Rocío Cleveland was at a wedding on Saturday when she heard the news that something had happened to Donald Trump. He fell, holding his ear, while giving remarks at a rally and it was still unclear whether he was injured or even dead.
“It took a while for that to sink in,” said Cleveland, a conservative activist from Illinois who attended the Republican National Convention this week. “I was speechless, I cried, I cried.”
Trump was taken down by Secret Service agents after a gunman, perched on a nearby rooftop, opened fire on the crowd at a Trump rally. When the former US president stood up, shaking his fist, blood running down his face – apparently just grazed by the would-be assassin’s bullet – the moment, for Cleveland, was one of euphoria.
“I think this tragic event that happened to President Trump will restore faith in our country, as horrible as it may seem,” Cleveland said. “The world saw a miracle before its eyes.”
Cleveland’s perspective – that Trump’s survival was more than just luck – is widely shared by Christian believers in the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, who saw the hand of God in Trump’s recent escape from severe damage to hands of an armed man. 20 year old shooter for no easily discernible motive.
It also reinforces Trump’s support among a key part of the Republican base – conservative evangelicals – who he and his team have sought to attract to the use of Christian imagery throughout their 2024 campaign.
Religious sentiment that Trump was saved in an act of divine intervention quickly took hold in the Republican Party after the shooting, with grassroots activists, Internet personalities and powerful Republican lawmakers offering religious explanations for the near miss.
“I have no doubt that God has lowered a shield of protection over Donald Trump,” Ben Carson, Trump’s former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told the crowd Tuesday night.
Carson said he “watched in horror” as Trump was shot.
“And my thoughts immediately turned to the book of Isaiah,” Carson said. “It says that no weapon formed against you will prosper.”
Others have also suggested divine intervention. A viral image that circulated in X in the days following the shooting showed how close the bullet came to hitting Trump in the brain rather than his ear.
“God intervened,” said the caption of the photo. The image was viewed almost 800,000 times.
Trump has not always been a favorite of the Christian right. A thrice-married man who referred to the Eucharist as a “small cookie”who would have been unable to name a single verse from the Bible and says he never asked God for forgiveness, he seemed like an unlikely hero when he first ran for president.
But Trump’s selection of the godly Mike Pence as his running mate allayed concerns in 2016, and his appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court paved the way for the overturn of Roe v Wade – a huge victory for conservative Christians. and which appears to have sealed the bond between them and Trump.
While Trump’s religious supporters on the grassroots latched onto a biblical interpretation of the shooting, influential figures on the Christian right amplified it.
In a podcast episode titled Prophecy or Coincidence, Lance Wallnau, an influential pastor and self-described prophet, said prayers for Trump “worked” to save the former president and speculated that the shooter was motivated by the left to commit a crime. . act of spiritual warfare.
In the episode, Wallnau referred to an apparent authority on the matter: Trump, who after the shooting, said in Social Truth that it was “only God who prevented the unthinkable from happening”.
“WE WILL NOT, but instead we will remain resilient in our faith and defiant in the face of evil,” Trump wrote.
Repeatedly at the Republican National Convention, prominent attendees and speakers expressed the sentiment.
“Let me start by thanking God almighty for protecting President Trump and for turning his head on Saturday when the shot was fired,” Texas senator Ted Cruz said in his speech.
“Together we lift up all our leaders in prayer for protection.”
Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman turned election conspiracy theorist and Trump ally, said during a podcast interview held outside the convention center on Monday that an image of Trump on the ground, alive after the shooting, inspired him a feeling of religious admiration.
“It’s like you can feel the presence of God speaking to us,” Lindell said, his voice wavering. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”
Others invoked darker forces. In his speech, Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina, claimed that “the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle,” while Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial congresswoman from Florida, he said “evil has come to the man we admire and love so much.”
For Marlene Stuck, who traveled with congregants from her church in Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Milwaukee for the RNC, the shooting was proof of a fundamental spiritual truth.
“The word of God works,” Stuck said. “It saved his life.”
