The Twitter account for President Trump’s new pick for the Federal Election Commission was reportedly made private Tuesday evening after other Twitter users began noticing some of the nominee’s past sharing of anti-Protestant posts.
The White House announced late Tuesday night that Trump was nominating Trey Trainor, a Texas lawyer who repeatedly clashed with the state’s campaign finance regulators, to serve on the Federal Election Commission. Trainor is being picked to serve the remainder of a six-year term that expires in 2021, according to the White House announcement Tuesday night, but it is not entirely clear which current commissioner he will be replacing.
While many election law experts were quick to point out Trainor’s reputation of fighting campaign finance regulation, others noticed the “interesting” tweets in his timeline.
cant explain trey trainor’s canon here but suffice it to say he’s the kinda dude who got super amped about the new black panther party pic.twitter.com/K4EWB4hU2T
— chris hooks (@cd_hooks) September 13, 2017
By Wednesday morning, Trainor had made his Twitter feed private, but not before a few users took screen shots of some of his Tweets, including those that appeared to promote anti-Protestant podcasts.
Snagged this gem before he went private. pic.twitter.com/GOupmL3psz
— Nikki Levy (@Nikki_Levy) September 13, 2017
— Celeste Katz (@CelesteKatzNYC) September 13, 2017
Trainor appears to have tweeted out links to audio episodes posted by the hardline Catholic website, Church Militant. Trainor has appeared on a radio show hosted by the website in the past to talk about the litigation around the Planned Parenthood “sting” videos.
Trainor did not immediately respond to TPM’s inquiry about the deleted tweets.
The links he apparently tweeted more recently are to Church Militant posts claiming the superiority of Catholicism over other religions.
“Protestantism is poison,” reads the subhead of one of the posts.
The host, Michael Voris, in one of the audio clips tweeted out by Trainor, says the various Protestant off-shoots “have perverted views of Christ.”
“There are no Protestants in heaven, just as there are not other religions in heaven,” Voris says.
Trainor is a well-known lawyer in Texas politics, currently working for the firm Akerman. He represented Michael Sullivan Quinn, a political kingmaker in Texas who got in trouble with state’s ethics board for failing to register as a lobbyist. Trainor represented Quinn’s and other Tea Party groups as they sought to replace over half of the board, Texas Ethics Commission.
While new @FEC nominee @txelectionlaw‘s tweets are now protected, here’s him RTing someone advocating to defund @TX_Ethics Commission pic.twitter.com/Qi0QmYiDwl
— Dave Levinthal (@davelevinthal) September 13, 2017
Trainor represented the Republican National Committee’s platform committee and did some work for the Trump campaign during the Republican National Convention.
Also, this nomination raises obvious question: would Trainor recuse himself on matters before the FEC involving Trump/RNC?
— Dave Levinthal (@davelevinthal) September 13, 2017
He has already served in the Trump administration, in a temporary position under Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
Trainor has a record advocating for religious causes. He was behind a push to install a Nativity scene in front of the Texas state Capitol in 2014. A year later, he got in a tussle with a watchdog group that sought to put a pseudo-nativity display at the state Capitol that had the Bill of Rights in the place of the baby Jesus.
“They want to continue this war on Christmas,” Trainor said at the time.
remind me again: DT is a Catholic ?
nominally presbyterian
There’s so many ‘true religions’ out there, you need a dichotomous taxonomic key to figure them all out. Part of the reason that I’m agnostic is, “how can you ever be sure you’ve got the right one?” For all I know, God is an ineffable, omniscient carabid beetle, which makes sense, owing to the fact that there are so many species of beetles, which, as J.S. B. Haldane has pointed out, is proof of God’s inordinate fondness for them.
I thought so, that’s kind of ‘Protestantish’ ?
Why will Trainor work for an apostate ?
I always forget, which side the US fought, on during the Thirty Years War…
Pope Frank must drive this clown crazy.