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On Monday night at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina took to the stage and declared he believes in miracles.
“Thank God almighty,” Scott said. “Our God still saves, still delivers, still sets free. Because on Saturday, the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle. But an American lion got back up on his feet and he roared.”
Scott, a man who once literally hammered the Ten Commandments to the wall of a government building, is one of dozens if not hundreds of lawmakers, religious leaders, and influencers who have framed former president Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt as some sort of divine act.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, currently serving a jail sentence for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena, described it plainly: “Trump wears the Armor of God.”
Some white evangelical Christians have claimed for some time that Trump was divinely chosen by God to lead America. More recently, such claims have inflected a distinct political tendency—white Christian nationalism, which envisions the United States as a divinely ordained promised land for Christians of European descent.
“A central tenet of this theological worldview is ‘spiritual warfare,’ the idea that Christians are engaged in a daily battle between good and evil, God and the devil, with prayers of the faithful thwarting evil plans,” Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research Institute and author of the best-selling book The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, tells WIRED. “But this worldview trades in a kind of ex post facto theology, where being saved from danger or sickness or other disaster is seen retroactively as evidence of divine protection. Its after-the-fact selectivity is glaringly apparent. I’m certain, for example, that none of these voices would be saying it was God’s will had Trump been assassinated.”
Now, in the wake of the shooting, claims that Trump is the anointed leader of Christian America have escalated dramatically—not only among those who have openly espoused Christian nationalist beliefs, but also among a much broader range of Trump supporters.
Despite Trump’s behavior often being antithetical to Christian beliefs and his apparent lack of religiosity—he was famously unfamiliar with even the name of a book of the New Testament during his first run for the presidency—evangelicals have long been Trump’s most ardent supporters. According to polling from PRRI, two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants hold Christian nationalist views, viewing themselves as the rightful chosen people to be in charge of the United States with Trump as their defender.
And on Sunday morning, as Americans were still coming to terms with what had happened the previous evening, evangelical pastors across the country portrayed the incident as a signal that Trump had been anointed by God.
“You preserved [Trump’s] life, and you don’t preserve anything you don’t have a purpose for,” Pastor Jentezen Franklin of Free Chapel in Georgia told his congregation. Speaking to Fox News hours after the shooting, Pastor Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church in Dallas said the shooting “is evidence of the reality of evil in the world. We thank God for protecting the life of this courageous leader who is a warrior for truth and the friend of Christians everywhere.”
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“GOD protected President Trump yesterday,” claimed House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has been a major proponent of Christian nationalist ideology, in a post on X.
Trump himself echoed these claims in a post on Truth Social: “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” the former president said.
But in the days following the shooting, a much broader range of Trump supporters began to invoke the idea that Trump had been protected by God to deliver a Christian America.
“If it isn't apparent enough who God wants to win,” YouTuber and boxer Jake Paul, who recently invited Trump to one of his fights, posted on X. “When you try and kill God's angels and saviors of the world it just makes them bigger.”
On Sunday evening, on the eve of the RNC, Trump supporters held a prayer vigil outside the event venue. In interviews with 18 RNC delegates on Monday, Reuters found that all but two believed God had a hand to play in Trump’s survival.
Many people, including Trump’s own son Eric Trump, his former adviser Roger Stone, and endless conspiracy posters on X, labeled the slight turn of the head that caused the bullet to graze Trump’s ear rather than kill him as a moment of “divine intervention.”
In many cases, these claims were accompanied by what appear to be AI-generated images of Trump with Jesus Christ standing behind him with his hands on Trump’s shoulders. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and cochair of the RNC, was among those sharing such pictures. Others claimed that an American flag flapping in the breeze above the stage where Trump spoke resembled the form taken by an angel.
Charlie Kirk, the founder of conservative activist group Turning Point USA, posted on X that he believed God had intervened to protect Trump and the future of the US.
“Consider for a moment that Donald Trump, and the fortunes of the entire country, might have been saved today by a gust of wind that pushed that bullet ever so slightly,” Kirk wrote on X. “The Holy Spirit in scripture is often associated with a gust of wind. God's hand is on Donald Trump.”
Many Trump supporters also looked for significance in the mundane details of the shooting.
“The bullets were fired at 6:11pm,” far-right troll and Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec wrote on X, adding: “Ephesians 6:11.” The Bible verse says: “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.”
While not specifically Christian nationalist, the idea that God had intervened was also promoted by spiritual influencers on X, Instagram, and Telegram, highlighting prophetic claims made months ago that appeared to accurately predict what happened on Saturday.
Earlier this month, for example, a self-described visionary named Jelaila Starr predicted on a YouTube show that there would be a failed assassination attempt on Trump in July or August. “She said that it would be a replay of galactic history when humanity lived in its 2nd great experiment in the Pleiadian constellation,” the host of the show, Michael Salla, wrote this week.
Separately, a number of pro-Trump accounts also flagged a video from April where an evangelical “prophet” claimed to have had a dream about an assassination attempt on Trump, where the bullet passed so close to his head that it shattered his eardrum.
What was noticeably absent from all of these claims of God protecting Trump was any reference to Corey Comperatore, the former fire chief who was killed by a bullet meant for Trump while using his body to shield his family at the rally.
This, Jones said, speaks to the dangerous divisions that result from claiming that God was protecting Trump but not anyone else.
“The danger with such ex post facto theology for a democratic society is that it is perhaps the most powerful source of confirmation bias and polarization: It attributes providential action to contingent events, but only if they conform to preconceived beliefs,” Jones said. “It’s ultimately a crass and arrogant declaration that God is on our side, that God protects our candidates and our interests but not others.”
