President Donald Trump‘s pursuit of the beatific vision continued on Thursday in an interview with radio host Todd Starnes.
Trump made headlines earlier this week after offering unprompted speculation about his final judgment, and the self-assessments seem to be ongoing.
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On Thursday, Starnes asked Trump whether it was important to him that he “stand up for people of faith.” The president responded that he supports them “because I know it’s true,” then offered an unsolicited reflection on the necessity for divine justice.
“People of faith, there’s a feeling they want to be good. They get punished if they’re not good. If you don’t think about that — if you’re not a believer and you believe you go nowhere — what’s the reason to be good?” Trump said. “There has to be some kind of a report card up there someplace. You know, like ‘Let’s go to heaven, let’s get into heaven.’ It’s sort of a beautiful thing.”
Trump added that religion used to be the “backbone of our country,” saying “it’s much less so now, but it’s getting much stronger under me.”
The president went on to accuse his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, of overseeing church raids during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and shuttering religious facilities.
Biden never ordered raids on churches, but COVID-19-era policies granted authorities a broad license to break up public gatherings, which resulted in arrests at churches in both red and blue states.
Trump then made a final observation about the value of all religions, though he clarified that he doesn’t necessarily think all faiths are equal.
“All religions, a lot of religions …,” he said before pausing, “… some I could question, I guess, to be honest with you, there’s a little rough philosophy there — but religion brings our country together.”
Trump’s comments, expressing conviction that an afterlife is “true” and belief in a cosmic “report card,” come after his admission on Tuesday that he wants “to get to heaven” but fears he may not be granted entrance.
“If I can save 7,000 people a week from being killed, I think that’s …,” Trump told Fox News’s Fox & Friends before trailing off. He continued, “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”
Trump was raised Presbyterian but confirmed in 2020 that he now identifies as a “nondenominational Christian.”
The president has long surrounded himself with faith leaders from evangelical Protestant churches and Charismatic Christian movements, but his comments on the afterlife do not seem to reflect either’s core theological belief in sola fide — the concept that salvation comes from faith alone without consideration of one’s earthly works.
Bishop Robert Barron, Catholic prelate of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester and a member of Trump’s Commission on Religious Liberty, told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that he was “struck by [the president’s] humility.”
BISHOP BARRON PRAISES TRUMP’S DESIRE TO ‘GET TO HEAVEN,’ SAYS HE WAS ‘STRUCK BY HIS HUMILITY’
Barron pointed to Trump’s brush with death last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, as a possible impetus for such a serious interrogation of his soul.
“I do think that the assassination attempt last summer affected a change in the president,” Barron said. “It convinced him that he was spared for a purpose, and therefore it opened him to accepting the ways of God’s providence. It also clarified his moral aim and brought into sharper relief the misdeeds of his past.”