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Ever since I saw the big yellow diapered-baby Trump balloon floating on a London parade—no, before that, when he declared his entry into politics from a gold escalator—Donald Trump has been a caricature to me. Two-dimensional, crudely drawn, bold and garish, demanding attention but not consideration. This is partly my recoil but largely his intent. However, given his power to scare our Congress, endanger our welfare (in the broad and specific senses of the word), and wreck the rest of the world’s trust, I find myself curious about what lives inside him. Why does he think we are here? How does he think we should live? What does he believe about God?
Trump has tried many times to skirt such questions. He collects Bibles, he startled some of us by saying. “It’s my favorite book.” But when asked his favorite passage, he said that was “very personal.” Later, pressed, he cited a passage about envy. Asked again on WHAM 1180 AM radio, he stalled—“many, so many”—then blurted a new answer, “an eye for an eye.”
Asked on Fox & Friends what his relationship with God was like and how he prayed, he said, “I think it’s good. I do very well with the evangelicals. I love the evangelicals.” Which, I feel safe in saying, is because they love him. At first, they saw him as a Cyrus the Great, doing holy work without being holy himself. A blessed thug. Trump, after all, had never pretended to be devout. He was, for most of his adult life, a fatalist. Scared of nothing, he insisted in 1991. “Whatever happens, happens—and you just have to go along with it.” He said it again in 1997: “I am a fatalist. I say, ‘Hey, what happens, happens.’” Ten years later, in his book Think Big and Kick Ass, he wrote, “People ask me, ‘How do you handle pressure? The truth is, it does not matter. What the hell difference does it make?” He went on to list seemingly random disasters, including 9/11. Why sweat what you cannot predict or control?
But the evangelical Christians did not want a fatalist who shrugged off random events. And he saw the power of their vote. In 2015, he assured CBN’s David Brody, “I will be the greatest representative of the Christians they’ve had in a long time.”
Soon they were insisting that he had a divine mandate and would be their savior. Initially, all they meant was that he could fix the laws, clean up the courts, and tilt the scales toward them, easing the sting of marginalization and the fear of pluralism and restoring their righteous power. But assuming that was God’s will was an easy jump. By 2020, more than 49 percent of White Protestants surveyed by Religion in Public believed that Trump had been anointed by God, handpicked to lead the country.
Trump went even bigger.
Last summer, he became a Christ figure.
Shot in the ear at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, he rose, bloodied but unbowed, and became an instant hero. What the secret service should have done was keep him down, then rush him away from the scene, but somehow that did not happen. Instead, Trump took his time, retrieved his shoe, then stood, pumped his fist in the air, and mouthed “Fight!” to the crowd.
It would have made a perfect trailer for a Hollywood biopic. Yet I watched, fixated. You could feel the significance of that moment, with its rich symbolism and rippling emotion. The scene was so perfect, conspiracy-theorists on the left wondered if it had been staged. All of us, like it or not, felt it as a turning point.
Still, I only thought it was clinching the campaign. I had no idea it would be a turning point in the psyche of Donald Trump.
“I’m supposed to be dead,” he said the day after he was shot. It was the eve of his formal nomination as the Republican candidate, and he wrote on Truth Social that “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” By the end of the week, he was asserting that “something very special happened. Let’s face it.”
His campaign changed tone. The memes now felt, to his supporters, less cartoony, more genuinely reverent. Jesus with his hands on Trump’s shoulder, Trump in Christ-like poses…. Two weeks after the assassination attempt, he spoke at the Turning Point Action’s Believers Summit and said, “You won’t have to vote again, my beautiful Christians. I love you…. In four years, you won’t have to vote again; we’ll have it fixed so good you won’t have to vote.” The following month, he told Dr. Phil, “If Jesus came down and was the vote counter, I would win California.”
Jesus was busy, but Trump won plenty of other states. In his victory speech, he reminded us, “God spared my life for a reason.” And by the time of his inaugural, his voice held full-throated conviction: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” At the National Prayer Breakfast—a setting that would have ordinarily made him a bit uncomfortable—he confided, “It changed something in me. I feel even stronger.”
A far cry from the man who used his first National Prayer Breakfast to mock Arnold Schwarzenegger’s low TV ratings as his replacement on Celebrity Apprentice.
Did the bluster of a deeply insecure man fall away, replaced by the supreme confidence possible only to someone who believes he has been endowed with supernatural powers and a heroic mission? I assumed he was surrounding himself with a different sort of person, unwilling to be scolded or thwarted in his second term, and that was making his blitzkrieg possible. But there is now a tone of invincibility that even toadies cannot supply. It has to come from above, not from below.
From the day of the shooting, Trump began to not just use but believe, with increasing confidence, his campaign’s mythology. His rhetoric, Michael Kruse writes in Politico, “has gone from borderline nihilistic to messianic.” To many, this shift matters, Kruse continues, because “his well-documented narcissism and grandiosity has metastasized into notions of omnipotence, invincibility, and infallibility.”
No wonder he said instantly (and was he really joking?) that he would like to be the next pope. A meme of Trump as pope soon popped up on his Truth Social account.
Meanwhile, he had a painting of the assassination attempt hung in the Entrance Hall of the White House, replacing a portrait of former president Barack Obama. The painting documents what he used to say jokingly, that he was chosen, because look! Turns out he really was.
The painting also places him firmly in a tradition. Authoritarian leaders have drawn the mantle of divine mandate around their shoulders, soft as ermine, for centuries. What is unique about Trump is that his Cyrus status—not a man of God, but God’s man—allows him to be as awful as he likes and still so pleasing to God that no one dare object. This is quite a lot of permission; it must feel giddy.
But oh, when it fails.
When a federal court struck a blow at his tariffs, Trump’s fuming posts on Truth Social included a meme of himself moving fearlessly down a dark street: “HE’S ON A MISSION FROM GOD. NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT IS COMING.” How could he resist believing that? But what, then, must be his reaction whenever anything—the Constitution, the courts, public opinion—tries to stop him?
When Jimmy Carter took the oath of office, he quoted Micah: “He hath shown thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.”
When Trump took the oath, he said, “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
Christianity has been stood on its head. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild describes a cycle, now familiar, in which Trump throws out something transgressive, and the pundits take the bait, making it clear that they are appalled and he should be ashamed of his (lies, cruelty, stupidity). This turns Trump into a victim, and he can appeal to his followers: “‘Oh, look how they’re looking down at me. They’re picking at me. They’re criticizing me. Don’t you, my followers, know how terrible that feels? Don’t they look down on you too? Actually they want to do to you what they’re doing to me, but I’m taking your shame on my shoulders.’ So he’s the victim. He’s the Christ-like figure of taking your shame away, carrying it himself.” Which then frees him to take revenge, on their behalf, as though it is divinely ordained, a righteous rampage through the temple, and not just mean and petty.
The White House Press Secretary now characterizes Trump’s campaign as a battle against “evil forces” (those would be Democrats) and insists she witnessed “spiritual warfare.” After Trump had Iranian nuclear facilities bombed, he made an exultant statement of triumph that concluded, “I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military.” One imagines God bemused, wincing at the juxtaposition.
So what else, beyond his own special status, does Trump believe? He was raised Presbyterian, his Scottish-immigrant mother’s faith. The patriarchal side was less devout: his grandpa ran a brothel, and his dad instructed Donald to “be a killer” and told him, “You are a king.” Fred Trump was the one in the monarch’s role, though, enforcing authoritarian discipline with an in-home surveillance system and intercom. At First Presbyterian Church in Queens, Donald went to Sunday school, and while the behavioral code did not stick, the hierarchical part did. Interviewed for Tim O’Brien’s 2005 Trump biography, he said, “There has to be a reason we are here. There has to be a reason that we’re going through this. I do believe in God. I think there just has to be something that’s far greater than us.”
His most nuanced views on an afterlife? “Religion, you know, it gives you some hope. Gee, if I’m good, I’m going to heaven.” On another occasion, he said, “If you’re religious, I think you have a better feeling about it. You’re supposed to go to Heaven ideally, not Hell.”
Reasons to be devout? “It keeps you sane. It keeps you honest. It keeps you good. It keeps you kind. It makes you help other people,” he told followers at the 2023 Faith and Freedom Coalition—but he was speaking more of them than of himself, because he added, “And they’re trying to take that away from you.”
His thoughts on Communion? “When I drink my little wine—which is about the only wine I drink—and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed.” Actually, the ask is supposed to precede Communion, and the cleansing comes with repentance, not the little cracker. But asked if he has ever sought forgiveness from Christ, he said, “I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don’t think so. I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.”
And worship? He goes to church “as often as possible,” which, he admitted, is on Christmas and Easter. Other Sundays, he said he tries, but no church has seen him. Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking” was a huge influence on him, and Trump was still claiming to be an active member of Marble Collegiate Church in 2015, but the church issued a statement denying that, and Peale’s son said Trump had not been there in years. Instead, he spent hours watching televangelists—Jimmy Swaggart, Billy Graham, David Jeremiah. In 2020, he changed his stated affiliation from Presbyterianism to nondenominational Christianity. Like televangelist Paula White, his unofficial pastor, he inclines toward prosperity theology (belief will bring you wealth), anti-intellectualism, Zionism, and messianism.
What does the imitation of Christ mean to Donald Trump? “Jesus to me is somebody I can think about for security and confidence.”
Thus defined, his faith is indeed working.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
