Social conservatives are "over the moon" about Trump

On the eighth floor of the Marriott Marquis in New York’s Times Square, Marjorie Dannenfelser stabbed anxiously at a plate of salad while offering a series of defensive and unconvincing answers. It was June of last year, and Dannenfelser, a social conservative titan and president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, was one of nearly a thousand Christian activists to attend a summit that afternoon with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. She also was one of roughly 50 to join him for a VIP meeting beforehand. Many of these leaders, including Dannenfelser, had opposed his candidacy from the outset of the campaign; now that they were closing ranks around a thrice-married Manhattan socialite and self-described womanizer with a history of running casinos and supporting partial-birth abortion, I had a simple question for Dannenfelser: Why would social conservatives stake their credibility and moral authority on Donald Trump?

After several halting responses, Dannenfelser leaned forward and lowered her voice. “All along the way he was our last choice,” she told me. “But when you get to the end, to the point of having a binary choice, you must choose.”