How politicians use the Bible

President Trump’s brief announcement in June that the United States had bombed Iran included what might be his most confused and confusing invocation of God to date: “I just want to thank everybody. And in particular, God. I just want to say, We love you, God.”

One of the defining features of the Trump decade is the strange combination of conservative Christians’ fervent loyalty to the president and Trump’s obvious ignorance of Christianity. Playing to his base, Trump pretends to be an ardent follower of a faith he couldn’t care less about, resulting in farcical statements like “We love you, God” or “Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ball game.”

It’s not just Trump. Flat-footed and half-conceived references to God or Jesus or the Bible are staples of American politics. In the infamous Signalgate chat leaks, high-ranking government officials like Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and others invoked God to celebrate the US military’s flattening of an entire apartment building in Yemen in order to kill a single target: “Godspeed to our warriors,” “I will say a prayer for victory,” “God bless,” prayer emoji bicep emoji American flag emoji. In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz justified his uncritical support of the Israeli government by saying he was “taught from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed.” Pressed by Carlson to say where in the Bible that line came from and what it meant in context, Cruz spluttered and changed the subject.