If there was a theme to the final leg of the Republican National Convention, it was that God has a plan for former President Donald Trump.
On Thursday, before Trump accepted his party’s nomination, pastor Lorenzo Sewell said that Jesus Christ himself saved Trump during last Saturday’s assassination attempt, preserving him “for such a time as this.” Rev. Franklin Graham said God spared Trump’s and, in the aftermath, the candidate known for his bluster reexamined his life and reevaluated his priorities.
Among the laity, Trump’s son Eric, addressing his father, said that through “the grace of God, divine intervention and your guardian angels above, you survived.”
But it was Trump who surprised most in a rare moment of humble spirituality.
With a bandage still on his injured ear, he described his brush with death, saying he would recount it just once, as it was “too painful to tell” again. But Trump said that as he ducked behind the podium, bleeding, he wasn’t scared.
“In a certain way I felt very safe, cause I had God on my side.”
Did I say Trump was humble? Maybe that needs rethinking. Such is the paradox of piety, that humility before one’s maker is often just a front for hubris. The claim that God has a rooting interest in your team ought to have been retired after 1963, when a prophet from Hibbing, Minnesota sang “With God on Our Side,” about the many frightful causes that believed themselves to be blessed.
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Bob Dylan name drops the Spanish-American War, the Civil War and Cold War as conflicts fueled by such a delusion. All of human history — and American history in particular — is a story of our mistaken belief in our own infallibility when we claim the divine as our sponsor.
Such magical thinking can be used to excuse any atrocity. If you have God’s cover, the thinking goes, you are forever blameless and moral, and can even extend the grace to your allies.
“We forgave the Germans and then we were friends,” Dylan sang in one stanza. “Though they murdered six million in the ovens they fried/The Germans now too have God on their side.”
What might God be standing for by being on Trump’s side? His platform — which threatens mass deportations and the shuttering of the Department of Education? Project 2025 , a conservative plan to remake society in the image of Christian nationalism that Trump claims to know nothing about — even though it was plotted out by at least 140 members of his previous administration? Maybe just Trump’s rhetoric, which after gesturing at unity over division, gave way to the usual ad-libbed ad hominems, grievances and xenophobia? (And, spare us, another Hannibal Lecter namedrop.)
Is it the faded world champion wrestling Hulk Hogan rending his shirt and predicting the age of “Trumpites?” Is it a stadium full of people, who, hearing Eric Trump speak about gas prices, wars abroad and making America’s schools the best in the world, saved their loudest outbursts for when he invoked the specter of trans women competing in women’s swimming? Is it the big light-up letters that spelled “Trump?”
Maybe God is just a Kid Rock fan.
I suspect God might favor Dylan’s view, delivered by a narrator whose “name, it ain’t nothin,’” that most invocations of His approval are really just fronts.
I can’t speak for the Almighty, but in his song Dylan spoke for the national mood. “ The confusion I’m feelin’, ain’t no tongue can tell,” he sang. “The words fill my head, and they fall to the floor , t hat if God’s on our side, He’ll stop the next war .”
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