Billy Graham’s granddaughter says Donald Trump needs to apologize.
“In order to forgive somebody, that individual needs to repent and apologize. And I don’t think America has seen that from our President in any scenario,” said Jerushah Armfield on CNN’s “Erin Burnette OutFront.”
The comments came Friday evening, as the American evangelist’s granddaughter joined CNN’s Jim Sciutto for a live conversation that quickly touched upon the syntax surrounding Trump’s alleged comments describing Haiti and other nations as “shithole” countries.
“I think a lot of times people seem to be focusing on the language that he used, which really wasn’t the issue,” said Armfield. She referred to other evangelical Christians — including her uncle Franklin Graham, who defended Trump’s language in a CNN interview earlier this week — and it’s her feeling that word choice was not Trump’s biggest error.
“I think it was the context of what he said, around the language that he used,” she noted, adding “I think it was the disheartening, dehumanizing comments that were said around the word.”
Armfield said she wishes that, as it pertains to President Trump, others could separate politics from character.
“I understand a lot of evangelicals supporting him because of his policies,” she said. “I’d love to see a Christian leader come out and say that they support Trump for his policies, but that his behavior disgusts them, and he needs to clean up his act.”
Instead, she said, many in the evangelical community feel that “if they support his policies, they also feel like they have to stay hush(ed) on his behavior.”
And for the granddaughter of one of the nation’s most well-known spiritual leaders, linking her faith with the face in the Oval Office feels blasphemous.
“My president doesn’t have to be a Christian … I just don’t want him to be held up as the poster boy for Christian evangelical because he doesn’t represent most of us.”