It’s 7.45am on Thursday morning and in the National Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill, Washington DC, yawning congressmen and women are taking their seats for the annual National Prayer Breakfast. The room is half empty. If it weren’t for the early start, the poor turnout would be surprising given the current Congress is much more religious than the general population. Most are Christian, with a disproportionate cohort of Catholics.
This is one of the few times each year the First Amendment is conveniently pushed aside and, for an hour, a vaulted hall on the Hill becomes a makeshift church. The event aspires to nothing more than allowing members of Congress to come together and pray. One of the organisers tells us that Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader who Trump has likened to a Palestinian, had a last-minute meeting with the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu so couldn’t make it.
When the president appeared at 8.15am, there was something blasphemous about his entrance. His face was more mahogany than the usual orange despite the snow falling outside. He looked like he’d had an early-morning spray tan before a routine Ozempic shot – he teetered along the stage on legs which have only got skinnier since the election – and his voice was hoarse, as if he’d been carousing along the bars of 14th Street the night before. His audience was enraptured.
“Our country is starting to do very well again,” Trump began. For some reason the crowd seemed to think Trump was summoning the audience into prayer and one congressman obligingly shouted back: “Amen!” The Republican senator Katie Britt, whose smile never left her face throughout Trump’s sermon, gazed at him with idolatrous admiration. And Trump delivered on the theme of unity and bipartisanship. “If we could ever come together it would be unbelievable,” he said, “it may not happen – but it should and maybe it will.”
He told a story about how he once admired his father’s Democratic friends in Congress dining with Republicans. But today, he said, it was tough with one side wanting an open border and the other wanting it closed. He could see that religion was a bipartisan salve. “We have to bring religion back. We have to bring it back much stronger.”
He went on to claim that being hit by a bullet in his ear had brought him closer to God – “something happened”, he said – or at least made him realise that the Lord had spared him for a purpose. Trump grew up a Presbyterian but hasn’t always been a consummate Christian. His multiple divorces and relaxed approach to abortion used to raise suspicions among Church leaders. Yet it was a testament to Trump’s apparent conviction in what he’s saying at any given moment that at one point, watching from a balcony in the hall, I bought into his religious bona fides, before remembering that this is a man who has changed his Church probably at least once to appeal to much-needed evangelical voters.
Trump has come to see the Almighty as the supreme marketing prop. Brand for brand, Trump Steaks, The Apprentice and high rises in Manhattan could not match the celestial as a source of political cachet. It felt like a hostile takeover of religion.
Which is fitting given that Trump’s creed seems pre-Christian. His philandering sex life and belief in the moral entitlement of powerful men to sexually dominate those they deem inferior is reminiscent of a Caesarian morality. Read Suetonius’s record of Julius Caesar’s affairs with the wives of his friends and allies and then recall Trump saying that Keir Starmer’s greatest asset is his wife; or the tales of Caligula’s incestuous relationships with his sisters and remember (if you permit yourself) that Trump once suggested he would date his daughter, Ivanka, if only they weren’t related.
But even this is unfair to the gens Julia. You have to go further back and concede that Trump embodies a pre-Socratic ethos. No wonder his online regiments follow the instruction of figures such as Bronze Age Pervert whose work combines a Nietzschean disdain for modernity with an affinity for a Heraclitean morality that sees conflict as necessary. During his Prayer Breakfast address, Trump even raised the curtain on his plans for a park full of statues of great Americans. It would be called the “National Garden of American Heroes” and the president teased his audience with the prospect of dedicating a statue to one of the few lucky congressmen in the room. They laughed excitedly.
Trump’s winding speeches belie the efficiency with which they are bookended by abrupt stage directions. After shaking hands with the congressional leadership on the front row, he scuttled off through the door he had come in. Senator Maggie Hassan mounted the stage and read Matthew 20.26: “Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant.” Blah, blah, blah. No one was listening. Trump had gone.
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