President Trump relishes his reputation as a savvy dealmaker. “Deals are my art form,” he once tweeted.
“Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.” He promised during the 2016 campaign that if elected, he would work with politicians and foreign leaders to make “smart deals for the country.”
But since he took office there has been precious little evidence of Trump’s vaunted dealmaking prowess. Such successes as his administration has been able to claim have generally been accomplished without his direct involvement?and sometimes in spite of it.

There is, though, one obvious piece of evidence from the president’s political career that suggests his dealmaking reputation might be
deserved after all: the relationship he has with evangelical political leaders. He has lavished them with attention and let them bask in his celebrity star-power, things that they, long feeling like outsiders
in American culture and politics,
have badly craved. In exchange, they have thrown him their support?unconditional
support, by all appearances?and with it, the backing of a political constituency vital to his success at the polls.

In The Faith of Donald J. Trump, authors David Brody and Scott Lamb provide an in-depth look at the relationship between
the president and American evangelicals. Brody and Lamb?respectively a newscaster
with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network and a vice president at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University?have written what they dub a “spiritual biography,” even though they come right out and say they have no intention of
answering the question of whether
Trump is a Christian. Instead, they hope to convey his faith through his actions.

In the process, though, Brody and Lamb inadvertently expose the corruption and moral vacuity of the political evangelical movement in the United States.

Trump only started paying attention to evangelicals once he began to consider running for president?some five or more years before the 2016 campaign. He made a show of cozying up to evangelical
pastors who write books that usually don’t sell well outside their own congregations. He reached out to the prosperity-gospel heretic Paula White and flattered her. He asked questions of other religious leaders.

As his ambitions grew, Trump cannily cultivated relationships with evangelicals, and they convinced themselves that those relationships must be sincere since they began before he openly started campaigning for
the presidency. Once he did start openly campaigning, the outreach
only became more intensive. As Brody and Lamb report, Trump would seek out the preachers to sit next to at events. He would bring his mother’s Bible to meetings to show it off. Evangelicals fell for it. So
deluded and distracted are they by the trappings of power, they do not even see what Brody and Lamb see. “He’s the P. T. Barnum of the 21st century,” an anonymous banker in the book
says of Donald Trump. These evangelical leaders have yet to realize that they are the suckers.