President Donald Trump publicly vows support for his Christian conservative supporters, promising he will protect them, and even claims the Bible is his favorite book, but behind their backs, in secret, he mocks them and ridicules their sacred rites.
The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins reveals “in private, many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base.”
Trump’s contempt for people of faith is not reserved for Christians.
The President’s “public appeals to Jewish voters have been similarly discordant with his private comments. Last week, The Washington Post reported that after calls with Jewish lawmakers, the president has said that Jews ‘are only in it for themselves.’ And while he is quick to tout his daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism when he’s speaking to Jewish audiences, he is sometimes less effusive in private. Cohen told me that once, years ago, he was with Trump when his wife, Melania, informed him that their son was at a playdate with a Jewish girl from his school. ‘Great,’ Trump said to Cohen, who is Jewish. ‘I’m going to lose another one of my kids to your people.'”
And while Trump derides people of faith, he takes great interest in the their religious leaders’s financial works, as his former attorney, Michael Cohen revealed.
“In Cohen’s recent memoir, Disloyal, he recounts Trump returning from his 2011 meeting with the pastors who laid hands on him and sneering, ‘Can you believe that bullshit?’ But if Trump found their rituals ridiculous, he followed their moneymaking ventures closely. ‘He was completely familiar with the business dealings of the leadership in many prosperity-gospel churches,’ the adviser told me.”
Coppins also points to televangelist and prosperity gospel preacher Creflo Dollar’s attempt to buy a $60 million private jet.
“Trump seemed delighted by the ‘scam,’ Cohen recalled to me,” Coppins reports, “and eager to highlight that the pastor was ‘full of shit.'”
“They’re all hustlers,” Trump told Cohen.
The President’s niece sums up Trump’s anti-Christian contempt well.
“Whenever I see a picture of him standing in a group of pastors, all of their hands on him, I see a thought bubble [with] the words ‘What suckers,’” Mary Trump, the president’s niece, told me.