Is Donald Trump Connected to the Family Cult
Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters
Quondam aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt well-nigh believers.
I twenty-four hour period in 2015, Donald Trump beckoned Michael Cohen, his longtime confidant and personal attorney, into his office. Trump was brandishing a printout of an article about an Atlanta-based megachurch pastor trying to raise $60 million from his flock to purchase a private jet. Trump knew the preacher personally—Creflo Dollar had been among a group of evangelical figures who visited him in 2011 while he was outset exploring a presidential bid. During the coming together, Trump had reverently bowed his head in prayer while the pastors laid easily on him. At present he was gleefully reciting the impious details of Dollar's quest for a Gulfstream G650.
Trump seemed delighted by the "scam," Cohen recalled to me, and eager to highlight that the pastor was "full of shit."
"They're all hustlers," Trump said.
The president's alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats agree them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on bourgeois Christians, casting himself as their champion. "My administration will never finish fighting for Americans of faith," he declared at a rally for evangelicals before this year. It's a bulletin his campaign volition seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barrett—a devout, conservative Catholic—to the Supreme Court.
But in private, many of Trump's comments about religion are marked by pessimism and contempt, according to people who accept worked for him. Former aides told me they've heard Trump ridicule bourgeois religious leaders, dismiss diverse faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base of operations.
Reached for comment, a White House spokesman said that "people of faith know that President Trump is a champion for religious liberty and the sanctity of life, and he has taken strong actions to support them and protect their liberty to worship. The president is as well well known for joking and his terrific sense of humour, which he shares with people of all faiths."
From the commencement of his cursory political career, Trump has viewed right-wing evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed, bamboozled, or bought off, one-time aides told me. Though he faced Republican primary opponents in 2022 with deeper religious roots—Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee—Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him.
"His view was 'I've been talking to these people for years; I've let them stay at my hotels—they're gonna endorse me. I played the game,'" said a former campaign adviser to Trump, who, like others quoted in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Information technology helped that Trump seemed to experience a kinship with prosperity preachers—ofttimes evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The old campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing "faith healings," while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, "Man, that'due south some racket." On some other occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen's media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons.
In Cohen'south recent memoir, Disloyal, he recounts Trump returning from his 2011 coming together with the pastors who laid hands on him and sneering, "Can y'all believe that bullshit?" Simply if Trump found their rituals ridiculous, he followed their moneymaking ventures closely. "He was completely familiar with the business dealings of the leadership in many prosperity-gospel churches," the adviser told me.
The conservative Christian elites Trump surrounds himself with have always been more than clear-eyed about his lack of religiosity than they've publicly let on. In a September 2022 meeting with about a dozen influential figures on the religious right—including the talk-radio host Eric Metaxas, the Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, and the theologian Wayne Grudem—the then-candidate was edgeless well-nigh his human relationship to Christianity. In a recording of the meeting obtained by The Atlantic, the candidate can be heard shrugging off his scriptural ignorance ("I don't know the Bible as well equally some of the other people") and joking about his inexperience with prayer ("The get-go time I met [Mike Pence], he said, 'Will you bow your head and pray?' and I said, 'Excuse me?' I'one thousand not used to it.") At i point in the meeting, Trump interrupted a discussion about religious liberty to complain about Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and brag nigh the taunting nickname he'd devised for him. "I call him Little Ben Sasse," Trump said. "I have to do it, I'm sorry. That's when my faith ever deserts me."
And notwithstanding, by the cease of the meeting—much of which was spent discussing the urgency of preventing trans women from using women's restrooms—the candidate had the group eating out of his hand. "I'm not voting for Trump to be the instructor of my tertiary grader's Sunday-school grade. That's not what he'due south running for," Jeffress said in the meeting, adding, "I believe information technology is imperative … that we do everything we can to turn people out."
The Faustian nature of the religious right'due south bargain with Trump has not always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than than twice equally probable as the average American to say that the president is a religious homo. Some conservative pastors have described him as a "infant Christian," and insist that he'due south accustomed Jesus Christ as his savior.
To those who have known and worked with Trump closely, the notion that he might accept a secret spiritual side is laughable. "I always assumed he was an atheist," Barbara Res, a former executive at the Trump Organization, told me. "He's non a religious guy," A. J. Delgado, who worked on his 2022 campaign, told me. "Whenever I see a picture of him standing in a group of pastors, all of their easily on him, I see a idea bubble [with] the words 'What suckers,'" Mary Trump, the president'southward niece, told me.
Greg Thornbury, a former president of the evangelical King's College, who was courted by the entrada in 2016, told me that even those who admit Trump's lack of personal piety are convinced that he holds their faith in high esteem. "I don't think for a moment that they would believe he'south cynical well-nigh them," Thornbury said.
Trump'southward public appeals to Jewish voters have been similarly discordant with his individual comments. Final week, The Washington Post reported that after calls with Jewish lawmakers, the president has said that Jews "are but in information technology for themselves." And while he is quick to tout his daughter Ivanka's conversion to Judaism when he'southward speaking to Jewish audiences, he is sometimes less effusive in private. Cohen told me that in one case, years ago, he was with Trump when his wife, Melania, informed him that their son was at a playdate with a Jewish daughter from his schoolhouse. "Bang-up," Trump said to Cohen, who is Jewish. "I'm going to lose another i of my kids to your people."
One religious grouping that the Trump campaign is keenly fixated on this year is Mormons. In 2016, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rejected the Republican ticket in unprecedented numbers. To win them over in 2020, the campaign has made Donald Trump Jr. its envoy, sending him to campaign in Utah and other Mormon-heavy states. The president's son has cultivated relationships with high-profile conservatives in the faith. Before this twelvemonth, he invoked Mormon pioneers in a call with reporters to draw his begetter's "innovative spirit."
In fact, according to two senior Utah Republicans with noesis of the state of affairs, Don Jr. has been then savvy in courting Latter-day Saints—expressing interest in the Church's history, reading from the Book of Mormon—that he's left some influential Republicans in the country with the impression that he may want to convert. (A spokesman for Don Jr. did not reply to a request for annotate.)
I've been curious most the president's opinion of Mormonism always since I interviewed him in 2022 at Mar-a-Lago. During our conversation, Trump began to strenuously argue that Mitt Romney's exotic religion had cost him the 2012 election. When I interrupted to inform him that I'm likewise a Mormon, he chop-chop changed tack—extolling my Church's many virtues, then switching subjects. (He remained committed to his theory about 2012: During his September 2022 meeting with evangelical leaders, Trump repeatedly asserted that "Christians" didn't turn out for Romney "because of the Mormon matter.") I've always wondered what Trump might have said if I hadn't cut him off.
When I shared this story with Cohen, he laughed. Trump, he said, frequently made fun of Romney'southward faith in private—and was especially brutal when he learned most the religious undergarments worn by many Latter-mean solar day Saints. "Oh my god," Cohen said. "How many times did he bring up Mitt Romney and the undergarments …"
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-secretly-mocks-his-christian-supporters/616522/
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