Did God save Donald Trump’s life from the assassin’s bullets because he wants him to be the next president of the United States? Donald Trump thinks so.
Speaking to Dr. Phil on Tuesday, Trump argued that he should have died on that stage in Butler, Pa., the odds of his surviving being “20 million to one.” If he hadn’t turned his head at just the exact amount he did, if several other unlikely things hadn’t happened, the shooter would have got him. His gun-owning sons explained to him that “It’s a guaranteed shot for a bad shooter … like sinking a one-foot putt.”
The only explanation he can imagine for all this luck is that God protected him to make sure he returns to the White House. He took the wrong lesson from his near death experience.
“Well, the only thing I can think is that God loves our country and he thinks we’re going to bring our country back,” Trump explained. “He wants to bring it back, it’s so bad right now what’s happening, when you look at crime, the horrible things that are happening inside our country.” Trump said he could solve the problems quickly.
“It has to be God,” he continued. “I mean, how can you say it’s luck when it’s, you know, (spacing out and emphasizing the words) 20 million to one?”
Trump isn’t a Christian in any useful sense. I don’t expect him to understand the very tangly theological questions of why God does what he does in the world.
I do expect him to know enough about God — if he’s going to claim his favor he should know something about him — to know that he has no good idea why God does what he does. The candidate ought to know that the great and incredible power up there he invokes is way, way too big for a mere mortal to know why He (or it) has done what He’s done, or seems to have done. Trump should know how presumptuous it is to claim God as a campaign supporter.
There are lots of possible reasons God might have saved Trump’s life — if He did, and the religious believer is not bound to believe that even very high odds show divine intent — other than wanting him to be president.
What if God did save Trump’s life, but saved him because He wants the Democrats to win, knowing that a replacement candidate might win? Maybe He wants the Trump-led Republicans to get beaten so badly they’ll stop assuming He’s on their side or see that they could be a better party than they are.
Maybe He sees that it’s so bad right now what’s happening that America needs the Democrats’ policies, not the Republicans’. (It’s at least arguable — I would argue it — that on most matters the Democratic positions come closer to the body of Catholic social teaching than do the Republican positions.)
Perhaps God doesn’t care much about which candidate wins the election. He certainly lets people make their choices, even when they make very bad choices. That leads to a more interesting possibility, sadly one the candidate didn’t think of.
Trump, to his credit, doesn’t completely believe he knows what God is doing. “I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know. In thinking about it, it’s beyond any of us, I guess, to know that.” For his sake, and the country’s, I hope he thinks more deeply about this and gives up any idea that God wants him elected.
David Mills is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
