Trump Has Found God. It's Him.

Politico

a day ago

'I'm supposed to be dead,' Donald Trump said, the day after he got shot at his rally last summer in Butler, Pennsylvania. 'I'm not supposed to be here,' he said four days after that. 'But something very special happened. Let's face it. Something happened,' he said two days after that. 'It's … an act of God,' he said the month after that. 'God spared my life for a reason,' he said in his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago in November. 'I was saved by God to make America great again,' he said in his inaugural address at the Capitol in January. 'It changed something in me,' he said in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in February. 'I feel even stronger.'
This is new. It's not how he talked for most of his long and voluble life. He has always, it should be said, seen himself as special, and he has always, of course, been notably self-aggrandizing. But the longtime self-described 'fatalist' invariably maintained a sort of shoulder-shrugging acceptance that whatever was going to happen was beyond his or anyone else's control. Over the last 10 or so months since Butler, however, and especially since his reelection and the start of his second administration, Trump's outlook has shifted in essence from stuff happens and nothing much matters to something happened and it couldn't matter more. His rhetoric has gone from borderline nihilistic to messianic.
For a while now, a roster of religious believers and leaders, grateful for the political victories Trump has bestowed in exchange for their votes, have suggested and sometimes outright said that Trump is 'chosen,' or 'anointed,' or a 'savior,' or 'the second coming' or 'the Christ for this age.' Now, though, Trump does it, too. And that matters. It matters, some say, because it highlights how his well-documented narcissism and grandiosity has metastasized into notions of omnipotence, invincibility and infallibility. And it matters maybe most immediately because it offers a window into how he is approaching his second term — even more emboldened, even more unilaterally oriented, even more apparently uncheckable and untouchable than the first. 'I run the country and the world,' he said last month. 'I'd like to be pope,' he said — kind of joking, but … kind of not? — before he and the White House posted on social media an AI image of himself adorned in archetypal papal attire.
It's worth asking. Does Trump … think he's God? OK, he almost certainly doesn't think he's God — but does he think he's … God-like? Divinely sanctioned or inspired or empowered? Does he think he's somehow imbued with some special, sacred purpose for some special, sacred reason? Or did he just see and seize an opportunity to stamp his world-upending agenda with the ultimate justification — a mandate from God?
'I have no reason to doubt that he would … prefer to believe he was saved by a supreme being because he himself is special rather than the would-be assassin was a lousy shot or he got lucky,' Alan Marcus, a former Trump consultant and publicist, told me. 'He prefers drama which fits into his make-believe narrative, a narrative which always has him being the best, the biggest, the strongest, the toughest, the brightest, et cetera — none of which are even close to the truth, but he knows he can convince people,' Marcus said. 'His world is fantasy, scripted like a movie — not biblical unless, of course, that helps bring a particular scene or chapter to life.'
'Perhaps opportunism and genuine belief in his own chosenness aren't mutually exclusive,' Marie Griffith, the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. 'But whether he truly believes it or not, it is plainly in his interest to keep talking as if everything he does is sanctioned by God,' she said. 'And I think just looking at the rhetoric, you have to wonder if Butler really shook him up and he thought, 'Maybe they are right. Maybe I really am the 'chosen one.''
'I think he does believe he was saved to do great things as president,' Stephen Mansfield, the author of the 2018 book Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him, told me. 'I think he does believe that he is a tool of God.'
Some say Trump believes nothing. That's not true. He believes, for instance, in tariffs, and always has. He believes in the importance of genes and always has. He believes in the power of positive thinking, and he believes in the power of negative publicity. And Trump, at best an intermittently observant Christian who reportedly has mocked those more devout, nonetheless believes, and has for a long, long time, in … something like predestination.
'I'm a great fatalist,' he told a reporter from New York's Newsday in 1991.
'What scares you the most?'
'Nothing,' he said. 'Whatever happens, happens — and you just have to go along with it.'
'Unbelievable,' he told Larry King on CNN in 1997. The famed fashion designer Gianni Versace had just been murdered outside his Miami Beach mansion by a celebrity-obsessed stalker named Andrew Cunanan.
'John Kennedy once said if someone wants to get you, and that's all they think about, you're in trouble,' King said.
'True,' Trump said.
'So,' King said, 'Trump the fatalist has to be aware and give thought to the Cunanans.'
'You have to be aware,' Trump said. 'Otherwise, you're a fool — but, again, I don't think you can change your entire life. You're not going to go into a very safe little space and just lock the door and never come out. I just don't think you can do that. And I am a fatalist. I say, 'Hey, what happens, happens.' And maybe it's predestined. Who knows?'
Trump has had stray moments in which he seemed to be searching for something else — something more meaningful? 'There has to be a reason we are here,' he told Tim O'Brien for O'Brien's Trump biography that came out in 2005. 'There has to be a reason that we're going through this. There has to be a reason for everything,' he said. 'I do believe in God. I think there just has to be something that's far greater than us.'
For the most part, though, Trump's expressed the opposite — that basically the world is full of random this or that with no higher discernible purpose. 'People ask me, 'How do you handle pressure?'' he wrote in 2007 in his book Think Big and Kick Ass. 'The truth is, it does not matter. What the hell difference does it make? You see what is going on in Iraq; you have seen a tsunami wipe out hundreds of thousands of people. Think about how 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center on September 11 …'
In 2015, Trump understood that such suffering or happenstance was not a message on which he could run to be president — and that if he wanted to win, he would need the support of people for whom faith in a higher power is a determinant factor. The thrice-married philanderer and philistine said he was 'not sure' he'd ever asked God for forgiveness, and said 'Two Corinthians' instead of 'Second Corinthians,' and couldn't or wouldn't name a favorite verse in the Bible (until he did somewhat). But he knew evangelicals were a crucial bloc of voters and 'realized it was going to be a bit of a stretch to argue that he himself is a religious man,' said Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, and so 'instead he adopted a quid pro quo approach' — dangling promises, policies and Supreme Court justices in line with their desires.
He ran a campaign, too, that was what noted rhetoric expert Jen Mercieca calls 'a Biblical hero narrative' — a convoluted 'hero quest,' as she put it to me, 'of defeating the corrupt (politicians, media, the politically correct) all around him and claimed that he had been purified to end corruption by the act of running for office.' And a critical mass of evangelicals responded by casting Trump as a messiah, a 'modern-day Cyrus,' an imperfect figure tapped to do God's perfect work. 'Does he think, do you think, that his election that year was the result of God?' pastor and Trump religious adviser Paula White-Cain was asked of his win in 2016. 'I say that all the time, and I say that to him,' she answered. 'He's not going to over-exaggerate himself that God is sitting there going, 'I chose you.' But others are going to say to him, 'You've been chosen by God.''
He was sworn in using the Bible he got from his mother as a kid at First Presbyterian Church in Queens in New York as well as the Bible Abraham Lincoln used in 1861. In his first National Prayer Breakfast appearance he took a swipe at former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about his lowly TV ratings as Trump's replacement as the host of 'Celebrity Apprentice.' In his first term he had prominent pastors come to him in the Oval Office and pray with him and for him and lay their hands on him. He used a Bible as a photo-op prop amid the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. He switched from Presbyterian to 'non-denominational' Christian. Conservative radio host and conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root said on Twitter 'the Jewish people in Israel love him like he's the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God' — and Trump retweeted Root's tweet and thanked him for 'the very nice words.' On the lawn outside the White House, in the context of a conversation about a pending trade war with China, Trump held out his hands and looked up at the sky. 'I am the chosen one,' he said. From his tone, though, it was clear at least to most that he was mostly joking.
But then that bullet in Butler just missed.
And then he won again.
So now, four months into his term, Trump is on a spree of a show of supremacy. He's pledged a 'Golden Age.' He's punished Trump and MAGA unbelievers. He's exacted or attempted to exact subservience and acquiescence from media execs and tech titans and major law firms and top universities and both chambers of Congress that he and his party control. He's tried to command the global economy and crack intractable issues of war and peace as if he were wielding a scepter over subjects far and wide. He's declared a slew of national emergencies on everything from the border to mineral production, and he's dropped scores of executive orders, whitewashing history, targeting 'Biased Media' and 'Criminal Aliens,' establishing a Religious Liberty Commission and a White House Faith Office and eradicating 'Anti-Christian Bias' — decrees delivered like apocalyptic pronouncements of an (albeit uncouth, foul-mouthed) Old Testament prophet.
World leaders 'all want to kiss my ass,' he told aides. 'I'm actually surprised myself' about the rolling-over of the law firms, he told ABC News. 'John Adams said we're a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?' he was asked in an interview for TIME. 'John Adams said that?' said Trump. 'I wouldn't agree with it 100 percent.' He was asked by Kristen Welker of NBC News if he as president needed to 'uphold' the Constitution. 'I don't know,' Trump said.
'I think one of the biggest differences between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is that in Trump 1.0, his own staff, the people who surrounded him, were perfectly comfortable thinking: President Donald Trump is very wrong about this. His judgment is bad. His impulses need to be foiled. We are the resistance inside the Trump administration,' the journalist Ezra Klein recently posited on his New York Times podcast with Times columnist Ross Douthat. 'In Trump 2.0, I don't think people around him are comfortable thinking that. There is both a sense that they're there to serve him but also a sense there is something in Trump — to them, not to me — that exists beyond argumentation,' Klein said. 'Yes,' Douthat said, talking of 'the kind of mystic drama of his return to power.'
'I think,' Robert Jeffress, the Trump-supporting pastor from Dallas, said last month, 'he came to the conclusion — the right conclusion — that God has a purpose for him.'
Christian believers believe, of course, that God has a purpose for them, and for all of them — that they're all potential tools of his will, and beneficiaries of his grace. Most of them don't, though, think of themselves as the literal second coming of Christ. And the extent to which Trump might think that of himself, and that his supporters might agree, speaks to the unprecedented expansion of power he has asserted and that many in the country seem content to grant.
'No previous president in American history has claimed that he was saved by God to enact his political agenda,' Mercieca, the rhetoric expert, recently wrote. Asking God to watch over the nation? Yes. Claiming to have been saved specifically by God to enable the enactment of political priorities? No. 'Invoking the power of the unified people and God gives Trump an awesome and unquestionable power — whoever defies Trump is at risk of defying the people and God. It's impossible to argue against Trump when he claims the power of God …'
If nothing else, in the assessment of his biographers, it means Trump as always is an opportunist.
'This is the logical next step from a half-century of continually pushing out the limits of what he can and will go after,' Gwenda Blair, who wrote about Trump's family, told me. 'Starting back in that famous public debut in 1973 when he counter-sued DOJ for defamation, he has consistently reached way past what anyone expected or had a ready response for — a strategy that has let him keep moving the goalposts ever forward.'
'It's another example of Donald Trump playing to an audience to convince them he's with them — and not at all to give you a window into his soul, because that blind is permanently drawn down,' O'Brien told me. ''The Apprentice' gave the impression to a whole generation of people who didn't know his story that he was a great dealmaker and an entrepreneurial guru as opposed to a serial bankruptcy artist and stumblefuck. And he went to the presidency in part on that. And he got reelected in part on [being seen as] 'the chosen one who survived the assassination attempt at Butler.''
Other scholars and observers say he's an opportunist who also is a narcissist who also recognizes considerable political utility in wrapping himself in such a divine mantle.
'The authoritarian leader presents himself as a divine or messianic figure who is uniquely able to vanquish the forces of evil and make the world safe for the faithful. As God incarnate, the leader is by definition omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent,' David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England, wrote before Trump won for the second time. 'Sacred leaders are messianic figures, who promise salvation for true believers. When a movement is headed by a sacred leader, it resembles a religion,' he wrote after. 'Trump is a sacred leader. His evangelical followers often refer to him as a 'savior' or 'anointed one' chosen by God …'
'Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion. Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual,' Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina and an expert on the intersection of religion, culture and politics, wrote in her book Spellbound that came out just this week. 'He's a nihilist for whom the only source of meaning is the amassing of personal power, turning his will into personal, political, financial and territorial domination, and that's totally compatible with a messiah complex,' Worthen told me. 'I don't see the recent turn in his language as a deviation from past patterns, but the fuller realization of those patterns.'
Sacred? Chosen? Messianic? 'As a Christian myself, the fact that he was spared … and then was re-elected … does have significance — and I would say that even if it was the other party and the other candidate who had been spared and then elected,' Scott Lamb, the co-author of The Faith of Donald J. Trump, told me. 'It's simply a matter of biblical reflection,' Lamb added, pointing to Proverbs 16:9. 'The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.'
Secular reality of course is more complicated. Trump has not been able to end Russia's war on Ukraine with the wave of a proverbial wand. He's not been able to ordain peace in the Middle East. And court after court has stymied the implementation of his edicts. He's seemed at times frustrated and even flustered by this incapacity.
Late Wednesday night, in the aftermath of the latest significant setback in the form of the decision of a federal court to overturn the tariffs at the heart of his economic program, Trump took to Truth Social. Among the barrage of his posts was a meme of Trump striding down a darkened city street.
'HE'S ON A MISSION FROM GOD,' read the words. 'NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT IS COMING.'
'Does the president mean with the post of this meme,' I asked in a text message to White House communications director Steven Cheung, 'that he's literally on a mission from God?'
'As people of faith, we are all on missions from God,' Cheung responded. 'The President has the biggest mission — to Make America Great Again and to help bring peace across the world. And he's doing just that.'