Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) bashed former President Trump online and said Christians who support him “don’t understand” their religion.
“I’m going to go out on a NOT limb here: this man is not a Christian,” Kinzinger said on X, formerly known as Twitter, responding to Trump’s Christmas post. “If you are a Christian who supports him you don’t understand your own religion.”
Kinzinger, one of Trump’s fiercest critics in the GOP, said in his post that “Trump is weak, meager, smelly, victim-ey, belly-achey, but he ain’t a Christian and he’s not ‘God’s man.’”
I can’t tell if you’re being serious, but in case you are, these definitions may help:
No true Scotsman fallacy: No true Scotsman fallacy is an informal logical fallacy that occurs when one tries to define a term or group in a way that excludes certain counterexamples by arbitrarily changing the definition to fit their argument.
metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
Yes, except the example here is someone who very clearly does NOT fit in the group. It’s basically saying Donald Trump isn’t a real Christian, not because of some arbitrary definition of what it means to be Christian, but because he is literally not a real Christian. No True Scotsman doesn’t apply here because the subject is as far removed from a Scotsman as a squirrel living in Japan is.
Obviously Trump is not a Christian. That’s not what he’s saying.
He’s talking about people who follow trump and who call themselves Christian. Literally no true Scotsman. They 100% think they’re Christian, and they have just as much a claim on the title as anyone.
eta: relevant quote: