Bulwark Takes - Trump Gives Rambling, Combative Speech at National Prayer Breakfast

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger react to Trump's latest craziness at the National Prayer Breakfast and his interview with NBC's Tom Llamas.

All right. We're live, buddy. Just another, is it Thursday? It's Thursday. I'm Sam Stein managing editor at the board here with Andrew Eger, author of Morning Shots. As he was getting out his newsletter this morning, Donald Trump, the president, was speaking at the national prayer breakfast. It was Trumpian. A lot of weird asides that had nothing to do with faith and a lot of efforts to basically claim that the Christian faith is aligned with MAGA and nothing else. Andrew, before I get into some of my favorite bits of that, and we're also going to touch on the NBC news that Trump gave last night, listen, I'm not going to break news here, but I'm Jewish.

You're not. Talk to me a little bit about the sort of weird relationship that I perceive between people of Christian faith and this president, who seems on the surface to not embody some of their ideals. Yeah, yeah. So there's a couple things you could talk about. You could talk about sort of like the tortured relationship between Donald Trump and sort of Christianity writ large or American Christianity. But the thing that is on display at an event like the National Prayer Breakfast is a subset of that, right? It's not only the subset of Donald Trump and his reliable base in sort of white Protestant evangelicalism out in sort of the heartland of America. But it's even more specific than that. It's Donald Trump and his kind of like, faith coalition of leaders, televangelists, like Paula White, you know, focus on the family, you know, honcho type people who have become like a really reliable part of his political infrastructure as well. So it's like, you know, its members of Congress are there. It's people who

are in his White House faith office. And so it's, it is, it is one of the like little subsets of people with whom Trump is the most personally and politically comfortable because they are super ultra reliable allies. They are part of the coalition that helped him ever take power at all. And more and more recently, it's become clear that on a kind of personal psychological level, Donald Trump thinks he gets to go to heaven in large part because he has done a lot of good things for these people in particular. That's kind of like his own personal spirituality. We can talk a little bit about how that was on display today if we want to. But because of all of this, Trump is 100% in his element. He was as comfortable up there today as I have seen him making a speech in the last year or two,

certainly. I mean, just much more unguarded, much more just sort of riffing and talking. It's also very different than this sort of thing was in his first term. But before Donald Trump sort of viewed Christianity and viewed faith in general as this sort of alien thing, viewed religion as this sort of alien thing. He kind of knew that he was coming into a world with which he was not very familiar. And what's been strange to see is that even though he has obviously very little more grasp of what, you know, we would call Orthodox historical Christianity than he ever has. Nobody has been like, you know, doing catechism with him at any point in time.

He was, he is not what he. Yeah, I mean, when he talks about it, he is not displaying any more awareness of what it would mean to be a Christian than he ever has. But he plainly seems to think he, he's comfortable now. He knows what's going on. He has figured out what it is like. to be around these people. And he thinks like he kind of gets it now. It's a very strange sort of like dichotomy here. And what he basically thinks is that like what it is to be a public Christian is to just say the word religion a lot. Talk about how much Democrats hate religion. Talk about

how much he's bringing it back. Bible sales are way up. We're bombing people who bomb Christians all around the world. It's this very, I mean, he has really forged a new kind of Christian political MAGA identity. Well, it's a transactional relationship, right? Yeah. And it's different than the one that was in the first. It's a very transactional relationship where he goes, I did this for you, therefore you should support me. There's also, I would argue, way more openly presenting his presidency and he himself as almost providential, right? Like I think the other day he was talking about, well, I think God's probably thinking I'm doing a good job, which is blasphemous, frankly, to say. But that stuff Trump gets away with. But that's one side of the equation, the other side of the equation, which I want you to just sort of give me your interest.

insights on is why white evangelicals predominantly, but Protestants too, are attracted to this man. So he's not followed through on many of their policy preferences. He was very muddied about abortion and abortion bans in the states during the presidential campaign, and they seemed to give him a pass. There was plenty of more overtly religious candidates in the field at the time, not least of them being Mike Pence, his ex-vice president who got no traction with this community whatsoever. And then my ultimate favorite set, because I don't want to present this as sort of a recent phenomenon, this is like 10-year or 8-year phenomenon.

One of my favorite polling stats ever was there was a public opinion poll on white evangelical voters and whether or not they supported Donald Trump. He's always had really great support in that community. But early in his first term, Stormy Daniels went on 60 minutes and gave her, first comments, really, about her relationship with Trump. And this was shortly after the check was produced from Michael Cohen to Stormy Daniels, basically confirming that there had been some sort of payoff. So you would think that, like, you know, evidence showing that you had had an affair with the porn actress, porn star, and then paid for her silence, might have rubbed some white evangelicals the wrong way.

But his support in these polls actually went up among white evangelicals after those revelations. And that's always been a little bit confounding for me. I mean, I can come up with theories explaining it. But what is your read of it? Why do they flock to him? So there's two things. There's the personal level and then there's the policy level, right? I think the personal accommodation that a lot of white evangelicals have made all along

is the same as it's been since very early. Like very early on, they were sort of presented with this devil's bargain, right? But this idea, well, maybe this guy is not a, you know, an upstanding man of character in the way that I have always valued in my leaders. But maybe, and this was sort of an argument they were presented with, that they hadn't really thought about it in these terms before. Maybe all of these kind of like fine, moral, upstanding guys that we keep nominating are just getting their clocks clean because they're too nice. They're not ready to get down and dirty and fight and do, you know, like do the things that we might be uncomfortable doing in order to like achieve the policy aims that that we want. And in that way, you know, the personal vice gets.

laundered through as a political virtue. That's the beginning of it. Back in the first term, the political virtues were pretty straightforward because Donald Trump, like I said, he did not really understand these people, but he knew that he needed them. And he came in saying, I'm just going to graft you onto my coalition. It's somewhat like the Maha thing now where he's like, I'm going to outsource basically my religious social policy to what you guys already want in a lot of ways. He was not super anti-gay.

So that was one big difference. But as far as abortion, as far as federal judges, as far as religious liberty, all of these sorts of things in his first term, he was very willing to, like, do that as the price of doing business for these people's loyalty. So that was how it first got laundered. The difference now, and I think this is very striking, he has gradually realized that as they have accommodated themselves to him,

there has been less and less of, like, a moral obstacle to get over as far as these people's support for Donald Trump. And a big part of that is because their political identity is as strong to them or stronger than any kind of, like, faith identity that they might have. And a lot of them might not be, they identify as white evangelicals, but they might not be part of an actual church community. They might not, you know, be, be, belong to a denomination with, with like, you know, obvious faith leaders. So like the people that they see in public life, who they like look up to for, for guidance and stuff, are increasingly

Republican political figures, or at least conservative political figures. Well, I would argue. Go ahead. Sorry, finish up and then I'll go ahead. Yeah. And, and so over time, it kind of became clear that like the moral objection to him personally had vanished more and more so they were they were there was a frictionless affection for Donald Trump from all these people and so in the second term what we have seen is not only does he no longer like have to feel like he has to do the same kind of like policy soaps to you know the the faith and family coalition or whatever but in fact he he believes and I think he rightly believes that he now has basically a lot of leeway to dictate to the these people what it means to be on the religious right now. So like you get him up there today. I mean,

he just talks about religion a lot. He talks about like, like I said, bombing people who who persecute Christians in other countries. He talks about how, how, you know, every Democrat wants you to stop saying Christmas, once you to stop saying religion, wants you to stop saying God. And he wouldn't, you know, ever do those sorts of things to you. And because the primary connection between him and these people is no longer, we are faithful Christians and we think you're going to be good for the faithful Christians, but we are Trump people and we are going along with the Trump people. And one of the things about being a Trump person is that we get to sort of feel good about these sort of oblique pro-religion stances.

That's a very different thing now than it was, you know, in Trump 1.0, a very real change in what it means to be a white evangelical Republican today. All right. All right. I would argue a couple things and then we'll get to the clips. One is they also view Democrats as hedonistic, right? They just think they're like the devil. And so that obviously pushes them to Trump.

But too is just echoing what you say. These are political actors. And they actually have political preferences that probably supersede religious beliefs in a lot of venues. The biggest friction point right now is not about abortion. It's about immigration. And the church, the Catholic Church, and the Pope specifically, has been very forthright saying, what's happening with ICE, what's happening with the treatment of immigrants at large is wrong. and it goes against scripture.

Trump this morning made the proactive choice to have an opening speaker, President Buckele, of El Salvador. And that was a choice, right? Like, here's a man whose country runs Sikot, which is a torture facility for immigrant detention, to which we have unlawfully sent migrants and immigrants. It's well documented. There's now an infamous 60 Minutes. on it. You probably've heard of it. It might have been held up for a little bit. But Buceli was out

there as the opening speaker, which was galling to me, absolutely galling. And it gets to your point that he feels like he can get away basically with more or less anything with these people. It's a long clip. So I want people to buckle. And it's about a minute and 15 seconds. But here is Trump talking about Buckele, who's in the audience at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning. We're also delighted to welcome visiting leaders and dignitaries for more than 110 countries. They're here, including one of my favorite people, President Buceli of El Salvador. He has been so incredible. He has been such a great ally of this country.

Thank you very much. Such a great ally. Some of you've seen, he operates rather large prisons like prisons that's so long. You can't see from one side to the other unless you have perfect 20-20 eyesight with binoculars. That's how long and big. And they do a job. They do a very humane job, but they're very strong prisons. And we present a lot of the people that we capture, the murderers, the drug dealers, the people that came into our country illegally and have already committed massive crimes. We had 11,888 murderers, and many of them were in your

prisons right now right and he does a fantastic job I mean it sounds like a different kind of you know this is a religious breakfast you're going to walk away say he's the meanest son of a gun I've ever seen but I'm not I just want to keep our country safe it's very simple we have to keep our country safe I just can't I can't square this I struggle to square it I think it's really important to understand this is not like incidental to his appeal to the Christian base like the the the white evangelical Christian base right it is it is very much that he is offering to do these things on their behalf and like keep this weird sort of like moral barrier between them. I mean, like this he's, let me go to another thing that he said at one point where where he was talking about bombing Christian, bombing, you know, people who were, he says, prosecuting Christians in Nigeria. He said, they were they were killing Christians. You can't do that. When Christians come under attack, they know they're going to be attacked violently and viciously by President Trump. I know it's not a nice thing to say. I know it's not a nice thing to say. say, but that's the way it is. It's not just, we're going to protect Christians abroad. It's,

if anyone attacks Christians abroad, we are going to come after them violently and viciously. And like, there's always this dance, right? It's always like, now look, I know you people aren't really into that, but somebody's got to do it, right? And that's kind of the, that is the secret sauce that binds them together, is they're like, well, maybe we wouldn't do it, but we sure will support you doing it, Donald Trump, because somebody's got to. Yeah, it's like he's a crude instrument for them or a vice that they know they shouldn't have, but they indulge in this moment. And you see that sort of thing in a lot of different, not to cut you off, sorry, but just on the vice thing. Like, it's the same with sort of like the theatrical swearing when he gets up there and

talk. I mean, he doesn't, he doesn't stop cursing just because he's at a national prayer breakfast because he understands that's like not, that's not a thing that puts more distance between them. That's him sort of carving out his brand as the guy who does the things that you wouldn't necessarily do. You know, you know what I mean? Yeah. I think it's important for people to understand what this breakfast used to be. Like this used to be a breakfast that was built around faith. And there was sort of, I don't know if this was the same exact breakfast, but there was a kind of an infamous breakfast. It might have been the congressional one. It might have been a slightly different one, but where Ben Carson spoke during the Obama presidency. And it got a lot of, like,

headlines because he was critical of Obama. And like that was like just unheard of at the time that you would use this breakfast that was ostensibly above politics to do something that was overtly political. And it's been transformed into this

it's not quite a campaign rally because he's not going totally there. But it certainly is a overtly political rally. And we'll play this clip he had where he talks about Democrats. I have no expectations for Trump to rise above this. I'm not surprised that he would do this.

But it is still a little bit jarring to see people who are gathering under the auspices of faith to be told this about one half of the country. Democrats are against. I don't know how a person of faith can vote for a Democrat. I really don't. And I know we have some here today. And I don't know why they're here because they certainly don't give them. their vote.

It's just shocking to me. He says the same thing often about Jews, specifically. I don't know how a Jewish person can vote for Democrats. I don't know about you. I find it like kind of offensive, right? Like who is he to dictate what a person of faith should or should not believe? Why is he the arbiter of what faith should or should not believe? But that's Trump.

He just doesn't care about offending. I guess that's an appeal for some folks. Yeah, yeah, and not only that. I mean, a couple different points in this same speech, he would make offhand comments like, ah, this will probably be the last time we have any Democrats at this prayer breakfast, right? And if you conceive of yourself, if you're a person in this room who's like a professional evangelical and you conceive of yourself as like a Republican operative first and foremost, maybe you don't care. Maybe you think that that's like a fun little dig or whatever. But if you are, and if you're not that, if you're a faith leader first and foremost, a person who maybe participates in politics, maybe has some sort of affinity for the Republican side of things because, I don't know, they have been more vocal about religious liberty in recent years, like, just to pick one example. There are a lot of people out there like that. This sort of thing should horrify you.

It should not, it should actually keep you up at night that there is a political project to launder faith writ large, religion writ large, into a subsidiary element of the Republican Party. not just because the guy who's up there plainly has no idea what you believe or why you believe it and is not responsive or receptive to your actual policy ideas at all. He thinks that you should just be grateful to him for like patting you on the head and saying the word religion out loud a lot. But also because why would you want him to like be actively working to negatively polarize Democrats who one day will retake power against the very concept of faith and religion in general? you want this to be a thing, a concept that is respected in a bipartisan way in D.C. So this, I don't know, it's so the reason that they eat it up is because that's not their project. The people in this room, they are not religious figures first and foremost.

They are political operatives first and foremost. I'm trying to think of an institution, I'm trying to think of an institution where Trump is comfortable with the inclusion of people who don't believe in his politics. Like, is there a place where he's like, it's cool that there are Democrats that are partisan? this. I don't really care. I mean, sporting venues, not even that. It's like he doesn't, that, that he's upset with. Obviously, movies, he's not comfortable with that. He goes off on Hollywood all the time and the whole Melania thing. There's really not a, there's really not an institution or a collective space where Trump is totally at ease with the fact that people who oppose him ideologically can coexist. Unless I'm missing something. No, no, you're 100% right. And it's not even clear that he

really thinks these people exist in significant numbers, right? I mean, he has completely divorced himself from all sort of like quantitative ways of knowing the country, of understanding what's going on in the country. He thinks the polls are all cooked. He thinks he won Minnesota, you know, he thinks he won California. Like, he really does think that, like, the vast majority of people out there really, really like him. And the people who don't are, like, suspicious in some way, they're interlopers or they're paid for, you know, so, like, this. Who are you? Who are you to say that the Venezuelan president didn't fuck up the elections where Italian satellites weren't involved? You don't know. You don't know.

Yeah, yeah. But it just is not obvious that there's a lot of space in his brain for like, there are people out there who disagree with me in like a reasonable way and they exist in significant numbers. The act of disagreeing with him is itself the crime. I'm going to switch now to the NBC interview he gave last night. There were a couple segments that really stood out to me. One was when the topic turned to this lawsuit that he is brought against the IRS. Now, for those who are not up on the story, Donald Trump has sued the IRS because an employee with the agency illegally leaked his tax filings, became public during the campaign.

he's suing the IRS for $10 billion. It's an absurd figure and made more absurd by the fact that he runs the, he's the boss, he runs the IRS. So he's suing himself and he's in charge of the settlement. And let's play what he says. And then I kind of want to just spend a little bit of time thinking about the implications of this. But let's play the clip of him talking about the suit. A new lawsuit by you and your family that you're suing the IRS for $10.5 billion. for leaking your tax documents.

Is this a good use of taxpayer money? You can't leak documents. And any money that I win, I'll give it to charity, 100% to charities. Charities that would be approved by government or whatever. I have another lawsuit with the United States. I sued because they broke into Mar-a-Lago. But that's taxpayer money. It's going to take out of the system.

I know it's going to charity you're going to say. Scott Besson's the head of the IRS. What I want to do is the head of the Justice Department. They're going to defend the IRS against you. You're their boss. Well, there's never been anything like it in all fair. So are you going to tell to pay you? Don't forget, I sued as a private citizen because I sued between terms.

I won three times. I won three times, but I didn't assume, unfortunately for this country, I didn't assume office the second of that. But here's the story. I sued because they broke into Maralaga. That was before I became president. Now it goes along and it turned out that the suit is a very strong suit. You're going to tell them to pay you, though? You're the boss.

Well, what I would do, tell them to pay me, but I'll give all. 100% of the money to charity. I don't want any of the money. It's so ridiculous on its face, obviously. And there's ample history showing he will not give this money to charity. And if he does, it's going to be like the Donald Trump presidential library. I'll call it a charity. It's $10 billion.

I mean, it's $10 billion. Here's the thing that I'm kind of struck by. How do we know if they pay? I mean, I suppose there's a suit and you have to sort of monitor. whether or not there's a settlement and all that. But like, do you have faith? Like, I'm not totally sure I would have faith that they didn't just do the payment and got it over with. And we never really knew.

And certainly I don't have faith that they're going to document down to the cent what charities he's giving to. I mean, this is just pilfering. It's straight up pilfering. It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, it is crazy. And it all just comes back to the basic fact of doing business in America right now, which is that every federal employee is assumed to be doing the personal bidding of the president at all

times or else something is wrong. I don't know. The whole charity thing, first of all, you're absolutely right. He would never actually give that money away. He's like the amount of personal enriching he has already done for himself, like totally shamelessly. It's not like he's giving that money to charity. It's not like he's giving his NFT scam money to charity. He does give his salary.

He says he foregoes his salary. Yeah, really, really cool. He's made $400,000. $4 billion off the presidency he's made in the last 13 months now or whatever it is. So yeah, really cool giving the salary to charity. I love the just complete absence of any through line of thought on this sort of stuff. I mean, like last year, this time last year, the entire might of the federal government was laser focused on. We have to save the taxpayer money by canceling all of the money that's flowing out of us to charities.

everything that's flowing out of the out of the treasury to NGOs is automatically suspect we have to lock it down we have to stop doing that doge cancels you know a hundred billion dollars in contracts or whatever it was that it ended up doing that's this sort of thing and now he's like no no nobody should have a problem with this because this money's coming out of the treasury and it's gonna go to charities you know like it's beggars believe like there's no there's no brain activity here beyond donald trump the appetite thinking he can get away with this and maybe he will we'll see well well as long as they don't use any of that $10 billion to purchase a Politico pro subscription, I think it's all above board. Yeah, that's a great topic. We buy like nutrient dent peanut paste for kids. Yeah, don't do that. Not that charity.

Not that chair. Actually, this is such a good topic for a morning shots. You got to write this one. It's so true. Just call up a few Doge fans and say, what do you think of this? I'm eager to see what happens here. I can't fathom a world in which the voting public, if they even know about this, would be like, that seems above bored and I'm cool with it.

Like, how the hell do you defend something that outwardly corrupt? I have no idea. But how the hell did you defend the Qatari Jet? Or how the hell did you defend that, that crypto dinner that he did? Or how the hell do you defend the fact that it was just reported several days ago that a sheik, a UAE? A UAE sheik bought, just sent almost $200 million just straight into Trump accounts, four days before the inauguration.

defend it. You don't defend it at all. You just wait for people to forget because they move on to the next thing. That was last week that that was reported, or this week maybe. And we're already, like, there's so much shit all the time. So you don't defend it. It is a never-ending, it's a never-ending tsunami of corruption. It's wild. Last clip I want to play is about Trump discussing, and this is related to the Epstein Files, the potential contempt vote, although I think it's shelved for Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, they've been called up by the House Oversight Committee to testify about their presence in these files. Quite conspicuously, James Comer, the head of the committee is calling up Democrats and none of

the Republicans and none of the Trump officials who are in these files. And the Clintons are now, their bluff was called, let's be honest, and they're going to play ball. They now want to say they want to do a public hearing. We'll see if that comes to fruition. Donald Trump has been notably sympathetic to Bill Clinton in this. like outwardly sympathetic, and it's pretty obvious why. We'll get to it after we play the clip of him being asked about this on NBC.

NBC News broke the story today. I don't know if you saw it that the Democrats are already saying, if you bring President Bill Clinton and he has to testify, we're bringing President Trump. What do you say to that? I think they might say that, you know, but they've already brought me. See, I've been brought. They had me indicted. No, you haven't.

Many, many times. Many, many times. And the president. had some surprising thoughts about former president Bill Clinton. It bothers me that somebody's going after Bill Clinton. See, I like Bill Clinton. I still like Bill Clinton. What do you like about him?

I like, well, I liked his behavior toward me. I thought he got me. He understood me. Pretty funny. Of course he likes Bill Clinton because he was nice to Donald Trump, the easiest mark ever. I will fact check Trump here. He's not been hauled up to the hill for any sort of. deposition or testimony, that's something he's avoided studiously.

But it's clear. I mean, he's pretty open. He's worried about the precedent, this will set. And he should be, right? I mean, like, if Democrats were to win back the gavel, you have to imagine that they are going to ask Howard Lutnik, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, anyone else in these files, to come up and talk about it. And they will say, hey, we have a precedent. We have no problem holding you in contempt because some of them actually voted for

the contempt because you just did it to Bill Clinton and they would be absolutely in the right to do so. Yeah. And I mean, I don't always go full JVL on the like, this is why he's going to try really hard never to leave office. But like this is made, he may very well try very hard never to leave office. Right. I mean, like Bill Clinton was president a long time ago and this has just sort of come up now. And if, you know, if he's in it, check it out. You know, like let's let's let's let's let's let's see where that goes. But like the amount of stuff Donald Trump is doing right now. He will spend literally the rest of his life, like, putting out fires anytime my phone's ringing here and we're live. I don't know where the phone is.

So I guess we'll just have to deal with it. He's going to have to spend the rest of his life putting out these fires. Mute yourself because I have the good news for him as he has to put out these fires and as he will be hauled up on the hill that he'll fight the subpoenas and fight all that stuff is that he'll have a $10 billion slush fund to pay for the legal bills that he's going to have to incur post-presidency, assuming he ever leaves the presidency. All right, buddy, I think the call is probably a sign from above, straight from the National Prayer Breakfast that we should go.

You have a new morning shots to read. A warning shot for morning shots. The people at the Great National Prayer Breakfast. First you get the phone call and then it's the Lightning Bolt. Well, now you have a great new topic for your morning shots. I'm excited to read it. I expect it filed in the next couple hours. I'm going to run on the breakfast, actually.

We'll push that other one on. push that one along. All right. For those who are watching, thank you for watching. We appreciate it. We like doing these live shows every now and then. We're going to try to do them more regularly because it's fun to be with you guys in the moment.

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check us out if you haven't already and thank you for watching andrew take care buddy see yeah