In the grim and exhausting news maelstrom that marked Donald Trump’s time in office from 2016 to 2020, we took our moments of light relief where we could find them.
These crumbs of schadenfreude – Pandora’s last gift to the world – invariably involved nonsense from the horse’s mouth.
One such instance came when a couple of TV reporters asked Trump to name a favourite verse from his “favourite book”, the Bible.
“I don’t want to get into it, it’s very personal,” he bluffed.
Was he an Old Testament or a New Testament guy?
“Err … *slight panic in voice* …probably equal.”
Trump has no more read the Bible than he has the Quran in Arabic or Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
The 77-year-old libertine has a tricky relationship with the Lord. But politically it has proved a fruitful one. And now he hopes for some financial gain by flogging his own version of the Bible during Easter week for $59.99.
“He’s obviously never read it and my guess is that it wouldn’t recognise the Sermon on the Mount,” said moderate Republican commentator Charlie Sykes after a cash-strapped Trump announced his latest grift, a partnership with country singer Lee Greenwood, whose God Bless the USA is played at his rallies.
“But the other irony, of course, is that here is Donald Trump, a great defender of Christianity who is peddling his $60 Bibles while he is getting ready to go in front of a court to face criminal charges for having sex with a porn star who we then had to pay off.”
Another Republican Trump critic, Liz Cheney, snapped on Twitter/X: “Instead of selling Bibles, you should probably buy one.”
Atheists may be the only people who come out of this with any credit. If there was a God, Trump’s Bible would probably have burst into flames as he presented it in the promo video: “All Americans need a Bible in their home and I have many. It’s my favourite book.”
But for some, hard sell and Christian nationalism go together like high streets and rifle shops.
“The new American far right is powered by grifterism,” says David Faris, a political scientist at Roosevelt University in Chicago. “The weird podcast ads, the doomsday prepper stuff, so a former American president hawking Bibles doesn’t even seem that odd when we’ve become so inured to it.”
The website flogging the God Bless the USA Bible notes that it’s the only version endorsed by Trump, a man who’s been known to autograph copies of the Good Book.
One Christian writer thinks this exploitation of Christian faith at Easter, of all times, may have crossed a line. Bradley Onishi, a religious scholar, former evangelist and author of Preparing for War, a book on white Christian nationalism, told MSNBC: “There are folks who are going to eat this up. Trump is clearly appealing to white evangelicals, as many people know… He needs every one of those votes in 2024 to return to the White House… and some of them will see this as somebody merging their faith with patriotic elements.”
But he adds: “There are others, including evangelicals and other other Christians, who will see this as nothing short of blasphemous.”
Polling suggests, however, that Trump can count on a huge amount of support among the Christian right.
The latest Pew Research Center data suggest that white evangelical Protestants have the most positive opinion of Trump. Two-thirds have a favourable view of the former president, including 30 per cent who have a very favourable opinion of him.
Recent polls indicate that incumbent Joe Biden may be making slight inroads into Trump’s large share of the evangelical vote.
According to Thomas Gift, director of the Centre for US Politics at University College London, however, “the evangelical community remains a key demographic within the Republican electorate. Although many remain reluctant supporters given concerns over Trump’s morals, they’re unlikely to abandon him”. The reason he says, is the Republican’s record on supporting social conservatism.
“Trump delivered three conservative judges in his first term, who helped to overturn Roe v Wade. That alone is enough to earn their support in 2024.”
Patricia Crouse, a political scientist at the University of New Haven, adds: “Trump’s support among Christian evangelicals has remained relatively strong for a few reasons. One is that many of them view him as the ‘chosen’ one.
“They believe he has been ordained by God to lead them and the country. It isn’t that they don’t acknowledge his transgressions, they just believe that those are things for God to judge, not them.”
This bizarre belief manifests itself in the declaration of the seemingly intelligent, right-wing Christian and former CIA director, Mike Pompeo, to declare that Trump could be a modern-day Esther, the biblical character who persuaded the king of Persia not to destroy the Jews. He has thanked God for Trump – “an immovable friend of Israel”.
Zionist Christians, with whom Pompeo associates, believe that a state of Israel for the Jews is a prerequisite for the return of the Messiah. (It’s not about the Jews, of course: upon the Second Coming they will either convert to Christianity or go to hell).
There are in effect, competing or perhaps over-lapping explanations for Trump’s continuing popularity among right-wing Christians.
The Pew Centre’s research suggests that most people who view Trump positively don’t think he is particularly religious – but think he stands up for people with religious beliefs like theirs. Just 8 per cent of people who have a positive view of Trump think he is very religious, while 51 per cent think he is somewhat religious and 38 per cent say he is not very religious.
This backs the theory offered by Tim Alberta, author of a recent book on right-wing Christians, The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. He contends that the religious right regards Trump as a necessary evil.
Paraphrasing their mindset, he has said: “The barbarians are at the gates, and we need a barbarian to keep them at bay.” What is Trump, if not a convincing barbarian?
Faris thinks the issues have been fudged in the minds of many of Trump’s Christian disciples. The relationship is “fundamentally transactional, but they can’t accept that, so they’ve also made him into this preposterous god-like figure”, he says.
Crouse notes the hypocrisy. “What is interesting about all this, is that they will hold their own members to one standard – the ousting of Jerry Falwell Jnr at Liberty University for example,” he said, in reference to the leading, Trump-anointed Christian-right figure who was dropped like yesterday’s trash when news of his sex scandal broke.
And Trump appears to be attracting a new constituency on the religious right – Latinos.
In the US around 10 million Hispanics identify as evangelical or Protestant and “approximately three in 10 Hispanic Republicans (28 per cent) consider themselves evangelical Protestants,” according to the Pew Research Center.
Evangelicals as a conservative bloc of the Hispanic electorate are said to be “more involved than ever” in the elections, accordion to the evangelical Pastor Samuel Rodríguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), which touts itself as the largest Hispanic Christian organisation worldwide with more than 40,000 churches in the United States alone.
“Evangelical Latinos this year are going to vote like no other year,” Rodríguez has said.
Some, like Sykes, think money was the overriding motive for the launch of the Trump Bible.
“He could have given away these Bibles during Holy Week. He said we should make America pray again. So here is my gift to my supporters. Instead of that, he is marketing them,” he says.
Trump will get a percentage on Bibles sold and probably use the proceeds to defend himself against charges that he illegally paid hush money to porn star.
If he gets off that charge and returns to power, Trump will, with the help of a Supreme Court stacked with his hard-right justices, be able to do the Christian right’s bidding and fight the culture war on their behalf for the next four years and beyond.
At the end of the day, in their eyes, it’s all for a good cause.