Bad politics, bad religion collide in ‘God Made Trump’

Sometimes I wonder whether people really believe what they say, or whether things are simply said for cynical reasons of gain. I want to believe the latter is at play when the content of what is said is so bereft of rational justification that it’s just too incredible to think someone would actually believe those things.

The problem is, such people are invariably not rational actors.

Donald Trump, the former President, is a man so mired in legal woes that I am amazed he is showing his face in public. But he is also a man known for self-delusion and for doubling down. Indeed, in a span of some 30 minutes last Thursday morning, Trump made 31 posts about E. Jean Carroll on Truth Social—a woman for whom a jury unanimously found Trump liable for sexual abuse and battery. That’s not the action of a well-adjusted man, and looks like doubling down of the most morally dubious kind.

When it comes to God, Trump has no space in his head for that belief. He is his own God. I’m sure we can all remember that time he was asked to name his favorite biblical verse and book. Ooof, the cringe. But he will happily use any tools that are close to hand, and if God-belief has a practical application, he’s game.

Enter “God made Trump,” a video that Donald Trump recently shared on social media. What is staggering about this video is that anybody could actually believe the claims made in it. It was originally made by the Dilley 300 Meme Team, known for creating pro-Trump content. The question remains: Does any member of that team actually believe the bizarre set of claims they make in the video? Or is this cynical propaganda akin to the rhetoric we have seen in history, in myth, and surrounding dictators?

I will lay out the transcript in full here because it needs to be read as a whole to get a sense of the bombastic claims. It is so ridiculous that it wouldn’t surprise me if we were falling afoul of Poe’s Law, and the whole thing is parody (transcript in italics):

And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God gave us Trump. God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state. So God made Trump. “I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle the Deep State and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild, somebody to ruffle the feathers, tame cantankerous World Economic Forum, come home hungry, have to wait until the First Lady is done with lunch with friends, then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon. And mean it. So God gave us Trump.

Let us first look at Trump’s working hours, something that comes up later in the video, too. Private schedules leaked in 2019 showed that the US president spends a majority of working hours on unstructured “executive time”. 60% of his time was spent involved in activities that did not appear on the daily schedules, although defenders have said that this time was productive and fit in with his management style. Yet, as reported in The Guardian:

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior adviser to Clinton, recalled: “The thing about Clinton is he was up much of the night … He was talking to foreign leaders and others to learn what was going on and he was sending people on missions. He had all kinds of unofficial plenipotentiaries.”

Blumenthal added: “I don’t believe Trump picks up the phone to have any constructive conversation with any foreign leader. He talks to his echo chamber and has a pathetic requirement for narcissistic affirmation. The executive time is a waste of time.”

The idea that Trump is a gentle soul, caringly delivering grandchildren, is really quite odd. He may have held a baby grandchild, but even then, he does not strike me as the caring, parental type. As for the claims concerning lunching First Ladies and friends, I don’t quite know where the video was going.

“I need somebody who can shape an axe but wield a sword, who had the courage to step foot in North Korea, who can make money from the tar of the sand, turn liquid to Gold, who understands the difference between tariffs and inflation, will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon, but then put in another 72 hours. So God made Trump.

Again, we have the arguably erroneous claims concerning how hard he worked on a weekly basis. He once criticized Obama for playing too much golf as POTUS, then eclipsed Obama’s time spent on the golf course by a wide margin, with one official count numbering “[d]aytime visits to golf clubs since inauguration, with evidence of playing golf on at least 150 visits” (with a total visit number of 298, day and night). This came at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of $144,000,000. In May 2020, CNN compared the two presidents:

Obama played 98 rounds of golf through this point in his presidency, according to data provided to CNN by Mark Knoller, a veteran CBS News White House correspondent who is known for tracking presidential activities. By contrast, Knoller said, Trump has spent all or part of 248 days at a golf course.

CNN’s own count has Trump at 266 days spending some time at a Trump golf course.

And this is not to discuss Trump choosing to play his golf and to house his entourage at his own hotels and golf clubs, pocketing himself a useful sum of cash, using his position as POTUS to line his own pockets.

God had to have somebody willing to go into the den of vipers, call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s, the poison of vipers is on their lips, and yet stop. So God made Trump.

The hypocrisy and projection here are beyond the pale. Concerning “fake news,” the last count had Trump’s presidential lies tallied to the tune of 30,000, calculated to be 21 mistruths a day for every single day of his presidency. Which is to say he almost certainly cheated on his golf scorecard, too.

God said, “I need somebody who will be strong and courageous who will not be afraid or terrified of the wolves when they attack, a man who cares for the flock, a shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave nor forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith and know the belief of God and country, somebody who’s willing to drill, bring back manufacturing and American jobs, farm the lands, secure our borders build our military, fight the system all day, and finish a hard week’s work by attending church on Sunday. And then his oldest son turns and says, “Dad let’s make America great again, Dad let’s build back a country to be the envy of the world again. So God made Trump.

As a pathological narcissist, Trump clearly has little concern for anybody but himself, with expert Dr John Zinner saying Trump was “incapable of attending to any issue beyond his own personal need for adulation.” The idea that the man is a caring shepherd for his flock is nothing short of laughable. Ty Cobb, a lawyer who served in the White House during Trump’s administration said the ex-president is a “deeply wounded narcissist” and is “incapable of acting other than in his perceived self-interest or for revenge.”

But what really takes the biscuit, as already briefly discussed, is the claim that Trump is “strong in faith” and knows “the belief of God and country.” Can anyone seriously believe this? Are these meme generators knowingly trying to hoodwink the listener for their own political gain, or are they so far down the rabbit hole that Trump becomes anything they imagine he could be? The video just becomes a fever dream of a delusional cultist.

Mike Pence, his former Vice President and committed Christian, probably has a better handle on Trump’s beliefs than most. At an off-the-record private dinner, Pence (per the Washington Post) took aim at Trump’s lack of Christianity:

“I once invited President Trump to Bible study,” Pence said in his speech. “He really liked the passages about the smiting and perishing of thine enemies. As he put it, ‘Ya know, Mike, there’s some really good stuff in here.’”

The former vice president continued in that vein as he turned to the scandal over Trump’s refusal to return classified documents he wasn’t legally allowed to keep: “I read that some of those classified documents they found at Mar-a-Lago were actually stuck in the president’s Bible … which proves he had absolutely no idea they were there.”

Touché.

To claim that Trump would toil a hard week’s work only to forego a Sunday round of golf so that he could attend church on the holy day is not to know Trump at all.

Russell Moore, a theologian who is also the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), said of the claim that Trump converted to Christianity just before being elected, “It is not a position that I find rational. Especially when Mr. Trump has been very clear about his own spiritual journey, or lack thereof.”

In February 2017, two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, a retired Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, Rev. Peter Daly, wrote a column for the National Catholic Reporter—“Donald Trump’s gospel is not the Gospel of Jesus.” Daly saw Trump as “an uncharitable bully, prone to lying, lacking in empathy and tolerance,” according to Time. “He sees every opponent as someone to be shouted down or roughed up,” Daly wrote. “He is not a peacemaker.”

The video above is a caricature of the real man, but one for which you would immediately demand your money back from the artist at Montmartre. The likeness is no likeness at all since it clearly has no recognizable connection to the source material.

This is fake news gone meta, disinformation feeding into the information space to be lapped up by adoring cultists who, rather like many religious people, make God in their own image or ideal. When followers sculpt these abstract models of Trump, they are fantasizing a Trump into existence that is not evidenced in the real world.

And truth claims aside: What does it say about the man himself that he shared it?

Like all the other deities throughout history, this new one is a mere figment in the imagination of his followers. And like the good skeptics we are, we still have a job to do.