Jul 14, 2025 12:37:53 pm

In order to reclaim the narrative, Trump played his final trump card yesterday – GOD -. The White House posted an image of Trump with the statement, I WAS SAVED BY GOD TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. But instead of soliciting a chorus of hallelujahs from the MAGA faithful, Trump was literally booed. Firstly by fans attending the Club World Cup Final, and then by the base on Truth Social, X, and the White House account. No worship, no dear leader, no fawning or praise. Only one thing was on their mind, JEFFREY EPSTEIN. 

The divinely inspired bs is not landing like it used to. In fact his unfollowers are saying that Jesus would release the Epstein client list, that God does not condone or protect pedophiles. Trumps Christian base will now split into two. The Christian Zionist pro-Israel Project 2025 lobby, and the America First, QAnon, Make America Healthy Again lobby. The pro-Israel lobby will probably stick with Trump to their own detriment, whereas the AmeriQa lobby will not. Their entire movement revolves around holding pedophiles to account and saving the children. They will not budge on this. Trump will very quickly go from Divine Leader, to Antichrist. 

I found this excellent article about Trump’s supposed divinity published on 30 May, round about the time he was assuming absolute control over proceedings. Both in America and on the world stage. One month later, and the Magaverse has dramatically changed. Fundamentalist Christians are now in a unholy conundrum of their own making. Will they continue to support a pedophile enabler, or will they do the right thing? 

ARTICLE – DOES TRUMP ACTUALLY THINK HE’S GOD? 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.”

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.

MESSIAH COMPLEX: 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.”

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.

“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.”

NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT’S COMING, EXCEPT JEFFREY EPSTEIN: 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 …”

“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 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.” 

By Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine – 05/30/2025. I encourage you to read the full article as this post contains excerpts only.