After 7 million Americans gloriously marched in 2,500 communities recently to declare we’ll have “No Kings” in the United States, the insistence by President Trump and his supporters that he has been divinely appointed leads me to make a suggestion: Maybe we’d better march next time for “No Messiahs.”
As Trump again floats the idea of running for an unconstitutional “third term,” former Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon told The Economist last week that “Trump will be president in 2028 and get a third term” because Trump is an “instrument of divine will.” When asked about the pesky little thing known as the 22nd Amendment that bars someone from being elected president more than twice, Bannon straight-facedly told the interviewers, “He’s a vehicle of divine providence.”
During Trump’s first candidacy and first term in office, we started hearing bizarre claims from evangelicals who likened him to the biblical outsider King Cyrus, who supposedly was a heathen but was chosen by God to liberate Jews from captivity. By the time Trump ran again last year, he unabashedly campaigned as a Christian on a Christian nationalist platform, and why not when eight in 10 white evangelical Christians supported him in 2020 and a similar share voted for him in 2016? Associated Press and others have meticulously documented the “Christian trappings” of his campaign, the ubiquitous slogans like “God, Guns & Trump,” and his over-the-top, pandering campaign speeches.
After surviving the assassination attempt last summer, Trump openly called his survival an act of God. The chorus began almost immediately repeating such claims, from folks like House Speaker Mike Johnson, “GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” to then-Sen. Marco Rubio, “God protected Donald Trump,” and on and on.
Trump modestly repeated this claim in his inaugural address: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” Politico racked up the effusive, worshipful praise and flattery from true believers calling him “chosen,” “anointed,” a “savior,” and “the second coming” or, yes, even “the Christ for this age.”
This past spring, after Trump ludicrously said he’d “like to be pope,” he posted an AI depiction of himself in papal drag. And then there was the infamous Truth Social post depicting Trump walking on a darkened street with a recycling of the “Blues Brothers’” line, which was tongue-in-cheek in the movie, but not so funny when used by Trump: “He’s on a mission from God & nothing can stop what is coming.”
“I think,” Robert Jeffress, the Trump-supporting pastor from Dallas, said in April, “he came to the conclusion — the right conclusion — that God has a purpose for him.”
Trump has bumped up his Christian nationalist pitches and actions of late, from his remarks at the so-called “Religious Liberty” gathering to his unveiling of the “America Prays” initiative, when he said it would be “very hard to be a good country” without religion. At the memorial-cum-religious revival for Charlie Kirk, Trump, after meandering remarks, declared to cheers, “We want religion back into America. We want God back.”
Bannon’s sycophantic promotion of Trump as divinely appointed is nothing new; insisting a third term must and will happen because it is divinely ordained is alarming. While FFRF and its advocacy arm, FFRF Action Fund, were proud to be co-sponsors of the No Kings I and II rallies, we don’t just need to march against a king or dictator, but against the white Christian nationalist movement that is anointing Trump as its messiah. Trump and his supporters such as Bannon are cynically playing the messiah card to help their ruthless quest to overturn the Constitution and democracy.
