Donald’s divine inspiration

President Trump appeared in the long hallway Saturday night, flanked by his Three Sons – J.D., Pete and Little Marco – to let us know he’d done the big violence in Iran. It was a somber moment, a war moment, though, as Trump said on Truth Social after he’d ordered the dropping of the Mother of All Bombs deep into the heart of old Persia, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.”  

Terry Southern, the screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove, couldn’t have dreamed up a line so darkly ironic, but Trump gifts us with daily comic diamonds, intentional and unintentional. Saturday’s crown jewel came at the conclusion of his statement, the time usually reserved for “God Bless America.” Trump did say that, but he also said: “I want to thank everybody and, in particular, God, I just want to say, we love you, God.” 

The “in particular” stands out, as though God had been the actual co-pilot on the stealth B-2 that dropped the MOP on Fordo. Other religious references seem more appropriate to the moment, but Trump, though I believe he took this event seriously, didn’t take it Oppenheimer seriously. He wasn’t about to say, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” That quote is from Hindu scripture, and we all now know that Tulsi Gabbard was sidelined in the room where it happened. So the wrathful, Biblical, Old Testament God it is, appropriate for the region, the moment, the Donald himself.  

Trump’s relationship with God has been steadily evolving, from a secular man who referred to Second Corinthians as “2 Corinthians” in a 2016 speech at the evangelical Liberty University, to today’s God-loving, bomb-dropping Commander in Chief. His time on Earth has been spent more in New York discos or on golf courses than in churches. But that all swerved after the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said in his Second Inaugural Address. “I believe that.” 

Even Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens might have thought about divine intervention had a bullet grazed one of their ears. “Something very special happened. Let’s face it. Something happened,” Trump said a few days after the attempt. 

“Trump’s Strange God Talk Has People Concerned,” said the Daily Beast over the weekend, citing as its source several random people on X. Does it though? Trump’s new-found religion doesn’t mean he believes he is God, as a somewhat histrionic Politico magazine article posited a few weeks ago. Why be God when you can be Donald Trump? They both have Big, Beautiful Buildings with their names on them – but only Trump has one on the Las Vegas Strip.   

If Trump does feel like some sort of Divine Hand is guiding his wartime decisions, it would hardly be the only manifestation of that relationship in presidential history. Abraham Lincoln frequently said that the outcome of the Civil War was in God’s hands. He mentioned scripture four times in his Second Inaugural Address. Ronald Reagan, in his 1983 “Evil Empire” speech, said, “There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.” Compare that Bible-thumping to Trump’s rhetoric, and Trump sounds like more of a deist than Thomas Jefferson does.  

For a far more Savior-soaked manifestation of the God-President nexus than Trump’s, let’s go back to the George W. Bush Administration. A BBC documentary about Bush’s wars in the Middle East quoted the then-Palestinian foreign minister, from a more innocent time when Hamas didn’t control Gaza, as saying:  

President Bush said to all of us: “I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq…’ And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.’ And by God I’m gonna do it.” 

Narrator: Bush didn’t do it. So now it’s President Trump’s turn to channel the big man in the sky – and we don’t mean Dick Cheney – to help bring peace to the Holy Land. But expressing simple gratitude to God doesn’t actually equate to a messianic attitude. The great spirit may have been with Trump in the Situation Room, but so was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. God only knows who helped Trump make the decision to bomb Iran, but I’d bet dollars to Big Macs the actual God was just spiritual radiation in the background.  

We live in extremely Serious Times, perhaps the most serious, full of war and domestic strife and terror. But the President nonetheless delivers us fresh hilarious miracles every day. We should be grateful for these rhetorical loaves and fishes, and we should thank everyone for them, but, in particular, God. As the President likes to say, thank you for your attention to this matter.