'You gotta be tough': White evangelicals remain enthusiastic about Donald Trump

White evangelical Christians show no signs of backing away from Donald Trump. That appears to be one takeaway from Iowa's Republican caucuses, where the former president won a decisive victory over several challengers.

In 2016, there was a lot of head-scratching about evangelical support for Trump - given his divorces, allegations of both extramarital affairs and sexual assault, and his insults toward women, immigrants, and others.

But many white evangelicals, like Shelley Buhrow, look past all that.

Nobody's perfect

"Have you read the Bible?" Buhrow asked. "Many people in the Bible were married multiple times and they didn't always do the perfect thing."

Buhrow, who attended a pro-Trump event in a suburb outside Des Moines leading up to Monday's Iowa caucuses, says she's been a Trump supporter since his first Iowa caucus in 2016.

"People aren't perfect," Buhrow said. "God is perfect."

Buhrow disregards the 91 state and federal criminal charges Trump is facing - including trying to overturn the 2020 election. She says they're illegitimate and she doesn't think they'll stick.

A binary choice, no longer

Around 8 in ten white evangelicals supported Trump in the general election in 2016 and a similar number again in 2020, when he lost to President Biden. Some defended those votes as a choice between Trump, who would advance goals like restricting abortion, and a Democrat, who would not.

Luana Stoltenberg, a Republican state representative, said she had some initial concerns about Donald Trump when he first emerged on the political scene.

"I just knew him as, you know, the developer and kind of the playboy kind of a guy," she remembered.

Stoltenberg had friends who "prayed through it" and believed Trump was "supposed to