The Mission of Donald Trump

“I’m supposed to be dead,” Donald Trump said, the day after a would-be assassin's bullet clipped his right ear at his 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he said four days after that.

“But something very special happened. Let’s face it. Something happened,” he said two days after that.

“It’s … an act of God,” he said the month after that.

“God spared my life for a reason,” he said in his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago in November 2024.

“I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said in his inaugural address at the Capitol in January.

“It changed something in me,” he said in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in February. “I feel even stronger.”

This is new. It’s not how he talked for most of his long and voluble life, though he has always been wont to speak about himself in grandiose, self-aggrandizing terms. But the longtime self-described “fatalist” invariably maintained a sort of shoulder-shrugging acceptance that whatever was going to happen was beyond his or anyone else’s control. Over the months since Butler, however, and especially since his re-election and the start of his second administration, Trump’s outlook has shifted in essence from ‘stuff happens’ and ‘nothing much matters’ to ‘something happened, and it couldn’t matter more.’ His rhetoric has gone from borderline nihilistic on occasion to downright messianic at times.

For a while now, a veritable roster of religious believers and leaders, grateful for the conservative political victories Trump has bestowed in exchange for their votes, have suggested and sometimes outright proclaimed that Trump has been “chosen,” or “anointed,” or is a “savior,” or “the second coming” or “the Christ for this age.” These days, Trump does it, too. And it matters.

It matters, some say, because it highlights how his well-documented narcissism and grandiosity may have metastasized into notions of omnipotence, invincibility and infallibility. And it matters maybe most immediately because it offers a window into how he is approaching his second term -- likely his last — even more emboldened, even more unilaterally oriented, even more apparently uncheckable and untouchable than the first. At the very least, gripped by a sense of destiny he seems determined to plunge forward with his agenda, surer than ever that whatever once constituted what he wanted to achieve in office is now a Mission with a capital M.

“I run the country and the world,” he has said.

“I’d like to be pope,” he added — ‘spun’ by the White House as a joke, but … kind of not so much? — before he and the White House posted on social media an AI image of himself adorned in archetypal papal attire.

Whilst the 45th and 47th President has always been a mercurial personality with a baffling personality (in all probability designed to be deliberately unpredictable) it’s worth asking if Trump believes that he’s somehow transcended the mundane to become not so much a deity, but more … God-like, divinely sanctioned or inspired or empowered? Does he think he’s somehow imbued with some special, sacred purpose for some special, sacred reason? Or did he just see and seize an opportunity to stamp his world-upending agenda with the ultimate justification — a mandate from God?

Either way, it’s yet another way the Master Marketer has chosen to stay relevant by baffling his global audience. By its very nature, the American presidency guarantees the individual occupying it almost unfathomable prominence, but Trump has taken this one step further by ensuring that he is perpetually in the public eye.

Donald Trump sees the world as a perpetual reality show in which he is simultaneously star, director, choreographer and scriptwriter. His preferred genre is drama, especially one which fits his larger-than-life narrative which has him being portrayed as the best, the biggest, the strongest, the toughest, the smartest etc. etc. which logic (and evidence) suggests cannot possibly be so but never stops him from trying to convince as many people as possible for most – if not all – of the time. He lives in a world of fantasy, written in his mind and sees himself almost always in the Third Person as a Überhuman character. In that sense, it’s easy to see how he believes he was saved by the Supreme Being because he is Special or the One rather than the more prosaic interpretation that he was almost taken out by a lousy shot or he simply got lucky.

This is nothing new to prominent figures in history. Steve Jobs, for example, was famous (or infamous) for his “reality distortion field” – his ability to use persuasion, charisma, wordsmithing and even downright browbeating to convince his teams that ‘impossible’ projects could actually be done. Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, all were at one time or another described as fantasists with egos to match their countries' mountains.

Whether or not Trump’s view of himself is in reality a mixture of genuine belief or shrewd opportunism is not all that relevant. It’s plainly in his interest to keep talking as if everything he does is sanctioned by God. Looking at the rhetoric, you have to wonder if the assassination attempt really shook him up and he thought, ‘Maybe they are right. Maybe I really am the ‘chosen one.’” Very few people could go through that kind of experience and not feel they were spared. for some deeper, greater reason.

There has never been a shortage of people who say that Trump believes in nothing. That’s not true. He believes, for instance, in tariffs, and always has. He believes in the importance of genes and always has. He believes in the power of positive thinking, and he believes in the power of negative publicity. He believes in himself. And Trump, at best an sporadically observant Christian who reportedly has mocked those more devout, nonetheless believes, and has for a long, long time, in … something like predestination.

“I’m a great fatalist,” he told a reporter in 1991.

“What scares you the most?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Whatever happens, happens — and you just have to go along with it.”

“Unbelievable,” he told Larry King on CNN in 1997. The famed fashion designer Gianni Versace had just been murdered outside his Miami Beach mansion by a celebrity-obsessed stalker named Andrew Cunanan.

“John Kennedy once said if someone wants to get you, and that’s all they think about, you’re in trouble,” King said.

“True,” Trump said.

“So,” King said, “Trump the fatalist has to be aware and give thought to the Cunanans.”

“You have to be aware,” Trump said. “Otherwise, you’re a fool — but, again, I don’t think you can change your entire life. You’re not going to go into a very safe little space and just lock the door and never come out. I just don’t think you can do that. And I am a fatalist. I say, ‘Hey, what happens, happens.’ And maybe it’s predestined. Who knows?”

For a man who lives in the moment Trump has displayed stray moments in which he seemed to be searching for something else — something more meaningful? “There has to be a reason we are here,” he once told a biographer. “There has to be a reason that we’re going through this. There has to be a reason for everything,” he said. “I do believe in God. I think there just has to be something that’s far greater than us."

For the most part, though, Trump’s has expressed the opposite, a more nihilistic view — that basically the world is full of random events with no higher discernible purpose.

“People ask me, ‘How do you handle pressure?’” he wrote in 2007 in his book 'Think Big and Kick Ass.' “The truth is, it does not matter. What the hell difference does it make? You see what is going on in Iraq; you have seen a tsunami wipe out hundreds of thousands of people. Think about how 3,000 people died in the World Trade Center on September 11 …”

In 2015, Trump understood that such suffering or happenstance was not a message on which he (or anyone) could run to be president — and that if he wanted to win, he would need the support of people for whom faith in a higher power is a given. The thrice-married philistine said he was “not sure” he’d ever asked God for forgiveness, and referred to, “Two Corinthians” instead of “Second Corinthians,” and couldn’t or wouldn’t name a favorite verse in the Bible (until he eventually managed to reference something). But he was sagacious enough to know that evangelicals are a crucial bloc of voters and that it would be a stretch (even for him) to present himself as one of them, much less a religious man. Pragmatically, he adopted a quid pro quo approach in wooing this constituency instead, offering promises, policies and Supreme Court justices in line with their desires. To him, these were necessary transactions.

Ever the savvy marketer and salesman, Trump ran a campaign with a distinctly Biblical heroic narrative — a kind of convoluted “hero quest,” seeking to cast out the “moneylenders” in the metaphorical “Temple” of Washington D.C. (i.e. corrupt politicians, media, the politically correct, the ‘woke’) all around him and claimed that he had been purified to end corruption by the very act of giving up the chance to enrich himself in the business world by running for humbly-paid office. Chafing under what they saw as an increasingly out of touch and godless media-controlling progressive elite, a critical mass of evangelicals responded by casting Trump as a modern-day prophet, albeit an imperfect figure tapped to do God’s perfect work.

He was sworn in using the Bible he received from his mother at First Presbyterian Church in Queens in New York as well as the Bible Abraham Lincoln used in 1861. In his first National Prayer Breakfast appearance he took a swipe at former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about his lowly TV ratings as Trump’s replacement as the host of “Celebrity Apprentice.” In his first term he had prominent pastors come to him in the Oval Office and pray with him and for him and lay their hands on him. He used a Bible as a photo-op prop amid the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. He switched his religious affiliation from Presbyterian to “non-denominational” Christian. On the lawn outside the White House, in the context of a conversation about a pending trade war with China, Trump held out his hands and looked up at the sky. “I am the chosen one,” he said. From his tone, though, it was clear at least to most that he was mostly joking.

But then that bullet in Butler just missed.

And then he won again.

So now, months into his term, Trump is on a speed run determined to make a show of focused intent. He’s pledged a “Golden Age;” he’s punished those he's perceived as unbelievers to his MAGA cause; he’s exacted or attempted to exact subservience and acquiescence from media execs and tech titans, major law firms, top universities and both chambers of Congress that he and his party control (in addition to arguably, the Supreme Court). He’s tried to dominate the global economy, re-write the rules of trade and crack intractable issues of war and peace. He’s declared a slew of national emergencies on everything from the border to mineral production, and he’s dropped scores of executive orders, whitewashing, even re-writing history, targeting “Biased Media” and “Criminal Aliens,” establishing a Religious Liberty Commission and a White House Faith Office and eradicating “Anti-Christian Bias” — decrees delivered like apocalyptic pronouncements of an Old Testament prophet.

World leaders “all want to kiss my ass,” he told aides.

“I’m actually surprised myself” about the rolling-over of the law firms, he told ABC News.

“John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?” he was asked in an interview for TIME. “John Adams said that?” said Trump. “I wouldn’t agree with it 100 percent.”

He was asked by Kristen Welker of NBC News if he as president needed to “uphold” the Constitution. “I don’t know,” Trump replied.

Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unchained. During his first presidential iteration the circle surrounding him were willing to think that the president could be wrong about something – a position or a belief or an action. They could question his judgment, and try to manage his sudden, dramatic impulses. Some may even have called themselves a 'coalition of adults' who made efforts at mitigating what they saw as his worse excesses. In his second coming it has become clear that there are not many people with these views or inclinations in his immediate orbit. Indeed, his team seems to sense that there is something in him that bespeaks a Destiny as yet undefined or unfulfilled which exists beyond the scope of argumentation: a mystic chord about his improbable return to power.

To them, and possibly to him, God may have a purpose for Donald Trump.

At their core, Christians (from all denominations) believe that God has a purpose for them,— that they are all potential tools of his will, and beneficiaries of his grace. Most of them don’t, though, think of themselves as the literal second coming of Christ, and the extent to which Trump might be tempted to think that of himself in that mold (to which some of his more fanatical supporters might agree) speaks to the unprecedented expansion of power he has asserted, is accumulating and that many in the country seem content to grant.

It's not as if any previous president has refrained from invoking God. Asking Him to watch over the nation is a regular refrain at the end of every presidential speech, but claiming to have been saved specifically by God to enable the enactment of political priorities? That takes things one substantial step further. No previous occupant of the White House has done this. Invoking both the power of the people (his supporters) and God is both a breathtaking step and, if successful even in the minds of a substantial minority, could give him unquestioned power. The message is: whosoever defies Trump risks standing against the people and God.

How do you stand against someone who claims the power and backing of God?

We’ve seen this before, in countries less inclined towards democracy, perhaps even in out-and-out dictatorships, but never so overtly in U.S. history.

If nothing else, in the assessment of his biographers, it means Trump as always is an opportunist. In fact, if one looks back at the panoply of his career, he has spent more than fifty years always pushing the limits of what he can and will go after. Starting back in his famous public debut in 1973 when he counter-sued DOJ for defamation, he has consistently reached way past what anyone expected or had a ready response for — a strategy that has let him keep moving the goalposts ever forward. He rewrites the rules of the game – any game he chooses to play.

This positioning is Donald Trump playing to an audience to convince them he’s with them — and not at all to give you a window into his soul, because that particularly blind is permanently drawn down, because at his core, Trump is a thundering paradox. ‘The Apprentice’ gave the impression to a whole generation of people who didn’t know his story that he was a great dealmaker and an entrepreneurial genius as opposed to a serial bankruptcy artist and lucky opportunist. He captured the presidency in part on that. And he got re-elected in part on surviving that horrific moment in Butler.

That singular moment was the apotheosis of the Trump worldview that everything is image driven by performance art. In the seconds which elapsed after the bullet grazed his ear and the Secret Service had pancaked him to the dais, he processed the near-death experience, then, fully aware of the high drama, milked it for all its worth through the world-famous fist pump and shouted enjoinder to “Fight!” seen by billions and replayed across news outlets via every possible media source. That he happened to be standing framed against the stark blue sky and a waving American flag just added to the iconography of the moment. No one else, not Biden, both Bushes, Clinton and even Obama would have attempted such brazen branding. In that split second he saw an opportunity to create a photographic tableau no less searing than that of the Marines raising the flag over Mount Suribachi during the Iwo Jima invasion.

It worked.

Small wonder then that more naysaying scholars and observers see Trump as an opportunistic narcissist who also recognizes considerable political utility in wrapping himself in a divine mantle. Leaders seen by followers as sacred are messianic figures, who promise salvation for true believers, and when a movement is headed by a sacred leader, it ceases to be political but more resembles a religion.

Sacred? Chosen? Messianic? As Proverbs 16:9 puts it: “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps.”

Secular reality of course is more complicated. Trump has not yet been able to end the Ukraine conflict with the wave of a proverbial wand. He’s not been able to ordain peace in the Middle East (where the violence seems to be spiraling on and on). And court after court has stymied the implementation of his edicts. He’s seemed at times frustrated and even flustered by this incapacity and clearly perceives them as fetters on his power.

In the aftermath of the latest significant setback in the form of the decision of a federal court to overturn the tariffs at the heart of his economic program, Trump took to Truth Social. Among the barrage of his posts was a meme of Trump striding down a darkened city street.

“HE’S ON A MISSION FROM GOD,” read the words. “NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT IS COMING.”

Do we take this literally or metaphorically?

The simple answer, for the more complicated truth is likely to be buried deep within the psyche of this most controversial yet enigmatic of presidents, is that people of faith perceive themselves as being on divine-inspired missions. To his supporters, Donald Trump has the awesome Mission of Making America Great Again. Whatever his motivations, POTUS 45 and 47 seems determined to do it his way. And if he keeps all of us guessing as to his true beliefs and motivations, as long as he gets great ratings does it matter to him?