For the approximately two-thirds of Americans who identify as Christian, this is Holy Week, a solemn time of participation in worship services that encourage reflection and repentance ahead of the resurrection celebrated on the holiest day on the Christian calendar, Easter Sunday. In the midst of this sacred time, the presumed Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, has committed acts that in any other era would have created an outcry among serious Christians across the spectrum.
Robert P. Jones
On Holy Monday, Trump compared himself to Jesus while sitting in a courtroom where he was facing charges of an alleged hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. He shared (“re-Truthed” in the Orwellian lingo of his Truth Social site) a message from a social media follower that declared, “It’s ironic that Christ walked through his greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you.”
That post included a quote from Psalm 109:3-8, which is a plea to God to punish false accusers. This use of the text casts Trump as the persecuted innocent man and says of his accuser, “Let his days be few, and let another take his office.” It also includes an icon of an American flag inside the scriptural quote. Trump reposted it with this heading: “Received this morning—Beautiful, thank you!”
These verses have been a favorite rallying cry among white Christian nationalist supporters against democratic candidates as far back as the Obama era. The quote used above stopped with verse eight, but if you take the verse in its larger context, which Trump’s followers likely intend, it veers quickly into calls for violence and revenge.
Here are the stark next two verses (Psalm 109:9-10):
Let his children be fatherless,
And his wife a widow.
Let his children continually be vagabonds and beg;
Let them seek their bread also from their desolate places.
It’s easy to miss the real work this text is doing and the significance of Trump’s proclamation that it is “beautiful.” But it is imperative that we grasp the disturbing truth.
These verses have been transposed in our time into prayers by white evangelical Americans not only for the deaths of presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden but also for the hateful destruction and desolation of their wives and children. This strategic marshaling of scriptural fragments — like so much of Trump’s own inciteful “bloodbath” rhetoric — maintains plausible deniability while quietly priming those under the white Christian nationalist spell to accept, and perhaps commit, violence.
“Trump’s comparison of himself to Jesus, while audacious, is not new.”
Trump’s comparison of himself to Jesus, while audacious, is not new. It echoes claims he has made in other settings, such as his speech to white evangelicals at the National Religious Broadcasters annual meeting last month. There, Trump evoked the theological logic of substitutionary atonement to describe himself as their savior.
Trump claimed, “I’ve been very busy fighting and, you know, taking the, the bullets, taking the arrows. I’m taking ’em for you. And I’m so honored to take ’em. You have no idea. I’m being indicted for you … .”
On Holy Tuesday, Trump began hawking a $60 God Bless the USA Bible. His sales pitch included this message on X: “Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again. As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible.”
In a three-minute pitch, during which Trump is woodenly reading from a teleprompter, he claims:
This (God Bless the USA Bible) is very important, very important to me. A lot of people have it. You have to have it, for your heart, for your soul. … All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book. It’s a lot of people’s favorite book. This Bible is a reminder that the biggest thing we have to bring back America, to make American great again, is our religion. … Christians are under siege but must protect content that is pro-God. We love God, and we have to protect anything that is pro-God. We must defend God in the public square and not allow the media or the left-wing groups to silence, censor or discriminate against us. We have to bring Christianity back into our lives and back into what will be again a great nation.
“This book is a tangible, monetized incarnation of Trump’s white Christian nationalism.”
This book is a tangible, monetized incarnation of Trump’s white Christian nationalism. It binds, within its brown leather cover, the text of the King James Version of the Bible (preferred by white evangelical Protestants) along with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and a handwritten chorus of Lee Greenwood’s song, “God Bless the USA,” which Trump regularly plays at rallies.
As my friend Jemar Tisby shows in a recent post on his Footnotes Substack, this disturbing amalgamation (I can’t bring myself to call it a Bible) has a telling history: It was born in white evangelical reactionary hate of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and an earlier proposed NIV version of it was turned down by Zondervan after pushback by Jemar and others.
According to The New York Times, Trump is receiving a royalty deal for his endorsement of the book “under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC,” a company that has the same listed address as the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach and is connected to his gaudy $399 “Never Surrender” gold sneakers and his $99 NFT trading cards.
That Trump has turned Holy Week into an ugly carnivalesque grift is not surprising, given his character and the financial crisis he is facing due to legal troubles, but it should be appalling to every Christian.
Christian theology has a word to describe those who claim the attributes of a deity or who treat sacred things with contempt and disrespect. That word is blasphemy.
And the failure of Christians — especially white evangelical Christians to whom Trump is pandering — to speak out against such disgrace during the holiest week of the Christian liturgical year is a measure of our captivity and complicity in Trump’s denigration of both Christianity and our nation.
Robert P. Jones serves as president and founder of PRRI and is the author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future and White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award.
This column originally appeared on Robert P. Jones’s substack #WhiteTooLong.
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