Opinion | Freedom for All? Trump Says Forget It

During a garish Rose Garden ceremony commemorating the National Day of Prayer in May, Donald Trump’s top faith adviser, the televangelist Paula White, prayed for God to give the president “divine dreams, visions.” A man in the audience approached the dais, where Trump was seated at a desk, and fell to his knees in a display of reverence and submission. Faith leaders, government officials, cabinet officials, members of Congress and even television personality Dr. Phil glorified Trump, prayed and sang “Amazing Grace.”

When he spoke, Trump repeated his lie about the 2020 election being stolen and dismissed the separation of church and state. “They say ‘separation between church and state.’ I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that,’” Trump told the audience of mostly handpicked right-wing Christian supplicants. “You guys are in the White House where you should be.” Separation of church and state, apparently, is just another of those pesky constitutional protections he believes God has granted him the right to trample, along with due process for immigrants and citizens alike.

Having tossed aside one foundational constitutional protection, at the same ceremony Trump doubled down on another. He signed an executive order creating a “Religious Liberty Commission,” the purpose of which is to validate and advance the persistently antidemocratic Christian nationalist conspiracy theory that equal rights for all (“woke DEI” in MAGA parlance) violate the religious freedom of conservative white Christians. “In recent years, some Federal, State and local policies have threatened America’s unique and beautiful tradition of religious liberty,” Trump’s executive order reads. “These policies attempt to infringe upon longstanding conscience protection” and, it argues, threaten the existence of religious schools and other institutions.

None of this is true, but a key MAGA article of faith is that contemporary pluralistic, democratic America, through its equal rights protections, is an anti-Christian, tyrannical state that deprives right-wing Christians of their God-given right to discriminate against others.

Their insistence that God intended America to be a “Christian” nation, not a “woke” one, is the core of Trump’s crackdown on free expression, academic freedom and equal protection.

Yet for all the MAGA complaints that no one respects their religion, the greatest acts of disrespect come from their supposed savior. Two days after declaring himself the foremost champion of religious freedom, Trump posted an AI-generated photo of himself in papal vestments on Truth Social. The image, which was amplified by the official White House X account, followed a round of “joking” by Trump that he would be a good successor to the late Pope Francis, whom MAGA Catholics, including Vice President JD Vance, had reviled as too liberal, particularly in his condemnations of Trump’s brutal, inhumane immigration crackdowns. Perhaps Trump, despite not being Catholic, harbored the unhinged thought that maybe the global Catholic Church, despite being far more ideologically heterogeneous than his American white evangelical base, would similarly embrace him as God’s anointed emissary. In the end, the cardinals elected an American pope who had once retweeted, “JD Vance is wrong” about Catholic doctrine.

If all of this seems too ridiculous for even the most absurdist Mel Brooks parody, it was par for the course in an America torn apart by Trump and his Christian supremacist lackeys. In Congress, Republicans sought to add an amendment to their Antisemitism Awareness Act that would ensure that Christians would still have a First Amendment right to say that the Jews killed Jesus. Apparently, they incorrectly believe (since they don’t understand the Constitution) that the First Amendment by itself isn’t sufficient to protect America’s Christians from being silenced by America’s woke police. They need super-protection lest they be muzzled from uttering one of history’s worst antisemitic slurs. (As a result of this and other objections, the Antisemitism Awareness Act is now stalled in the Senate.)

And lest anyone think Trump and his MAGA minions aren’t actually taking antisemitism seriously, he also installed Siggy Flicker, an influencer known for appearing on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

Whatever their source, Trump’s implementations of the dreams and visions Pastor White prayed for are convulsing humanity and tipping the world toward catastrophe. His supporters embrace them as miraculous. The rest of us must diligently contest the all-too-real nightmare he and his apologists have unleashed.

Sarah Posner is a journalist and the author of Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. 

Opening picture: National Day of Prayer, May 1, 2025. (Photo credit: The White House)