people of different races and faiths in this GOP research. One man explained that Colin Kaepernick’s girlfriend had instructed him to kneel during the national anthem, and if you do your research and “find out the nationality she is, she’s Muslim.”
But the Pope Francis Catholics pushed back to defend legal immigrants, a vision of a multicultural America as a country of immigrants, and even advocated against Trump’s child-separation immigration policy. When asked about the threats facing our country, one of these men said we were threatened by “too much immigration” and suggested we “export them all”; he immediately received pushback from another man, who said, “Illegal immigration. Immigration is good. We’re [a country founded on] immigration.”
The separated families were top of mind for these Trump-conflicted Catholics: “Everybody’s concern[ed] with the families being torn apart and the children not being with their maternal parents and being displaced and the concern over how they’re gonna resolve it.”
After I played them a video of a Catholic bishop arguing against the policy on religious grounds, the two factions sparred over whether it was moral to divide children at the border from their parents or not:
There is a gray area with that, because you let them break the law. Other people are going to see that it’s OK to break the law.
I mean, most people are humane. So, I’m sure these people at the border that are separating these families are doing the best they can.
Well, they didn’t just decide to do this. And you knew—and they knew they were coming over here that there was a chance that this was going to happen.
They’re taking them until they know what’s going on and these parents are, do they have any kind of diseases, stuff like that.
I totally understand what he was coming across with. And I consider it kidnapping. You know, to take a child away from a mother or father, whoever and put them somewhere where they’re isolated away from their parents. That’s just cruelty. I mean, the parents don’t know where the kids are. The kids are crying because they don’t know where the parents are. And like I say it’s, if you did it it’d be kidnapping.
Well, they do it here. I mean there are so many parents that are incarcerated for breaking the law, and their kids go to foster care.
The two factions also had a heated exchange over whether the child-separation policy was “discriminatory” because “Canada is another border, [but] you don’t see that happening there. It’s only with Mexico.” The Trump-Fox Catholics rushed to respond that “that’s bulls***” because “people aren’t flooding across our [northern] borders illegally.”
A Coca-Cola Super Bowl ad featuring “America the Beautiful” sung in different languages started a debate about the nature of the country and its future. Probably half thought it was too political, disagreed with it, and said that they should learn English; that America has changed because so many don’t learn the language; that “when I was a kid we’d have one of the masses in Polish on Sunday.”
It was the melting pot of the world because people are not melting … they’re bringing in their cultures with them and staying localized. Because in my opinion—in my opinion there is—yeah, brace yourself, people—but immigration without assimilation is tantamount to an invasion.
If you’re going to come to America and just—that’s the whole thing I don’t agree with. Is you guys come here to America and you want to change our beliefs. But you guys came in here.
We ran into the issue with terrorism and people coming over here illegally. I say, I still think we have to be the country that accepts people—in under our laws. And assimilating is important. I don’t—my family, when they came over and they had a green card and it took some time before, you know—we were all real hard-core Americans, but eventually it happened. That’s what I think a lot of people are afraid of, not [happening].
A lot of this was wrapped up in not speaking English—or, as one man said, “You should speak American.” These men complained they were being forced to adapt, rather than the other way around: “Now, you’re changing, telling us that we’re middle-aged men and women that we have to be re-educated in a different foreign language in our homeland that we grew up as an American, our first language is English?”
But a vocal minority made an argument that America is defined and united by its immigrant history and not by the prevailing ethnicity or language of its people. “America’s the melting pot of the world,” one man explained. “Is anybody in here Native American?” another asked, because, “Somebody came from somewhere, another country, and you have the right to live here.” Another man who “grew up in a Polish neighborhood” and attended “one of the masses in Polish on Sunday” raised his hand to push back against their opinion that “it’s become a jigsaw puzzle” and not a melting pot: “I understand that culture tends to build a community together, whether it’s Polish, Italian, Irish, what have you, and that’s obviously going to be a part of peoples’ ethnicity or whatever or their heritage.” They explain that “the times are changing” and “it’s never going to go back,” so they might as well get used to the growing number of immigrants from Latin America and Asian countries “melting with the United States.”
THE CONFLICT OVER TRUMP’S SCANDALS
After viewing a video of Trump making offensive comments about other women while campaigning, most of the Trump-Fox Catholics excused it as just men being men.
We’ve all done or said similar.
Oh worse. Worse.
Yes, we’re not any better or any worse than him, we’re males. We have it inbred in us. That’s how we are. Maybe not to certain extents, give or take, but that’s how we are.
Another found a way to implicate Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama as well: “I think that works both ways. I’m sure if they dug up dirt on Hillary about her comments about men, or Michelle Obama, I’m sure they would find them.”
But the majority of the men believed Trump’s comments were “demeaning to anybody that’s a female.” Trump’s comments about Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump especially offended their sensibilities as husbands.
Well, I’ve been married forty-nine years, and I find that offensive.
My wife would know I’d—never say anything like that. Not a chance.
I think it’s immature. I think it’s immature at that his wife where he was at. He doesn’t have to fight these kind of battles. He doesn’t have to do that. And I wouldn’t want to see any president doing that stuff like that. But I am just—there was no reason to attack somebody else’s wife for that.
He’s not even showing respect for his own wife. That’s the part I can’t understand.
This was the context in which watching videos of President Trump brought out the harshest criticism of his personality. These Catholics wanted a president to be a moral leader, too: “We should be looking up to him. He’s the CEO of this country. We should respect him and he should be setting an example for every other family.”
THE CONFLICT OVER RUSSIA
Many in the conservative Catholic base also responded strongly to potential
conclusions of the special counsel’s Russia investigation. In open-ended associations, one person said that Robert Mueller had “been appointed to take care of a very important subject” and “somebody needs to find out” about what the Russians did because “we just can’t let some people do things improper that affect elections.”
To be sure, most Fox News Catholics had their Fox talking points about the Russia probe down!
Had Hillary Clinton won we wouldn’t have found out about all the corruption in the Department of Justice.
Most of the Democratic Party and the powers that be pushing this. I just don’t see—I don’t see how the Russians had any impact on me throughout any of this.
Well, to me it goes bad when Obama was president before his second election, he was caught with his microphone saying to the Russians leader, wait till I get reelected, we’ll really get things accomplished. And nothing was ever brought up about that except for that day or two. And I thought Hillary had off like a whole bunch of stuff tied to the Russians as well. So, and then there was all these dealings with, was it Obama, trying to get Iran tons of money before he left the presidency. And I’m just like, where is all those investigations. I just feel like they’re really trying to push Trump out of office any way they can.
And a lot of people gloss over the fact that it was Rob Rosenstein recommended to Trump that he fire Comey.
But a significant minority also took seriously a hypothetical scenario in which the special counsel indicts Trump’s campaign leadership for conspiring with Russia and reports to Congress that Trump obstructed justice, saying that if there was proof, then “let the currents fall where they may. It’s about accepting responsibility,” including possible impeachment. That response even came to include part of the Trump-Fox conservative Catholics: “I wrote, proof, proof, proof. And indictments right now are nothing more than party politics that I’m seeing. And if proof does come up, if these people were included at some point, Donald Trump, Jr., somebody’s got to pay for it, Manafort. There has got to be some jail time.” They said that if this were to happen, then “the Congress needs to be honest.” So, like the moderates, some in this bloc of the GOP wanted leaders to be a check on President Trump.
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