Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that he desperately wants to get into heaven — but his actions say something very different.
In a new fundraising email sent to supporters on Monday, Trump shared how:
I want to try and get to Heaven
Last year I came millimeters from death when that bullet pierced through my skin. My triumphant return to the White House was never supposed to happen!
But I believe that God saved me for one reason: TO MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
I wasn’t supposed to beat Crooked Hillary in 2016 — but I did.
I wasn’t supposed to secure the border & build the greatest economy in history — but I did.
I certainly wasn’t supposed to survive an assassin’s bullet — but by the grace of the almighty God, I did.
SO NOW, I have no other choice but to answer the Call to Duty, but I can’t do it alone.
Friend, you’ve been with me through everything.
Predictably, Trump concludes with, “That’s why I’ve launched a 24 HOUR TRUMP FUNDRAISING BLITZ, and I’m asking everyone to chip in $15 to make it one for the record books!”
Trump reiterated how much he wants to go to heaven and admitted that he will need some help getting there. Trump cannot buy indulgences from the Roman Catholic Church — he would need a time machine to do that — but he apparently believes that being a peacemaker in Ukraine may be a good way to get on St. Peter’s good side.
The president’s appeal followed a week of talk about the afterlife. On Aug. 19, while speaking to “Fox and Friends,” Trump reiterated how much he wants to go to heaven and admitted that he will need some help getting there. Trump cannot buy indulgences from the Roman Catholic Church — he would need a time machine to do that — but he apparently believes that being a peacemaker in Ukraine may be a good way to get on St. Peter’s good side.
“I wanna end it,” he said. “You know, we’re not losing American lives; we’re not losing American soldiers. We’re losing Russian and Ukrainian — mostly soldiers, some people as missiles hit wrong spots or get lobbed into cities like Kyiv and towns.”
Then the president did some math to calculate his heavenly odds. “You know, if I can save 7,000 people a week from being killed, I think that’s a pretty — I wanna try and get to heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”
At first glance, Trump’s expressions of doubt seemed out of character for a man who has consistently refused to show any vulnerability or admissions of infallibility. His comments were revealing — and intentional. Trump is playing the role of the humble sinner who wants to repent and find grace.
On Aug. 21, Trump talked to right-wing radio host Todd Starnes about his worries about where he would spend eternity. “People of faith, there’s a feeling, they wanna be good, y’know? They get punished if they’re not good, right?…There has to be some kind of a report card up there someplace, y’know, like: ‘Let’s go to heaven, let’s get into heaven.’ It’s sort of a beautiful thing.”
Trump then said that people who are not religious have no reason to be good human beings. “If you’re not a believer, and you believe you go nowhere, what’s the reason to be good, really?”
Since 2016, Trump has made his professed Christian faith and personal relationship with God a central feature of his public persona. Yet his behavior and policies — which are rooted in political sadism and a lust for unchecked power — tell a different story. As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer famously warned, Trump’s ideology and modus operandi are driven by how “the cruelty is the point.”
Trump’s vision of a post-democracy America stands in stark opposition to the grace he claims to seek. His politics of vengeance and his desire to be the country’s first dictator are antithetical to his goal of getting into heaven. Is such a thing even possible for Trump and people like him? One does not have to be religious to ponder that question.
Since he took office in January, Trump has deported at least 180,000 people according to a recent tally by the New York Times. If these numbers continue, he will have deported over 400,000 people during his first year back in office. One of those could be Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland migrant who was wrongly deported to his native El Salvador — which he fled at 16 to escape gang activity — in spite of a 2019 court order that allowed him to live and work in the U.S. and prohibited his return to El Salvador due to fear of persecution. The Trump administration has accused him of being a member of the transnational gang MS-13 and brought criminal charges of human smuggling against him, both of which he has denied. Although he has not been convicted of any crimes, the administration plans to deport Ábrego García to Uganda — a country with which he has no ties. On Wednesday, a federal judge extended a temporary restraining order blocking his deportation until early October. Currently in custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Ábrego García has renewed his bid for asylum.
García’s story is just one example in a long pattern of Trump-era cruelty. From the forced deportation of migrants to policies like the Big Vile Bill, which will gut the social safety net and funnel wealth to the richest Americans and corporations, Trump’s legacy is being built on punishing the weak and rewarding the powerful — not in being a Good Samaritan.
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These choices are not aberrations. They are central to Trump and his MAGA forces’ campaign to replace American democracy with competitive authoritarianism. Such a political order erodes human freedom, dignity, and flourishing, and it stands in direct contradiction to Trump’s public claims of Christian faith and yearning to reach heaven.
I am not a theologian, nor am I trained in pastoral care or spiritual counseling. So I reached out to Rev. Adam Taylor, president of Sojourners and author of “A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community,” about the president’s quest.
Taylor went immediately to the Bible and its teachings. “I hope that President Trump’s recent statement about his desire to go to heaven is sincere and comes from a place of humility,” he said. “While it is no one’s place to know someone else’s heart and the sincerity of their faith, we should refer to scripture as our guide. In particular, in Matthew 25, Jesus teaches that the ultimate measure of how we will be judged both as people and even as nations is tied to how we treat those who are in the most vulnerable situations. The King in this parable is indeed Jesus himself, and the message could not be clearer: How we treat the most vulnerable and marginalized people in our community, nation, and world is how we treat Jesus himself.”
Taylor then shared a worry. “Unfortunately, many of the policies we have seen from the Trump administration seem to do the opposite of what this passage calls for. My hope is that President Trump and all of our elected officials can make the government’s ethos and priorities more aligned with the people and values that Jesus prioritizes in Matthew 25.”
Many on both the center and the left have been mocking Trump’s supposed Christian values and public desire to get into heaven. For them, his profession of faith is a transparent farce and a performance to win over the MAGA rubes and other members of the White Right.
But they are not his audience.
But this is a crucial moment: Trump’s authoritarian campaign is escalating, along with his other abuses of the law. It’s reasonable to think that the president’s God and heaven talk is an attempt to soften his cruel image and to make his vengeful policies more palatable. Some of the compliant public, and perhaps even some in the media, may actually take this behavior as representing that of a changed man.
In reality, Trump’s appeals to heaven and Christian salvation are smart politics. He is speaking directly to his most zealous supporters on the Christian right who feel alienated from mainstream American society and view secular society as the enemy. By using their language, symbols, narratives, codes and systems of belief, he is reassuring them he is loyal and is advancing their cause. His support among evangelicals remains rock solid. But this is a crucial moment: Trump’s authoritarian campaign is escalating, along with his other abuses of the law. It’s reasonable to think that the president’s God and heaven talk is an attempt to soften his cruel image and to make his vengeful policies more palatable. Some of the compliant public, and perhaps even some in the media, may actually take this behavior as representing that of a changed man.
Trump’s authoritarian project is a type of religious politics where he is a divine ruler, an emperor-god king. In this vision, Trump is not merely a man. He is the State itself. He exists outside the law, and beyond accountability or limits. In the long Trumpocene, White Christianity and MAGA are now conjoined.
Trump’s Christian MAGA people support this form of American theocracy for a variety of reasons. Research by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has shown that white right-wing Christians are more likely than other Americans to support authoritarianism, and specifically, the end of multiracial pluralistic democracy. Some of this is likely due to the fact that some religious belief systems attract and reinforce hierarchical thinking. In evangelical Christianity, God is viewed as the ultimate father figure who is to be obeyed totally and blindly. This is taught as the natural order of the world, and is then often applied more broadly to society. Other factors in why right-wing Christians are more likely to support Trumpism include authoritarian personalities, social dominance orientation, tribalism and the role that whiteness and racism play in American evangelical Christianity. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning…is the most segregated hour in America.”
Perhaps most importantly, the union between Trump and the Christian Right is a transactional and lucrative relationship. Trump has elevated white right-wing Christians to a superior position in American society, where they enjoy more rights and freedoms — and privileges — than members of other religions, and racial and ethnic groups. In exchange, the Christian right gives Trump unwavering political and other forms of support.
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Robert P. Jones, PRRI’s president and founder, explained how Trump’s transactional understanding of the world is reflected in his disingenuous and superficial understanding of heaven and God. “What’s most striking about Trump’s language about heaven is that it is — like everything in his worldview — transactional. He often muses about whether he’s done enough “to get in” and whether particular actions will be enough to meet the minimum cover charge. This pay-to-play way of thinking about heaven is antithetical to the Protestant Christian faith he claims, in which confession and repentance of sin — something Trump has explicitly said he has never done — is the prerequisite for salvation that comes through unwarranted grace. But this is perhaps not so surprising from a man who takes the usefulness of religion, but not Christian theology, seriously.”
Jones observed how this corrupt understanding of faith and religion is reflected by the way White Christians have justified their alliance with Trump and MAGA. “What’s more important for understanding our current moment and [the] state of conservative white Christianity is that this facile, indeed heretical, perception of how salvation works causes virtually no critique or alarm from evangelical leaders,” he said. “It’s enough for them, and their followers, that [Trump] utters the words “God” and “heaven.” That’s evidently sufficient today for [him] to be useful in their own quest for power.”
Donald Trump keeps talking about God and the hereafter. But what if the president’s idea of a higher power and heaven comes down to his own power to do whatever he wants, without accountability? After all, Trumpism is centered on a cult of personality, and its ideology is driven by his blinding ambition and force of will. As the Dear Leader, he is trying to remake American society in his own image and according to his personal fantasies — and he has encountered little effective resistance while doing so. The American people are quickly learning that the “heaven” of Trumpism and MAGA is more like a dystopian hell for everyone else.
