“God protected President Trump yesterday,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has been a leading advocate of Christian nationalist ideologyHe stated in a mail in X.
Trump himself echoed these claims in a post on Truth Social: “It was only God who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” the former president said.
But in the days after the shooting, a much broader group of Trump supporters began to invoke the idea that Trump had been protected by God to liberate Christian America.
“If it isn’t clear enough who God wants to win,” said YouTuber and boxer Jake Paul, who recently invited Trump to one of his fights, aware in X. “When you try to kill God’s angels and the saviors of the world, you only make them bigger.”
On Sunday night, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Trump supporters celebrated a prayer vigil outside the event venue. In interviews with 18 RNC delegates on Monday, Reuters discovered that all but two believed that God had intervened in Trump’s survival.
Many people, including Trump’s own son Eric Trumphis Former advisor Roger Stoneand countless conspiracy tales about X, labeled the slight turn of the head that caused the bullet to graze Trump’s ear instead of killing him 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 co-chair of the RNC, was among those people. exchange Those images. Others reclaimed that an American flag waving in the breeze above the stage where Trump spoke resembled the shape an angel had taken.
Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, posted on X that he believed God had intervened to protect Trump and the future of America.
“Just think for a moment that Donald Trump and the fate of the entire country could have been saved today by a gust of wind pushing that bullet slightly,” Kirk said. wrote In X. “In Scripture, the Holy Spirit is often associated with a gust of wind. The hand of God is upon Donald Trump.”
In addition to claims of divine intervention, many Trump supporters sought meaning in the mundane details of the shooting.
“The bullets were fired at 6:11 p.m.,” said far-right troll and Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec wrote on X, adding: “Ephesians 6:11.” which says “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”
While not specifically Christian nationalist, the broader idea that God had intervened in events was also promoted by spiritual influencers on X, Instagram and Telegram, highlighting prophetic claims made months ago that seemed to accurately predict what happened on Saturday.
Earlier this month, for example, a self-proclaimed visionary, Jelaila Starr, predicted on a YouTube show that there would be a failed assassination attempt on Trump in July or August. “She said it would be a repeat of galactic history when humanity lived through its second great experiment in the Pleiades constellation,” said the show’s host, Michael Salla. wrote this week.
Separately, several pro-Trump accounts also pointed to an April video in which 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 notably absent from all these claims that God was protecting Trump was any reference to Corey Comparatorthe former fire chief who was killed by a bullet intended for Trump as he used 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 no one else.
“The danger of this 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 fit preconceived beliefs,” Jones said. “It is ultimately a crude and arrogant declaration that God is on our side, that God protects our candidates and our interests, but not everyone else’s.”