Trump's Plan To Conquer Heaven • TaxProf Blog

The Free Press, Trump’s Plan To Conquer Heaven:

[President Trump] called up Fox & Friends on Tuesday to announce a different motive behind his diplomacy, and that’s getting into heaven.

“If I can save 7,000 people a week from being killed. . . I want to try and get to heaven if possible,” Trump said. “I’m hearing that I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”

For a second there, Trump sounded like an old-school Catholic, which he very much is not, having been raised Presbyterian. And it’s the first time I can remember this president musing about the afterlife.

I respect that Trump never pretended to be an evangelical—despite their tremendous weight in GOP primaries—when he first ran for president. Who can forget when he said he’d never in his life asked God for forgiveness? He’s a sinner, and a somewhat proud one.

Trump’s religious foundation, such as it is, was largely forged under the guidance of the Protestant preacher turned self-help guru Norman Vincent Peale, best known for the book The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale even officiated Trump’s first wedding. But while Trump certainly took the confidence-building aspect of Peale’s thinking seriously—one of Peale’s more famous pearls of self-helpitude was “Make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it ten percent”—the president has never appeared partial to the whole Jesus thing.

I’m not naive enough to say that perhaps Trump is changing and growing before our eyes. As of now, as far as I’m concerned, he’s the same venal jerk he’s always been. Then again, perhaps this is a guy who, facing the end of his political career in just a few short years, is reckoning a bit with his mortality and deepening ever so slightly. And if he’s motivated to end wars by the prospect of seeing those pearly gates, on which he will presumably install a gold mailbox, it’s a good trade to me.

New York Times, ‘I Want to Try and Get to Heaven’: Trump Gets Reflective on ‘Fox & Friends’:

President Trump cast his effort to broker peace in Ukraine in existential terms.

President Trump dialed into “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday morning and revealed his newest and truest motivation for brokering an end to the war in Ukraine: He’s worried he might not get into heaven after he dies.

“I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he explained. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”

Holy mother of God! What a thing to say at 8 o’clock in the morning.

This would have been a highly unusual admission from any president, but it seemed especially out of character coming from this one. The man who is regarded as a messiah by many of his own supporters — a belief he has encouraged at every turn — says now that he knows he’s no saint.

This fear of perdition raised some questions. Chief among them: Who, exactly, has been informing the president that he is “not doing well” with regard to kingdom come? Did Michael the Archangel somehow get Mr. Trump’s cellphone number?

It is rare to hear Mr. Trump say something so soul-searchingly self-deprecating, which this surely was. He has talked often about his brush with death last summer and how he felt it changed him, but it is otherwise uncommon to hear him acknowledge his own mortality. …

“I know my mother’s in heaven,” he said at a Madison Square Garden rally in October. “I’m not 100 percent sure about my father, but it’s close.” …

At the White House briefing later on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, was asked if Mr. Trump was joking when he talked about going to heaven, or if “there was a spiritual motivation behind his peace deals.”

“I think the president was serious,” Ms. Leavitt said. “I think the president wants to get to heaven — as I hope we all do in this room as well.”