The one consistent motif of Donald Trump’s electoral career is that he never loses. He didn’t lose the Iowa caucuses in 2016, he claimed; Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) cheated. He didn’t lose the popular vote in 2016; illegal votes in California or New Hampshire or Virginia were to blame. He didn’t lose in 2020; there was rampant fraud and a broader anti-Trump fog that led to Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Trump wants to be president, yes, but he wants people to view him as victorious and popular perhaps just as much. This year, a lot of his rhetoric about voting hinges on this idea, that he is the true choice of the people and deeply popular — and, therefore, that any loss would necessarily be a function not of vote-counting but vote manipulation.
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He said as much at a rally in North Carolina this month.
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“Our primary focus is not to get out the vote,” he said. “It’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need.”
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Trump is destined for success, unless the Democrats “cheat.” And in an interview with television’s Dr. Phil that aired on Tuesday, Trump added another validator to that point: God wants him to win.
Speaking to Trump at the former president’s Las Vegas hotel, Phil McGraw asked the former president to weigh in on last month’s assassination attempt. Had it inspired self-reflection, McGraw wondered, a reconsideration of “why am I here”?
Before answering that question, Trump outlined the ways in which his survival was a function of chance. That, just as the bullet was fired, he turned toward a (misleading) graph on immigration being displayed on a large screen at the Butler, Pa., rally. That, because he turned when he did, the bullet clipped his ear instead of doing far worse damage.
The odds of his having survived, he suggested, were minute.
“You just can’t say ‘millions to one.’ Millions to one,” he said. “When I used to say a million to one, it’s much more than that.”
Later, the reason for his amplifying the odds became clear.
“How can you say it’s luck when it’s, you know, 20 million to one?” he asked rhetorically. There must therefore have been some other hand at work.
“Is there a reason you think you were spared?” McGraw asked.
“I mean, the only thing I can think is that God loves our country,” Trump replied. “And he thinks we’re going to bring our country back. He wants to bring it back.”
“You believe God’s hand was in this that day?” McGraw asked a bit later in the discussion.
“I believe so, yeah, I do,” Trump replied.
“And you talk about the country; you believe you have more to do,” McGraw followed up. “You weren’t done. You were spared for a reason.”
“Well,” Trump said, “God believes that.”
This idea that a divine hand averted the bullet or caused Trump to turn to the chart on his right — “it’s always on my left,” Trump told McGraw — quickly took root among his followers. In the days after the assassination attempt, The Washington Post documented a number of Trump supporters who described Trump’s close call in religious terms, as a miracle. This isn’t surprising, given the extent to which Trump’s support is rooted heavily in the White evangelical Christian community.
Here, though, it’s Trump amplifying the connection. Trump has never been an obviously religious person and there’s no indication that he has become one since the shooting. He also has always invoked religion when it’s useful, so that’s not novel. But his explicit pronouncement that God believes Trump needed to live to “bring our country back”? This is an unusual invocation of divine intent.
(It is also one that, for an outside observer, raises a correlated question: Well, why did firefighter Corey Comperatore, struck by one of the bullets, have to die? This was unaddressed by McGraw or Trump.)
The effects of this assertion are obvious. If God wants Trump to win, what does it mean if he doesn’t win? (Besides, a cynic might observe, that omnipotence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.) If God wants Trump to win — as manifested in the events in Butler, Pa., last month — what does that say about those who don’t? How could any person of faith then vote for Vice President Kamala Harris?
In the days after the shooting, the attack was framed by Trump’s allies as an offshoot of criticism of the former president, the inevitable culmination of attacks on his presidency and personality. That didn’t bear out; the shooter’s motivations remain nebulous but seem (as has been the case in past attempted assassinations) rooted more in attention-seeking than politics. That’s still in the mix, with Trump at another point telling McGraw that the Biden administration had indirectly allowed the shooter to be so close to his lectern. But there was also this pivot: Instead of the shooting being proof that his opponents are evil because they inspired or facilitated the shooter, it is proof that they are unloved by God because Trump wasn’t killed.
This is unquestionably one reason Trump and his supporters have been so insistent that the shooting not be forgotten, not that it has been. The incident and the images from it serve as a reinforcement of a perceived divine hand in the election, the ultimate defense against Democratic scheming.
If Trump loses anyway, it will be interesting to see how his theology evolves.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/28/trump-dr-phil-god/
Trump wants to be president, yes, but he wants people to view him as victorious and popular perhaps just as much. This year, a lot of his rhetoric about voting hinges on this idea, that he is the true choice of the people and deeply popular — and, therefore, that any loss would necessarily be a function not of vote-counting but vote manipulation.
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Subscribe to How to Read This Chart, a weekly dive into the data behind the news. Each Saturday, national columnist Philip Bump makes and breaks down charts explaining the latest in economics, pop culture, politics and more.End of carousel
He said as much at a rally in North Carolina this month.
Advertisement
“Our primary focus is not to get out the vote,” he said. “It’s to make sure they don’t cheat, because we have all the votes you need.”
🏛️
Follow Politics
Trump is destined for success, unless the Democrats “cheat.” And in an interview with television’s Dr. Phil that aired on Tuesday, Trump added another validator to that point: God wants him to win.
Speaking to Trump at the former president’s Las Vegas hotel, Phil McGraw asked the former president to weigh in on last month’s assassination attempt. Had it inspired self-reflection, McGraw wondered, a reconsideration of “why am I here”?
Before answering that question, Trump outlined the ways in which his survival was a function of chance. That, just as the bullet was fired, he turned toward a (misleading) graph on immigration being displayed on a large screen at the Butler, Pa., rally. That, because he turned when he did, the bullet clipped his ear instead of doing far worse damage.
The odds of his having survived, he suggested, were minute.
“You just can’t say ‘millions to one.’ Millions to one,” he said. “When I used to say a million to one, it’s much more than that.”
Later, the reason for his amplifying the odds became clear.
“How can you say it’s luck when it’s, you know, 20 million to one?” he asked rhetorically. There must therefore have been some other hand at work.
“Is there a reason you think you were spared?” McGraw asked.
“I mean, the only thing I can think is that God loves our country,” Trump replied. “And he thinks we’re going to bring our country back. He wants to bring it back.”
“You believe God’s hand was in this that day?” McGraw asked a bit later in the discussion.
“I believe so, yeah, I do,” Trump replied.
“And you talk about the country; you believe you have more to do,” McGraw followed up. “You weren’t done. You were spared for a reason.”
“Well,” Trump said, “God believes that.”
This idea that a divine hand averted the bullet or caused Trump to turn to the chart on his right — “it’s always on my left,” Trump told McGraw — quickly took root among his followers. In the days after the assassination attempt, The Washington Post documented a number of Trump supporters who described Trump’s close call in religious terms, as a miracle. This isn’t surprising, given the extent to which Trump’s support is rooted heavily in the White evangelical Christian community.
Here, though, it’s Trump amplifying the connection. Trump has never been an obviously religious person and there’s no indication that he has become one since the shooting. He also has always invoked religion when it’s useful, so that’s not novel. But his explicit pronouncement that God believes Trump needed to live to “bring our country back”? This is an unusual invocation of divine intent.
(It is also one that, for an outside observer, raises a correlated question: Well, why did firefighter Corey Comperatore, struck by one of the bullets, have to die? This was unaddressed by McGraw or Trump.)
The effects of this assertion are obvious. If God wants Trump to win, what does it mean if he doesn’t win? (Besides, a cynic might observe, that omnipotence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.) If God wants Trump to win — as manifested in the events in Butler, Pa., last month — what does that say about those who don’t? How could any person of faith then vote for Vice President Kamala Harris?
In the days after the shooting, the attack was framed by Trump’s allies as an offshoot of criticism of the former president, the inevitable culmination of attacks on his presidency and personality. That didn’t bear out; the shooter’s motivations remain nebulous but seem (as has been the case in past attempted assassinations) rooted more in attention-seeking than politics. That’s still in the mix, with Trump at another point telling McGraw that the Biden administration had indirectly allowed the shooter to be so close to his lectern. But there was also this pivot: Instead of the shooting being proof that his opponents are evil because they inspired or facilitated the shooter, it is proof that they are unloved by God because Trump wasn’t killed.
This is unquestionably one reason Trump and his supporters have been so insistent that the shooting not be forgotten, not that it has been. The incident and the images from it serve as a reinforcement of a perceived divine hand in the election, the ultimate defense against Democratic scheming.
If Trump loses anyway, it will be interesting to see how his theology evolves.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/28/trump-dr-phil-god/
