Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who ran twice for President (2008 and 2016), reports that he has been bombarded with media interviews after Donald Trump won the 2024 Iowa Caucus. (Huckabee won the 2008 Iowa Republican caucuses.)
Huckabee, who is also a Baptist minister, says mainstream media journalists are “bewildered” by evangelicals supporting Trump — a man who has been married three times, has been found guilty of sexual abuse, and is facing 91 criminal charges across four indictments, one involving a porn star.
On his TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network) show, Huckabee claimed “Evangelicals do not vote in a monolithic block,” but did point out that the two “biblical” issues that are non-negotiable for most evangelical voters are “the sanctity of life issue and the support of Israel.”
Without mentioning Trump by name, Huckabee (who has endorsed Trump) explains: “Evangelicals do not vote on the person most like their pastor or Sunday school teacher” but those candidates who “truly and authentically share the spiritual conviction and practices of [evangelical] voters.”
As an evangelical voter himself, Huckabee also states that “most of us believe in real charity — we think that’s what happens when we give a tithe of our income, ten percent… to help widows, orphans, the homeless and the hungry.”
Trump sometimes qualifies as charitable by Huckabee’s definition. After the former president refused to release his personal tax returns while running for office, in 2022 a House committee made public six years of his tax returns.
Examining the returns, NBC News reported that Trump reported zero charitable donations in 2020, though “that was an outlier for Trump during his time in office — he reported $1.8 million in charitable giving in 2017, and just over $500,000 in charitable donations in 2018 and 2019, the returns show.”
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