We're starting to wonder if maybe this Trump thing is getting out of hand, just a little maybe. Call it a hunch. Oh, sure, there's always been the xenophobia, the hatred, the lies, the gratuitous violence, and the candidate's own love for the spectacle of the violence. Not to mention the white supremacists fapping to anime. Oh, yes, and the acting like a Nazi, that too. So we certainly shouldn't have been all that surprised Monday when the warm-up preacher for a Trump event in Hickory, North Carolina, casually remarked that Bernie Sanders needs to get himself saved by Jesus, who is almost certainly Donald Trump's biggest supporter. Because if there's anything Jesus loves, it's the gold plated bathroom fixtures in Trump Hotels. So Trump rallies have finally come for the Jews, huh? Or at least one of them.

Filling time while Trump was running late thanks to a plane delay, Pastor Mark Burns contrasted Donald Trump -- the classiest Christian who ever misquoted the Bible -- with one of his potential Democratic rivals, who is not even a Christian at all:

And Bernie Sanders who doesn't believe in God -- How in the world are we going to let Bernie? I mean really? Listen, Bernie gotta get saved. He gotta meet Jesus. I dunno, he gotta have a come to Jesus meeting.

Yes, that would be the same Bernie Sanders who, at the last Democratic debate, said he enjoys being a Jewish just fine, thanks for asking:

I am very proud to be Jewish and being Jewish is so much of what I am. Look. My father’s family was wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust. I know about what crazy and radical and extremist politics mean. I learned that lesson as a tiny, tiny child when my mother would take me shopping and we would see people working in stores who had numbers on their arms because they were in Hitler’s concentration camp.

Hmm. Who could he possibly have been talking about with that line about "crazy and radical and extremist politics"? In any case, it would appear that Burns forgot the first rule of fundagelical public speaking, which is that even if you're sure Jews are going to hell, publicly you have to praise America's "Judeo-Christian values," by which you mean Christianity.

Burns is one of the black pastors who met with Trump in a badly stage-managed event the Trump campaign originally billed as an "endorsement," which was quite a surprise to several of the pastors who thought they were simply going to meet Trump to check the cut of his jib. Never mind those losers; Burns, who co-founded a Christian TV network that no one's ever heard of, enthusiastically announced his own endorsement of Trump. On MSNBC, Burns preemptively insisted that his endorsement was a very brave thing to do, and he absolutely was not paid for his endorsement:

trust me, when I tell you, I'm not an Uncle Tom, no coon, nobody's been paid. I have not been offered a position. This is me looking at the politics, and looking at an individual, a strong leader that I believe that's going to bridge and bring a strength back to America.

Which strikes us as weird, given that anchor Kate Snow had merely asked him about another pastor who'd declined to endorse Trump; she hadn't said a thing about Burns selling out. Since the endorsement, Burns has appeared at other Trump events, where for all we know he might open every speech with "I am not an Uncle Tom," to goad the lamestream media into calling him an Uncle Tom.

Despite Pastor Burns's sage advice, Bernie Sanders apparently plans to stubbornly continue being Jewish, albeit not Jewish enough for some arbiters of Who Gets To Be Jewish. He's probably just Jewish enough for some Trump supporter to tell him he should "go to fuckin' Auschwitz."

[Politico / Mother Jones / Fusion / Real Clear Politics / NYT]