I will vote for Donald J. Trump in the 2016 presidential election. A factor that tipped me into this decision was the witness of Christians surviving genocidal attacks in the Middle East, who consistently beg Western nations not to topple President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

They don’t endorse his cruelty, but they know that the toppling of Assad would unleash anti-Christian violence and the genocide of countless Syrians, Iraqis and others. There is no Syrian election in 2016, but the “vote” — the political will of the persecuted in the Middle East — is that Assad remain in power.

This may seem unrelated to the U.S. presidential election, but it isn’t. In fact, the fate of the Church in the U.S. and in the Middle East may be more related than one would guess. Indeed, from a global perspective, the Christian case for Donald Trump is by far the strongest.

The Anti-Christian Ruling Class

Recent WikiLeaks revelations confirm what the lived experience of the past eight years has taught us to suspect: That there is a progressive ruling class — a powerful cabal of media and political figures — and that its aims are manifestly anti-Christian.

How anti-Christian? Anti-Christian enough to do the following:

Anti-Christian Bigotry in the U.S.

• Stir up hedonism by pushing “gender theory” propaganda in schools and normalizing perversity in the media — ultimately lining up sexual vices and their attendant drugs and “surgeries” (not least of all abortion) for taxpayer funding and even the coerced support of Church organizations despite religious objections.
• Cover up and downplay the historic news of Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in preborn human body parts, smearing the Center for Medical Progress’s undercover videos in the media as “deceptively edited” while government officials raided and ransacked whistleblower David Deleiden’s home, but dragged their feet on investigating the illegal activity he exposed.
• Conspire to “plant the seeds of a revolution” in the Church by creating Leftist Catholic front groups to undermine the Church’s resistance of government encroachments on religious liberty.
• Nominate a presidential candidate and construct a Democratic Party Platform that explicitly promise to ramp up the above efforts by
  1. Signing into law the “Equality Act,” a bill which, as I wrote at catholicvote.org, “would be the last nail in the religious liberty coffin of Obergefell, criminalizing the rights of religious employers to, say, refuse to hire gay rights operatives as Catechism teachers.”
  2. Increasing Planned Parenthood’s federal funding and repealing the Hyde Amendment, forcing taxpayers to directly finance abortion on demand.
  3. Appointing Supreme Court justices who would pursue a “progressive vision of religious freedom” that only operates as a cover for labeling orthodox Christian beliefs as “the misuse of religion to discriminate,” in the words of the Democratic Party Platform.

Anti-Christian Bigotry Overseas

• Refuse to acknowledge the persecution of Christians in the Middle East virtually until the rise of ISIS made it politically embarrassing not to do so, and celebrate Syrian Muslim persecutors as “freedom fighters” for nearly a decade — both by granting them the status of media darlings at outlets such as NPR, and by the Obama administration providing them (to this day!) with the very weapons they used to hunt and murder Assyrian Christians and Yazidis.
• Foment aggression against the Assad regime in Syria, while ignoring the terrified pleas of surviving persecuted minorities who continually beg the West to leave the Assad regime intact as the only thing — however imperfect — standing between them and a final unleashing of genocidal Jihad.
• Trumpet a “refugee crisis” that demands the hasty acceptance of Syrian migrants into Europe and the U.S., only to systematically exclude Assyrian Christians fleeing ISIS. (As Elliot Abrams reports for the Council on Foreign Relations: “The United States has accepted 10,801 Syrian refugees, of whom 56 are Christian. … That is to say, one half of one percent.”
• Nominate a presidential candidate and construct a Democratic Party Platform that explicitly promise to ramp up the above efforts by
  • a) Supporting what the Democratic Party Platform calls the “moderate Syrian opposition” which has long been hijacked by the same Islamists who have mercilessly persecuted Assyrian Christians since long before ISIS.
  • b) Creating a “No-Fly Zone” at the behest of would-be President Hillary Clinton to protect “moderate” rebels in Syria — an aggressive threat to shoot down Russian and Syrian planes.
  • c) Exponentially increasing U.S. acceptance of Syrian Muslim migrants while continuing the status quo of systematically neglecting endangered Assyrian Christians.

Displaced Assyrians, who had fled their hometowns due to Islamic State Group (ISIS) attacks against their communities, take part in a prayer at the Ibrahim-al Khalil Melkite Greek Catholic church in the Jaramana district on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on March 1, 2015. IS jihadists in Syria recently abducted at least 220 Assyrians, one the world’s oldest Christian groups. Some 30,000 Assyrians lived in Syria before the start of the civil war in 2011.

Assad and Trump Have Something in Common: Powerful Anti-Christians Have Set Their Sights On Them

There are parallels between mainstream media coverage of Syria’s Assad and of presidential candidate Donald Trump. In both cases the reportage is incessant, mostly undeniably repulsive, and emotionally charged.

There have been several spikes of gruesome, heartbreaking viral reportage on the Assad regime’s aggressive actions against jihadist cells in Aleppo. One of the first viral images was of a little boy, bloodied and covered in powder and rubble from the latest bombing. Too stunned to even cry, no parents in sight, sitting momentarily alone in an ambulance chair after busy rescue workers rushed to aid more civilian victims.

Along with the rest of the world, I was moved to tears.

But many suffering Christians in the Middle East had twice as much reason to weep.As moved as they are by Assad’s cruelty, Assyrian Christians are wise enough to keep in mind that his opponents don’t have their own motives. As the president of Iraqi Christian Relief Council, Juliana Taimoorazy, told me in a recent interview at CatholicVote.org:

For me, as a Middle Eastern Christian, it’s terrifying to hear that Assad should be attacked or Assad should be removed, because we see what happened when we removed Saddam Hussein. If we remove Assad, Christians will be slaughtered across the region even more because we don’t know what will fill the vacuum when Assad is removed.

Assad is a tyrant. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, yes, I completely agree, and Saddam Hussein needed to be removed, but I don’t think we’re capable of replacing these tyrants and dictators with fair, good leaders. That’s where my fear comes from when it comes to the removal of Assad.

American Christians should try to be as shrewd as their coreligionists in the Middle East. We ought to keep in mind that the political and media establishment that spent so much airtime on Trump’s personal lewdness has for years encouraged sexual vices both in the media and among policymakers — to say nothing of the sexual deviance of members of Hillary’s inner circle, not least of all that of her husband.

The ruling class does not oppose Trump because of his personal immorality — insofar as he is lecherous he’s their spiritual kin — but because of the political machinery he carries with him. As president, Trump would represent the most pro-life GOP platform in history and a much less aggressive policy toward Syria. His election would hamper the barreling anti-Christianity of progressives at just the moment when it is meant to ramp up and plunge us into a potentially irretrievable global mainstreaming of progressive and jihadist bigotry.

American Christians Should Not Wish to Topple Trump Any More Than Middle Eastern Christians Would Topple Assad

Going back to my interview with Taimoorazy, she said “President Obama and American policy have gravely failed the Christians of the Middle East.” She also told me of the plans of local Christian militias, sympathizers in the Iraqi government and others to defend Assyrians by creating their own fully defended region:

The Donald Trump camp, and congress in general, requested that Robert Nicholson [the Executive Director of the Philos Project] write the language on the safe-haven for both platforms, the DNC and the RNC, what it should look like or what it is. The Trump camp and the RNC incorporated it into their 2016 Platform but the DNC did not.

Unlike heroic Christians who risk their lives for their faith in the Middle East, we have an election at our disposal and considerable power over the fate of Christians both in the U.S. and abroad. American Christians should consider whether we want to join the ruling class in toppling Trump, just as it would topple Assad.

Luckily, we do not face the question of whether we would risk our lives to hold onto our faith. But to some degree, we do face the question of whether we would risk the lives of Middle Eastern Christians to express our dissatisfaction with Trump.

I, for one, will not.