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The President, who has no known consistent political principles, has just “kept his campaign promise to the American people,” by pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, thereby insuring that the same American People (and especially their children and grandchildren) will suffer increased effects of “the Chinese hoax” of man-made global-warming.

Does he really believe global warming is a Chinese hoax? Probably not, but it’s something he can sell to low-information voters.

Sometimes we wonder if Donald Trump is not really President of the United States, he’s just playing one on TV.

Yesterday it was the Birthers, but todayʻs low-information Trump customers appear to be found in the greatest concentration amongst “Christian” Conservatives.

Thus we have the spectacle of Congressman Tim Walberg (R-Michigan) saying that, even if climate change is a problem (which he doubts), the Deity will see to it that it goes away. When questioned at a public meeting in Coldwater, Michigan, he said “as a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us. And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, He can take care of it.” Sure He will …

I’ve personally had a problem with kind of religiosity ever since I was walking across the Manoa campus one day and a student preacher approached me, Bible ostentatiously in hand. He asked me if I were “a Christian” and when I replied I was raised as a Unitarian by a very high-church Anglican mother, said, “no, I mean a real Christian.”

Which points to an essential problem in American political and social discourse. Not only have they cast aside uncomfortable scientific facts like global warming, Fundamentalist Protestants have also abrogated unto themselves the term “Christian.” As if Catholics and Greek Orthodox and Quakers and Mennonites, et al (not to mention Mormons) were not really “Christian.”

Pope Francis, we understand, is actually a “Christian” himself. But he is not a Fundamentalist Protestant.

And since he is decidedly not “low-information” either, the Holy Fatherʻs encyclical Laudato Si (the one which Francis handed Trump on the latter’s visit to the Holy See) in which he details the duty of the followers of Jesus in the modern world to work for the environment (including global warming), must not be a “Christian” document. At least not in the eyes of “Christians” like Rep. Walberg.

Never mind. Donald Trump, who has somehow managed to bamboozle a whole passel of Fundamentalist Conservatives, doesn’t really give a damn. He just knows a gullible mark when he sees one.