The Yomiuri Shimbun; John Bazemore/AP (2)
In the hours after the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump Saturday evening at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, X became an even more chaotic space than usual, incandescent with posts from Americans of all political persuasions trying to make sense of what happened—and what it portends for the upcoming presidential election. I was watching one group in particular: the ascendant Christian nationalists who have, in the last 48 hours, become even more convinced that the event proves that Trump has been anointed by God. But their observations were wide-ranging, and here are a few of the recurring themes I’ve noticed.
Most striking was the preponderance of posts claiming that the fact that the bullet only grazed the former president’s ear was evidence of divine intervention. In a tweet to his 2.2 million followers, for example, former Trump Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson wrote, “I firmly believe with all my heart that God was watching over President Trump. As I said back in 2016 and again recently, I think President Trump is called for this moment.”
Moving from the idea of divine intervention to Trump’s actual divinity, many of the tweets and memes likened him to Jesus. I noticed several comparing him to a lion, the Christ figure in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.
Some prominent Christian nationalists have claimed that the assassination attempt was unsurprising, given that it had been predicted by several self-appointed prophets. Sean Feucht, a pastor who has organized a series of prayer rallies on the steps of statehouses called “Let Us Worship” told his 125,000 followers on X that the assassination attempt had been foretold by a YouTuber who calls himself the Prophet Brandon in March. MorningStar Ministries, a church closely associated with the charismatic New Apostolic Reformation movement, also claimed that Chris Reed, another self-proclaimed prophet, had predicted the shooting.
While some of the most prolific posters don’t have particularly large followings on X, they are connected to powerful people and institutions. One example is evangelical pundit William Wolfe. A former Trump appointee and former staffer at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, Wolfe has been opining to his just over 40,000 followers on X about the imperative for Christians to fight back. “The Left is absolutely committed to using political violence to secure their desired outcomes,” he posted after the shooting. “Time to wake up, you evanjellyfish, and know what time it is.”
Wolfe also went hard at the media:
Auron MacIntyre hosts a show on the conservative Christian Blaze media network and spoke last week in Washington, DC, at the National Conservatism Convention. Fellow speakers included Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Utah Sen. Mike Lee, and vice-presidential hopeful Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). “The left is about to pretend that they oppose political violence after spending years encouraging it,” MacIntyre posted. “There should be a mass arrest of antifa BLM related criminals. They should get decades in prison.”
Expanding their aperture to those charged with protecting presidents—and some of the concerns about security lapses at the Trump rally—other Christian influencers have tweeted about the impropriety of women working in the Secret Service. “It is perverse and scandalous that we permit women in the Secret Service,” conservative Catholic commentator Michael Knowles posted to his 1.1 million followers. An anonymous Christian account with 50,000 followers posted, “Female secret servicewoman are a disgrace to our nation and evidence of God’s judgment on our people.”
Not to be outdone, Andrew Torba, the Christian nationalist CEO of the social media platform Gab, added some antisemitic context to this theme:
Yesterday, Politico reported that pastors across the country delivered sermons about God’s protection of Trump, noting that several of them emphasized tolerance. “We need to recognize and respect the fact that other people around us—that may have views different than we might have—are not wrong, but probably listening to God just as well as you are,” said a pastor named Doug Andersen at the Church on the Way in Los Angeles. That open-minded message stands in stark contrast to some dark corners of X, where Christian posters urged followers to consider their political opponents to be depraved enemies. One example is a recording of a Sunday sermon from a reformed Baptist church Midlothian, Virginia, that has been making the rounds on X. “I’m not praying for unity,” the pastor, Steve Gentry, told his congregation. “There are certain people in our nation we simply cannot unite with.”
