In his 90-minute speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee Thursday night, Donald Trump repeatedly credited God for saving his life last weekend after a bullet from a would-be assassin at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, ripped through his right ear as he turned his head milliseconds before impact.
“There was blood pouring everywhere, and yet in a certain way I felt very safe because I had God on my side. I felt that,” he told the crowd of thousands in accepting the 2024 Republican nomination for president. He added later: “I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God.”
In all, he spoke God’s name nine times during the speech, referring to God’s plan, the gift of life on Earth and the American people’s faith in God’s existence. Earlier in the month, President Joe Biden also invoked the divine, telling an ABC interviewer July 5 that he would only heed a growing chorus of calls that he quit the race if “the Lord Almighty” told him to.
Three quarters of Americans believe in God, according to a national survey conducted last year by the online research portal Statista. Whether they believe such a higher power would intervene on behalf of a political candidate, as Biden and Trump suggest, is another matter. Given the number of faithful, each presidential hopeful has a strong political interest in convincing the voting population that they’re the chosen one.
“I’m wondering if those who feel it was God’s hand that saved Trump found him to be more worthy of being saved than the retired firefighter who was killed at the same time,” said Mitchell Wohlberg, the rabbi emeritus and former longtime spiritual leader of Beth Tfiloh Congregation in Pikesville. “I have to be honest and tell you that I have not heard from God lately, so I’m not sure exactly what he’s thinking. But I do find that most people who have heard from God have heard what they wanted to hear.”
Questions around the divine’s involvement in history, including how political leaders are chosen, rarely come with clear answers. The authors of the Old Testament, for instance, asserted time and again that God chooses the rulers and principals that he wants to carry out his desired ends, whether it was a slow-of-speech Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt or a charismatic but not always faithful Joshua delivering them to the Promised Land.
But as Wohlberg points out, the second line of Genesis shows us a God who “hovers” over the world he has made rather than driving its events, and there’s ample scholarship that points in other directions.
“The Talmud has a story that a man went and stole wheat and planted it,” Wohlberg said. “According to moral law, that wheat should not have grown. But it did. We learn from this that the world follows a natural course. God created it through laws of nature, the same laws that bring hurricanes, accidents, COVID and coincidences.”
Rev. Jason Poling, the rector at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Pasadena and the director of the Doctor of Ministry program at St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute in Baltimore said he tries “to avoid telling God what he can and can’t” get involved in.
“He’s God, and I’m not — but I believe that he is not limited, as we are, in his capacity to care about things,” Poling said. “If he wants to providentially guide the path of a bullet, he can. He could show up in [Biden’s] office this afternoon and tell him to drop out. But the question of how to ascribe the hand of God in any particular event is a lot more fraught.”
Scott Buresh is the Baltimore community minister for Coracle, a national Christian nonprofit dedicated to helping believers deepen their personal relationships with God. He was more than 3,000 miles away, leading a spiritual pilgrimage in Scotland, when news of the attempt on Trump’s life broke.
What immediately flashed through his mind, he said, was the Gospel story that describes the disciple Peter using his sword to strike off the ear of a priest’s servant who was taking part in the arrest of Jesus that would lead to his crucifixion.
An ear is so close to the head, Buresh said, that he always wondered how the disciple could have struck it as precisely as he did, and to see a parallel in 2024 was mind-boggling.
“It’s so hard to hit someone’s ear,” he said. “You’re so close to either totally missing them or killing them. What are the chances? Honestly, it’s amazing.”
Still, he’s not ready to conclude the Almighty authored the outcome. Experience has taught him that the best way to determine whether God has intervened is to observe whether it leads the people in question to “live their lives more consistently with the spirit of Jesus” — with more compassion, gentleness and kindness.
“I go back to the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus said ‘we will know by their fruits,'” he said. “I’m anxious to see whether it leads Trump to live a life more consistent with the spirit of Jesus — with his kindness, gentleness and compassion — or to validate things that would be less than consistent with that spirit. That’s something we’re only going to know over time.”
Belief in God’s providence, of course, has helped shape Americans’ sense of their own destinies since the days of the founders. Most of those men styled themselves as Christians — even Benjamin Franklin, who as a Deist saw reason as mankind’s most effective problem-solving tool, called for daily prayers at the Constitutional Convention. And a belief persists to this day that their work, and the nation it spawned, were divinely inspired.
That might or might not explain why some ardent Trump supporters have always seen him — to the amazement of detractors — as a man who, though flawed, was chosen by God to protect the divinely blessed United States from malevolent globalists plotting to take it down.
That view of Trump as an almost Old Testament-like leader may have hyper-charged their interpretation of such eerie images as the American flag that hung over the stage in Butler before the Republican came on. It became tangled in such a way that some said it looked like an angel.
A YouTube video showing the twisting flag has been viewed more than 8.3 million times, inspiring plenty of online commentary.
“The Holy Spirit was definitely there protecting him yesterday,” one poster, Flashygalflushing, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday.
“We are living in historic times! The fingerprints of the divine all over,” a poster calling himself Arthur MacWaters replied.
“Tell that to the father that died,” another, Claymore, wrote.
The Rev. Dr. Harold A. Carter Jr., the longtime senior pastor of New Shiloh Baptist Church in Baltimore, has little doubt that the Almighty does influence elections. If God “watches over the birds of the air and the flowers of the field,” as Jesus attests in the Gospel of Matthew, he reasons, he surely does the same with matters of great human consequence.
Prior to the 2020 election, in the midst of the pandemic, Carter invited more than 20 other African American preachers from across the country to record themselves “praying prayers that God would prevail” and posted the result online. Most were Democrats. When Biden won, he said, it felt like confirmation that the Creator is watching and taking action.
“We give God a win for that,” he said.
Carter does believe God spared Trump’s life last Saturday, and like Buresh he saw a message in the involvement of the ex-president’s ear, a part of the body he said Christians consider symbolic of our ability to listen to the divine. And he hopes it will catch the attention of a man he said can come across as brash and unfeeling, especially among members of the minority community.
He noted a change in Trump’s rhetoric between Saturday, when he famously stayed on his feet, held his fist in the air, and said the word “fight!” three times after being hit, and Sunday, when he saw on the news that Trump had torn up the speech he planned to give at the convention and written one that was to be more conciliatory and focused on uniting rather than dividing.
Indeed, on Thursday night, Trump emphasized that he was “running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.”
Carter supports Biden and hopes he stays in the race, but he said he’s worried that if the nation’s second Catholic President is waiting for a divine message, he might be expecting to experience it as an earth-shaking vision rather than, say, in the form of other people’s voices.
As far as Trump is concerned, whether he’s elected in November or not, Carter prays he’s a changed man.
“We all have to keep in mind that the man almost died,” he said. “That will cause anyone to do some soul-searching. If we start to to see more toned down, more thoughtful Donald Trump, maybe that’s God’s will in the end.”
