"Thin-skinned" Americans should have listened to President Donald Trump's words — not seized on them as a political weapon — because all hate is "pure evil" and "we need to unite behind that," Jerry Falwell Jr. said Sunday.
"I think the American people have gotten sort of thin-skinned, and I think they need to listen to the substance of what he said," Falwell Jr. told ABC's "This Week." "The only groups he identified by name as evil and causing what happened were the Nazis, KKK, and extremists. All I know is it was pure evil.
"The media has tried to paint this as Republican versus Democrat, black versus white. Jew versus gentile. It's pure evil versus good. We all need to unite behind that — behind stopping evil, with whether it's Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist in Oklahoma City, Muslim terrorists in Barcelona, somebody flying a plane into the World Trade Center — it's all evil."
The selective listening has become too political, and President Trump — while unrefined — is a different kind of leader for the U.S., one that speaks from the heart and is not stuck on being politically correct, Falwell told host Martha Raddatz.
"President Trump is something we haven't had in national leadership in a long time: He's substance over form," Falwell said. "So many of our politicians, recent leaders, national leaders, have been form over substance. They tell people what they want to hear. They sugar-coat everything."
President Trump's statements might have left him open to criticism because they don't align with political correctness, but they should not be dismissed, or mis-branded as racist, fascist, or hateful for political attackers of the president, Falwell added.
"One of the reasons I supported him is because he doesn't say what's politically correct," Falwell added. "He says what is is in his heart. What he believes. Sometimes that gets him in trouble.
"He does not have a racist bone in his body. I know him well. He is working so hard to help minorities and people in the inner cities up through . . . He's doing so many other things to bring jobs back to the inner city."
As for the criticism of President Trump's chosen delivery after Charlottesville —assigning moral equivalency of all the hate groups — Falwell said they are all evil, even if they may not be morally equivalent.
"I think the president has made it very clear that there is no moral equivalency," Falwell said. "There's no moral equivalence between that and somebody driving his car into a crowd because he hates people of other races. That's wrong. That's just evil. There's no two ways about it. The president has made that clear."
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