Fake news: CNN on Trump and religion

Reagan's church in Tampico, IL

There is so much wrong with this CNN fake news article by M.J. Lee about President Donald Trump and his religious faith, or lack thereof, that it's a matter of Christian mercy that I don't just pick it to pieces.

But here's one paragraph:

Trump is unique among modern American presidents for his seeming lack of deep religious orientation. He doesn't have a hometown church, and a months-long examination of the congregations he had ties to throughout his life found no evidence that Trump put down permanent roots in any of them.

The claim in that first sentence is wrong. And one could easily substitute "Obama" for "Trump" in that paragraph, only that Barack Obama's parents were atheists. Trump's mother was a devout Presbyterian. And Obama only joined one church in his life, the race-based Trinity United Church of Christ, led by Jeremiah "God D*mn America" Wright. And while Abraham Lincoln was likely a believer in God, his stance on Christianity was complicated, particularly when he was a young man. Okay, Lincoln wasn't a modern president, but he's widely regarded as America's greatest one.

Barack Obama's name never comes up in Lee's piece.

Lee notes that Trump has not been a regular church attendee since he became president. But Obama was a rare churchgoer as president.

And so was Ronald Reagan, a deep man of faith who possessed a Christian empathy for others. Since most churches aren't built with US Secret Service protection in mind, it's very disruptive to worshippers when a president and his entourage arrives for church services, and the Gipper didn't want to spoil mass for everyone else.

Lee looks back at the president's childhood in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens.

But it's not clear that Trump ever quite fit in at his childhood church in the 1950s, when there was a perceived division between the "old money" and "new money" families within the all-white congregation.

But within that article is a 1959 photograph of a young Trump, second from the top right, with his confirmation class at the First Presbyterian Church of Jamaica.

Photo courtesy of CNN

And what do we see here? Among Trump's classmates are two blacks and what appears to be an Asian girl.

All white?

Fake news.

It's a revolving circle with the anti-Trump media. When the Russia story cools off they'll move back to his income tax returns. Or they'll attack him on global warming.

Not even religion is sacred with them.