In Trump’s USA Bible, a reminder of his biggest moments with his ‘favorite book’
Trump poses with a bible outside St. John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. on June 1, 2020. Photo by Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
By PJ Grisar March 27, 2024
After lending his name to casinos, steaks, an airline and NFT trading cards, Donald Trump is at last entering the lucrative space of novelty scripture. In what seems to be his newest gambit to scrape together money for his mounting legal penalties, Trump is now hawking $60 Bibles with country artist Lee Greenwood.
Named the “God Bless The USA Bible,” after Greenwood’s song, Trump announced on Truth Social that the Bible is the King James version “and also includes our founding father documents — yes, the Constitution, which I’m fighting for every single day, very hard, to keep Americans protected.”
That the framers of the Constitution — many of them deists — enshrined a separation of Church and State didn’t appear to register. Trump asserts in the video that the country has gone “haywire” due to a lack of religion and he himself has many volumes of this, his “favorite book,” which in this edition is in a large print format and features a debossed American flag on the cover.
“We must make America pray again,” Trump said, in a rambling pitch that emphasized Christian values.
Those who’ve been following Trump closely know, of course, that he has a long history with the Good Book.
Throughout his 2015 campaign, Trump the candidate regularly mentioned that the Bible was his favorite book (with his own The Art of the Deal coming in second). At campaign stops he often carried a Bible his mother gave him when he was 10, using it as a prop.
Trump long demurred when prompted to offer a favorite selection, calling it a “very personal” matter. Asked to elaborate on why he loves the Bible so, he gave a characteristically precise answer.
Speaking to CBN news in September 2015, he said: “There’s so many things, you take, uh, whatever you wanna say. There’s so many things that you could learn from it. Um, Proverbs, the chapter ‘Never Bend to Envy.’ I’ve had that thing all of my life. Where you’re — people are bending to envy.”
Unfortunately, that Proverb doesn’t seem to exist. (The verse about an eye for an eye does, in Exodus, and he told a conservative radio host that while it’s “not a particularly nice thing,” it may be an apt approach for dealing with “people taking advantage of us.”)
Shortly before swearing his oath of office on the Bible his mom gave him and on one owned by Abraham Lincoln, Trump did ultimately cite an existing piece of Paul’s epistles. Speaking at Liberty University in January 2016, he vowed to protect Christianity and said “Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame.”
Maybe, and I’m not really counting balls and strikes when it comes to the New Testament, but many noted that Trump’s way of referring to scripture — “Two Corinthians” rather than “Second Corinthians” — was a touch unorthodox.
Ever a class act, Trump blamed the flub on someone else for writing out “the number 2 Corinthians.”
This, one familiar with the Bible might know, is how verse citations are typically written (though often with a Roman numeral). It’s possible Trump had a Ron Burgundy moment, but by faulting another — namely Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who gave him notes of what to say in the speech — Trump was essentially telling us that it wasn’t a verse he knew well at all.
To be fair, by 2019 Trump displayed some humility when it came to his fluency with sacred texts. At an event with religious leaders, on the occasion of an executive order to fight antisemitism on college campuses, Trump appeared to paraphrase the evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress’ praise of him as someone who “may not know the Bible quite as well as the rest of us,” or even very well at all, but who is nonetheless “a real leader.”
That humility with regard to gospel was evidently infrequent. Trump had signed enough Bibles in 2019 that people were polled about it. 65% of Christians in the U.S. disapproved.
But, before he had taken on the post of Bible salesman — a role almost comically steeped in American grit and crooked hucksterism — Trump’s most memorable appearance with a Bible was certainly his infamous photo op outside of St. John’s Church on June 1, 2020.
To make way for this picture, Trump’s attorney general William Barr ordered a dispersal of peaceful protesters with tear canisters and rubber bullets. Many believed — and it turned out to be false — that Trump was holding the Bible upside down. Twitter seized on a doctored photo of Hitler wielding a Bible to compare the two.
It wasn’t a fair comparison. As far as I know the main book Hitler liked to thump was Mein Kampf. That’s not to say there’s no literary connection between him and the 45th president. While he may not know the Bible, it was reported that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches as reading material by his bed; he’s since taken to, perhaps unwittingly, echoing the Führer’s rhetoric.
There is a quote from scripture that seems to fit the former commander in chief’s transformation into a self-appointed champion of faith slinging an overpriced sacred text. I suspect even Trump knows this one, from Two Samuel: “How the mighty have fallen.”
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