Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, made waves this year when he pivoted on his 2016 stance against President Donald Trump, who he called at the time “the Great Evangelical Embarrassment.” Mohler came around on Trump over the course of his administration and even voted for him in this year’s election, explaining that “If I am electing a neighbor, it would be Biden hands down …But I am not voting for who will be my neighbor, I am voting for who will be President of the United States.”
But that was October and now, Mohler says that Trump is “endangering” his legacy by casting aspersions on the security of the election. In his weekday current events podcast The Briefing, Mohler criticized Trump for refusing to concede the election, saying Trump’s baseless accusations of mass voter fraud “weakens America’s posture before the entire world.”
It is clear that the election in 2020 for president of the United States did not turn out as I had hoped. It is also clear that right now, President Trump’s refusal to separate the personal and the political is endangering the reputation of the United States around the world, but it’s also endangering President Trump’s place in history, which will record not only how he came to the office in that remarkable election of 2016 when no one believed that he could win, how he served in the office for four years of making history, but also how he left the office and ensured the peaceful transfer of power, which is the hallmark of America’s constitutional order.
“The election was won by Joe Biden,” Mohler said. “… It simply doesn’t work to say that the political system is rigged in such a way that ‘I could not have won re-election, because even if the people wanted to vote to re-elect me, they could not because of a rigged election.’”
Mohler is a fan of many of Trump’s policies over the last few years, particular in the area of abortion and conservative judge appointments, but says Trump’s comments are “fundamentally troubling.” He also says that Democratic Party leaders should have been more forceful in condemning accusations of mass voter fraud in 2016, when many voters baselessly theorized that Russia’s election meddling (which mostly involved online misinformation) had involved actual voter fraud (vote tampering.)
