Donald Trump and the New Mormon Mission

Yet on Friday, the swift and definitive Mormon defection from Trump reflected an even more intimate (and particularly male) Mormon impulse than to care for the religious and racial “other”—it was the urge to honor and protect Mormon wives, mothers, and daughters. Chaffetz announced that he could no longer back Trump because he and his wife “have a 15-year old daughter, and if I can’t look her in the eye and tell her these things, I can’t endorse this person.” Likewise, Mitt Romney, the leading Mormon Never Trumper, tweeted, “Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America’s face to the world.” On Saturday, even the Mormon-owned Deseret News broke with an 80-year tradition of not entering “the troubled waters of presidential endorsement” and called on Trump “to step down from his pursuit of the American presidency.” Trump is unfit for the highest office in the land, the paper explained, because he used his power to sexually abuse women and did so while also espousing the belief that these women actually wanted it.