Trump Is Worrying About the Afterlife. Thank Heaven.
“I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well.”
DONALD TRUMP HAS BEEN TALKING A LOT about heaven lately. He says he’s afraid that he might not get first-class seating in the afterlife. Maybe he doesn’t mean it, or maybe in his waning years he’s contemplating what might come next. Either way, let’s encourage it, because nothing in this world—voters, Congress, the Supreme Court—has managed to restrain his worst impulses. Perhaps fear of the world to come can do the trick.
When Trump reads from a script, his references to heaven are mostly about dead people he’s supposed to be praising. “Today, Charlie Kirk rests in glory in heaven for all eternity,” the president said in a bored tone at Kirk’s memorial service three weeks ago. “He has gone from speaking on campuses in Wisconsin to kneeling at the throne of God.”
But when Trump extemporizes, the heaven talk is largely about himself. He envisions his parents in the afterlife—speculating that they “made heaven,” as though it’s an elite college or a country club—but the point of the story is always that “they’re looking down on me.”
Trump is a narcissist. He’s interested in God only as an endorser, benefactor, or tool in his own career. He suggests that God helped him win the presidential elections in 2016 and 2024. He says if God (instead of those cheating Democrats) were to count the ballots, Trump would win California, too.
As to the 2020 election, which Trump still insists was stolen, he says that, too, was part of God’s plan. Speaking last month to the White House Religious Liberty Commission, he gloated, “You had some very bad people who rigged an election, and look what happened: I end up getting the Olympics, the World Cup,” and the 250th anniversary of the United States. “It’s amazing the way God works, isn’t it? It’s amazing.”
Last year on Fox & Friends, Trump was asked to respond to a viewer’s question: “What’s your relationship with God like? And how do you pray?” He seemed unable to comprehend the phrase “relationship with God.” The first words out of his mouth were: “Okay, so I think it’s good. I do very well with the evangelicals.” He bragged about all the people who prayed for him. He said nothing about praying for anyone or anything else.
To Trump, everything is about the life of Donald Trump. But there’s a catch in that worldview, and it’s making him anxious: The life of Donald Trump will end.
A YEAR AGO, podcaster Lex Fridman asked Trump, “How often do you think about your death? Are you afraid of it?” Trump didn’t answer directly, but he spoke about the advantages of believing in an afterlife. “If you’re religious, you have, I think, a better feeling toward it,” he said. “You’re supposed to go to heaven, ideally not hell—you’re supposed to go to heaven if you’re good.”
Without that belief, Trump couldn’t imagine why anyone would behave morally. “If you don’t have heaven, you almost say, ‘What’s the reason? Why do I have to be good?’” he wondered during the interview on Fox & Friends.
That’s how Trump translates altruism—a baffling, alien concept he associates with “suckers” and “losers”—into egoism, which he understands well. The reason to help others, he calculates, is that you’ll get paid off in the afterlife. In a radio interview with Todd Starnes two months ago, he imagined God keeping a “report card,” like a scorecard for a round of golf:
People of faith, there’s a feeling, they want to be good. You know, they get punished if they’re not good, right? 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, really? 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.”
Trump never sounds like he really believes in the afterlife. But the possibility of it—and the knowledge that at 79, he’s running out of other options—clearly weighs on him. Two days before the Starnes interview, he told Fox & Friends that ending the war in Ukraine and saving “7,000 people a week” might boost his grades with the Almighty. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well,” he mused. “But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”
On Monday, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked Trump whether the peace deal in Gaza might ease him through the pearly gates. The president sounded pessimistic. “I don’t think there’s anything going to get me in heaven,” he replied. “I think I’m not maybe heaven-bound. . . . I’m not sure I’m going to be able to make heaven. But I’ve made life a lot better for a lot of people.”
That comment sparked a rebuttal from Eric Trump. “He is heaven-bound,” Eric assured podcaster Benny Johnson on Tuesday, referring to his father:
I can say that as a son, because I’ve seen the hand of God on him for a very long time. . . . He is heaven-bound. And I can tell you maybe the one thing he does that might have, you know, influenced heaven is . . . he stopped the death and destruction around the world. I’ve personally witnessed him stop wars. . . . And that in itself will get my father into heaven.
Eric depicted his father as God’s favorite and savior. “If he wasn’t heaven-bound, if he wasn’t meant for this purpose, he wouldn’t have beaten Hillary,” said Eric, taking the opportunity to plug his book and bash DEI and Colin Kaepernick (as if it were still 2016). “We’re saving Christianity. We’re saving God.”
The whole rant was degrading. To genuine believers, it was blasphemous; to atheists, it was classic Bible-thumping bigotry.
But if you’re in either camp, I implore you: Don’t mess with a good thing. Trump may not care about human rights, the Constitution, or the rule of law. He may be incapable of imagining a deity more important than himself. But he does care about external validation: ratings, crowd size, and the Nobel Peace Prize. And increasingly, it sounds like the big prize he wants is heaven.
If the prospect of that reward can motivate him to do his best, or at least limit his worst, let’s go with it. Heaven help us.
You'll know he's serious when he starts speculating on what the fee might be.
I encourage Trump to find the final answers he seeks, and quickly, too.