Trump didn't 'gaffe,' he merely repeated exactly what the nice hate group leader told him to say

I really hate to defend Donald Trump on this "2 Corinthians" thing. So I won't.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump late Wednesday pinned blame for his scriptural gaffe — saying “2 Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians” — on evangelical activist Tony Perkins.

Let's fix that up a bit before we continue. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump late Wednesday pinned blame for his gaffe on SLPC-designated hate group leader Tony Perkins. Identifying Tony Perkins an "evangelical activist" is like penning a column referencing "noted social rights activist David Duke," and it's long past time the press decides it's all right to identify loathsome people accurately instead of glancing over the troublesome bits.

“Tony Perkins wrote that out for me. He actually wrote out the 2, he wrote out the number 2 Corinthians,” Trump said on “CNN Tonight with Don Lemon.” “I took exactly what Tony said, and I said, ‘Well, Tony has to know better than anybody.’”

So there you go, and I think we can all believe Trump's story because, as per the usual metric, nobody would make up a version that makes themselves seem worse than originally thought. Anti-LGBT hate group leader Tony Perkins wrote down what Republican front-runner Donald Trump should say in a public setting; Donald Trump obligingly repeated it word-for-word. So 2 Corinthians is indeed the shortened written name of the book, and Donald Trump is indeed (still) not familiar enough with good old-fashioned Bible-thumping to know that that is the Bible shorthand for Second Epistle to Those Corinthian Guys Over Yonder. Perkins, for some reason possibly related to his own bulk-rate stupidity, did not himself catch on that Donald Trump was not the sort of person who would know that 2 Corinthians was the shorthand version and that Trump would therefore need it and the rest of the Bible-related portions of his speech written out foh-net-ick-lee.

But Trump said he has since heard from “a lot of people” who tell him that he was actually correct.

This is Donald Trump's answer to any question asked, mind you. There is nary a gaffe that won't result in Donald Trump taking to Twitter after he has said it to brag about all the invisible people that have now verified, from the comfort of their invisible chairs, that whatever Donald Trump originally said was brilliant and insightful and not at all pulled from the nether regions of a decomposing cat.

But I will say that the Two Corinthians "gaffe" or verbal shorthand does seem common enough even among the most rigorous Bible-thumpers that it's hard to pin that specifically on Donald Trump as a reason to despise him, when there are plenty of far better reasons, or as evidence that he is not truly familiar with Christianity's Holy Book, when Donald Trump’s entire spoken oeuvre has already demonstrated that Donald Trump has no particular use for Christianity's Holy Book. We should believe him when he says the nice man from the far-right virulently anti-LGBT hate group wrote down what he should say in his next speech and Donald Trump merely repeated it word-for-word like a good conservative candidate would.

As Jesus intended, and so forth.