God and Donald Trump – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The date was February 2, 2017. The event: the National Prayer Breakfast. The speaker was the new president of the United States: Donald J. Trump.

Conservatives, Christians, and many religious Americans generally were keenly interested in what the new president would say. As a presidential historian and spiritual biographer, I was especially interested. I have read just about every presidential statement made at National Prayer Breakfasts since Dwight Eisenhower. I have even written the remarks for a prayer breakfast keynoter. Not to belabor the point, but I’ve done books on the faiths of political leaders, including God and Ronald Reagan and God and George W. Bush. I’ll add that Reagan’s first address at the National Prayer Breakfast, February 5, 1981, was eloquent, thoughtful, meaningful, and inspirational. 

I think all of that conveys my interest in presidential remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. But I hasten to add another element.

I had been contacted by a major publisher to write a book called God and Donald Trump. This publisher was a major fan of my book on Reagan’s faith. I won’t walk through the reasons that that book on Trump never happened (it’s actually an interesting story), but that request further illustrates my keen interest in Trump’s remarks that February day in 2017.

Trump approached the dais that morning with the well-earned reputation of someone who far more often invoked the word “I” than “God.” Many of us thus did not have high hopes for a religious speech. What we got was, unfortunately, what we expected.

Our new president characteristically went off-script, with predictably bad results. As he had theretofore done so often in religious settings, where the focus was supposed to be on his God and his faith, Donald Trump focused yet again on himself and his political situation. (A particularly infamous example was a June 2016 speech he gave to a huge group of about a thousand evangelical leaders in New York City, which included heavy hitters such as Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Ben Carson, Jerry Falwell Jr., Ralph Reed, Mike Huckabee, David Jeremiah, James Robison, and Kenneth Copeland, among others.)

He opened his remarks by telling the group of faithful about his television show, The Apprentice. In the presence of the show’s producer, Trump related his disappointment with the show’s declining ratings in his absence. He hence told the producer that he should “never, ever bet against Trump again” (speaking of himself in the first person).

“We know how that turned out,” said Trump of the producer’s choice to replace him with Arnold Schwarzenegger. “The ratings went right down the tubes. It has been a disaster.” Trump then asked his faithful audience to “pray for Arnold” and “for those ratings.”

There was nervous laughter. Was this a joke?

Trump did eventually get on script (with remarks composed by a speechwriter, of course) and gave a good albeit short speech acknowledging the hand of God in the nation and its founding. And to be fair, what Trump said about The Apprentice seemed to be at least partly a joke. Nonetheless, the liberal press was more than happy to present the new president as a narcissist rather than a Christian. Still, Trump did come off as too much about himself.

Fast forward eight years to the start of Donald Trump’s second presidential term and his next speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 6, 2025. 

Here as well, Trump joked, jostled, talked about politics and his electoral victory, and frequently invoked the first-person “I.” This time, however, was different. Very different. This time, the “I” was connected to the “G” — that is, to the Big Guy upstairs, God the Creator. And what Trump said was profoundly different from anything he would have said eight years ago.

Shortly into his speech, about at the point eight years earlier when he talked about The Apprentice, Trump grew serious, pensive. He spoke of the “terrible tragedy when 67 people were killed in a horrible accident near Reagan Airport” just days before. He said of the victims: “We take solace in the knowledge that their journey that night did not end in the icy waters of the Potomac, but in the warm embrace of a very loving God. None of us knows exactly when our time on Earth will be over. You never know.”

This was a segue and a self-reference, and everyone in the room knew it. Trump proceeded to make that transition clear.

Donald Trump counted himself as one who “never knows” when our time on this Earth will be over, as he had learned in a literal life-changing moment seven months earlier on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he nearly lost his life at the hand of a would-be assassin. Trump went right to that moment. He said it was a moment of “truth I confronted,” one that confirmed that feeling that you never know when your time might be over.

That moment, said Trump in his typical folksy way, “was not a good thing. But God was watching me. The chances of me being here — my sons are shooters. They’re really good shooters, Don and Eric. And they said the chances of missing [a target] from that range with that gun are — Don equated it to a one-foot putt … one foot you can’t miss. It was the equivalent of a one-foot putt, is what he told me.”

The bullet had barely missed Don’s dad’s skull. His dad told the National Prayer Breakfast audience that his son wasn’t very religious, but “he gained some religion” that afternoon in Butler. The audience laughed. Trump quoted his son’s words to him that evening: “There had to be somebody that saved you, and I think I know who it is.” As Don looked upward for answers, his dad said to him, “Whoa, Don, you’ve come a long way.”

Yes, and so had Donald J. Trump.

The president marveled at how that afternoon he had turned his head to the right to look at a display chart on a jumbo screen at exactly the right time for the shooter to merely graze his right ear rather than shatter his skull with a bullet, akin to John F. Kennedy’s fate on November 22, 1963. “Had I not made that turn — boom,” said Trump. “So, you never know, but God did that. I mean, it had to be.”

Trump further explained to the audience that he usually showed that chart toward the end of his stump speech, and typically on his left side rather than right, and elevated about 20 percent higher. But this time, the chart was positioned just right, “perfect” enough for him to evade the bullet. “The thing [bullet] went ‘shhh’ right along the edge [of his ear],” noted Trump. “Can you believe that?” 

The effect of that moment? It was spiritual as well as physical. “[I]t changed something in me,” shared Trump. “I feel even stronger. I believed in God, but I feel much more strongly about it. Something happened. And so — [applause] — thank you. Thank you.”

The crowd not only applauded but stood — a standing ovation. Trump swallowed, looked slightly teary-eyed, and was obviously touched. No, he didn’t cry, but he seemed on the verge.

Yes, he had already believed in God. Trump was not an atheist. But now he felt differently about that relationship. What happened in Butler made him much closer to God.

One such witness to that was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recounts how right after the Butler shooting, Trump called him and asked, “Are you a religious person?” Kennedy told him, “I indeed believe in God … as the central organizing force in my life.” Trump told Kennedy in response, “You know, I think I believe in that, too, now.”

A very different Trump from the National Prayer Breakfast eight years earlier.

Recounting that moment in Butler does not get old for Donald Trump. He speaks of it constantly, saying repeatedly that he believes that God spared his life that Saturday afternoon. He immediately said that to family and friends and intimates. After checking out of Butler Memorial Hospital that evening, he headed for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where, in a private event prior to the convention, he told a small group, “God was with me.” 

That was just a warm-up. It soon became apparent to the world as Donald Trump walked onto the convention floor that Monday, with a large bandage over his right ear, that he looked like a different man. This was clearly not the same person.

Trump slowly moved to his convention box to watch speeches over the next few days, looking humbled and tired, almost out of place, like his mind was somewhere else. His son, Eric, looked upward, toward his seated father’s box and to the heavens: “Dad,” he said publicly, “by the grace of God, divine intervention, and your guardian angels above, you survived.”

The world soon learned that Trump himself felt the same way. In a truly historic, fascinating, must-see nomination acceptance speech that Thursday evening, July 18, Trump shared what had been on his heart all week since the previous Saturday afternoon: “I had God on my side.” A man not known for showing weakness or vulnerability, he said, “I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” prompting this rejoinder from a chorus of delegates: “Yes, you are! Yes, you are! Yes, you are!”

Trump replied: “Thank you, but I’m not, and, I will tell you, I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of Almighty God.” He called his survival a “providential moment.” He said, “[I]f the events of last Saturday make anything clear, it is that every single moment we have on earth is a gift from God.”

Trump proceeded to share that feeling again and again in the months ahead. And not just his belief in God’s protection, but in guardian angels.

In a really extraordinary display on September 29, the feast day of St. Michael the Archangel, Trump went to his social media accounts to invoke the prayer of St. Michael the Archangel. Trump posted (on X, Facebook, and Instagram) this special prayer of the Catholic Church:

Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

That was an astonishing gesture by Donald Trump. It certainly would not have been offered eight years prior. But, of course, he hadn’t been nearly killed eight years before. 

Trump’s staunch belief that he was divinely protected became such a central organizing force in his daily life that it made its way into his inaugural address in a particularly moving way.

“The journey to reclaim our republic has not been an easy one — that, I can tell you,” said Trump on January 20, 2025. “Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and, indeed, to take my life.” He looked back: “Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.” As the audience burst into applause inside the Capitol rotunda on that cold January day, Trump repeatedly expressed gratitude, “Thank you…. Thank you very much.”

He was effectively on autopilot for that part of his inaugural remarks.

Again, so many such invocations by Trump could be cited here. In all, they serve to illustrate that Donald Trump at the start of his second term is a different man than he was at the start of his first term.

The change seems palpable. He appears less belligerent, obnoxious, bombastic, and narcissistic. Even as he seeks to drain the swamp, to take on Washington’s noxious Kultursmog, to counter his enemies, he does not seem to be vindictive or angry. He seems driven, convicted, looking to right wrongs rather than get even. He seems satisfied, perhaps even happy, and at peace. 

A literal brush with death will do that to a man. As Donald Trump said at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 6, 2025, none of us knows exactly when our time on Earth will be over. Trump learned that most acutely in Butler. He said in Milwaukee on July 18 that “Every single moment we have on earth is a gift from God.”

With every action he now takes in his second term — a veritable cyclone of executive activity that makes FDR’s first one hundred days look like four years of Sleepy Joe Biden — Donald J. Trump is certainly seizing this moment granted to him.

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