Trump Adviser Compares Him to God in Resurfaced Quote
Amongst the upper echelons of the MAGA movement, Donald Trump’s word is God’s.Paula White-Cain, a Pentecostal televangelist who has offered Trump spiritual guidance since 2002 and was appointed to run the new White House Faith Office last year, once said that “saying no to Trump would be saying no to God.”Earlier this month, White-Cain compared Trump to Jesus at the White House’s Easter lunch, likening Trump’s various political scandals to Christ’s crucifixion.“It almost cost you your life,” she said, feet away from Trump. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you.”White-Cain’s sycophantic public commentary offers a brief glimpse into the rhetoric circulating around the president, and could possibly explain why Trump felt it appropriate to circulate an AI-generated picture of himself as the messiah earlier this week.That act earned Trump nationwide backlash, driving a wedge between himself and many of his loyal supporters, who overwhelmingly condemned the blasphemous depiction. (The image features Trump dressed in white and red robes, encircled in light, holding light, and sharing it with the fallen.)Several self-identified Trump voters interviewed by MS Now said that they were “disgusted” by and “ashamed” of the image, and further implied that they regretted voting for the self-identified Christian. (Reminder: while Trump has claimed the Bible is his “favorite book,” he couldn’t name a single passage from the text when prompted to do so in a 2019 interview.)“Trump knows what he is doing. He knows what he posted,” former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X Thursday after prominent evangelist Franklin Graham came to the president’s defense. “He knows how to manipulate his followers. And he’s not sorry, he never apologized. Instead he lied, and said he was a doctor, which is also absurd.”A Franciscan friar that spoke with CBS News earlier this week said that “no one” should try to “put themselves in the person of Christ.” “I think that’s a little bit of a problem,” he said. White-Cain’s remarks could also explain the president’s attitude as he escalates a seemingly pointless feud with Pope Leo XIV, who apparently upset the administration by advocating for peace, not war.As Trump’s base begins to turn on him, questions have arisen about Trump’s other political miracles. Several MAGA voters have recently begun to reexamine the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in apparent suspicion that the ordeal was staged.