Bulwark Takes - Trump: "I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to make heaven"

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

JVL and Will Saletan take on Donald Trump’s strange, childlike theology — a worldview where heaven is a reward for “winning” and faith is just another transaction.

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But we can't talk about, does Donald Trump think he's going to heaven? Because it's starting to look like he's reaching that time of life, that season of life where he's starting to think about it. Will, let's listen to him. We talked a couple weeks ago, you were doing an interview and you talked about how you hope to end the war in Ukraine because it might help. and get into heaven. How does this help? Does this help? I mean, you know, I'm being a little cute.

I don't think there's anything going to get me in heaven. Okay, I've really done. I think I'm not maybe heaven bound. I'm maybe in heaven right now as we fly in Air Force one. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make heaven. So Will, the President United States, thinking about the pearly gates, St. Peter, the list, how it all works. And you asked yourself, well, hold on, what else has he said about heaven in the past?

And I think you have a little theological treatise to look out, like the Trumpian version of salvation. How does it, how does it work in that orange head? I was trying to figure this out. In psychology, there's this thing called the Colberg scale, which is you start out as a child and you mature and you get sort of more enlightened ideas about being good. And Donald Trump seems to be stuck on this stage where he's still a small, child and he thinks about heaven as it's candy. It's a reward, right? And children are taught this. A lot of people are taught this, right? But he doesn't seem capable of understanding that he ought to be good apart from the idea that he's going to get this payoff in the Great Beyond. So that seems to be

where he is. And then the sort of question is, how do we work with that? Can we work with that? But I just started digging into stuff he'd said about heaven in the past, and it was pretty wild. Show me what he said. The latest thing is that he's anxious about whether he's going to go to heaven, and he thinks that if he solves the Ukraine war, that can get him into heaven. Somebody's clearly been talking to someone's in his ear telling him, like, you've got to do this stuff. And then subsequent to that, since he hasn't solved the Ukraine war, they were asking him

whether if he solves the Middle East, can that get him into heaven? And we thought it may be so, right? But if you go back and you look at Trump's history of talking about heaven, it's really awfully egocentric. So he's got this history of talking about on the campaign trail in his rallies, his parents. Who's in heaven? My parents are in heaven, right? So let me show you this one line. This is representative of what he would say on the campaign trail last year.

My father's looking down, my mother and father, they're looking down because they're definitely in heaven. They made heaven. They're great. They're looking down and they said, I can't believe my son took a mugshot. This is unbelievable. They made it. They made it. Ma and Paul Trump got on the list.

And this is the way he talks about, he's always talking about making heaven. So it's like, you know, you want to get into a good college, right? You want to get into a country club. And he said, did my parents make it? Yeah, well, I think my mom made it. My dad probably made it. Many people were saying heaven is the most exclusive country club in the whole world. Right.

So he thinks his parents made it, but really the whole thing is about his parents looking down on him. And so they're always looking down on me and, you know, am I a good boy? So he's got this sort of self-centered view. Let me show you one clip, though, from last year. He was on an interview with Fox and Friends. Religion is such a great thing. It keeps you, you know, there's something. to be good about. You want to be good. It's so important. And I don't know if it's explained

right. I don't know if I'm explaining it right now. But when you have something like that, you want to be good. You want to go to heaven. Okay. You want to go to heaven. If you don't have heaven, you almost say, what's the reason? What do I have to be good? Let's not be good. What difference is it? He's saying there's no reason to be good apart from heaven. JVL, you're a parent. Have you run across this with your kids, with other kids? I mean, again, I'm Catholic, so my theology is a little different than the tradition the president was raised in. The Catholics believe that rightly ordered all of all of the truths about the world and the realities about the world point you to heaven. The world is arranged in such a way as to help you want to do good and to seek God's will for you and to pursue it with all your heart.

Like, what could bring a person more joy than that? Maybe some people who were raised in Manhattan in the 1980s have a different view of what constitutes a good time. I can't speak to the president. But wow, it's not a Catholic view of the world. That's for sure. I can tell you it's not a Jewish view either. It's some kind of evangelical thing. I've got a feeling like if someone is in Trump's ear talking about God in heaven, it's got to be like Paula White.

It's got to be some prosperity gospel type. I was going to say prosperity gospel, right? I mean, that is, in a way, Trump is the living embodiment. of prosperity gospel, except that he takes it in the reverse direction. Instead of be good so God will shower you with good things, it's I have all these good things so God must love me because I've done good, right? I mean, doesn't that seem to be the direction this is running? Yeah, that's a, that's, well, actually, well, I'll get to Eric Trump in a minute who seems

to be right on point with what you just said. I want to play one more clip, though, from the interview with Fox and Friends. This is the part where he's asked directly about his relationship with God. You've been faced with so much adversity and persecution for years. What's your relationship with God like, and how do you pray? That's Sharon from Alabama. Okay, so I think it's good. I do very well with the evangelicals.

I love the evangelicals. And I have more people saying they pray for me. I can't even believe it. And they are so committed and they're so believing, they say, sir, you're going to be okay. I pray for you every night. I mean, everybody, almost, I can't say everybody, but almost everybody that sees me, they say it. They're so believing. They're so believing.

They are believing. He's like marveling that other people, that other people have this thing called belief. It sounds to me like maybe he doesn't. What's your relationship with God like? It's good because I do very well with the evangelicals. What? That's one of the most revealing things I've ever heard because it, again, it just suggests the pure transactionality of Trump's worldview, which is so evangelical Christians who must be the most God people because they're very big with God, very strong on God, because they do well. they vote for Trump, that means that his relationship with God is good because if his relationship

with God wasn't good, then the evangelicals wouldn't vote for him, right? Isn't that the exact transaction which he's describing? Yeah, it's like, so he's, he's obviously a businessman. He has no religious sensibility at all. He doesn't seem, the phrase relationship with God, he seems unable to comprehend what this means, right? What do you exactly do you mean by God? He doesn't really have a relationships with anybody, though, in fairness to him. Right. Right. I mean, I'm not sure his relationship with God is any different than his relationship with any being, living or present, earthly or heavenly. Well, I think you've got your finger on it with the transactional. And it's not just that it's transactional, but it has to be quantifiable. So how do I know that I have a relationship?

Well, I can count something. And so he spent his whole life counting money. I can count money, right? But politics for him is I count votes, right? Do I have a relationship with God? Let's see what my tally is with the evangelicals who seem to represent God to him. Like, you know, the dairy industry or the, you know, the soybean farmers. The soybean farmer. Like the soybean association. Yeah. That's how the evangelicals are farming God or something like that, right?

Let me play you another one from, this is him talking about God intervening in the world. And of course, who does God intervene for? It's Donald Trump. This is last month speaking to the. religious liberty commission at the White House. You had some very bad people who rigged an election and look what happened. I end up getting the Olympics, the World Cup at 250. It's amazing the way God works, is it?

Okay, so the election got rigged, which you would think is like somebody doing something bad. Maybe that was because God was mad at him. Maybe the only reason the rigged election succeeded was because he displeased God. Right. So, but it works out. Do you ever think about that Donald? So, but it all works out for him because it's, it goes, this goes back to what you said about being favored by God, right? All the signs are I ended up winning and I get the World Cup and the Olympics and everything.

So that's, I just as a point of theology, I hate this like, oh, things worked out. God is good. That is not the way religious faith works because things work out badly all the things. time. Edith Stein was martyred, and it wasn't because God hated her. The problem of evil, which is generally you have a shorthand for like, if God exists, why does all this bad shit happen in the world all the time? Theologians refer this as the problem of evil. And it's the biggest stumbling block to religious belief. You know, you look at the world and you say, look at all these dead kids, look at all these terrible tragedies. Like, how could a loving God who

created us all and cares for us all, allow these things to happen. And Trump doesn't seem to have any problems with that. Like, he just recognizes that as pure, again, good things, bad things. Bad things only happen to bad people. Good things only happen to good people. It's like he's never read any of the Bible. Jesus, teacher, uh, who tell us, who sinned this man or his parents that he is, is a blind leper and, you know, and Jesus is like, neither. This person has been, uh, afflicted with this. So that, uh, you know, the glory of God could be revealed to everybody. And Trump would be like, what? Like that sort of thing just does not compute for him.

Honestly, JVL, what you're talking about is your adulthood, maturity, like thinking about complicated moral issues. This is someone who's never grown up. And I think you're right. He doesn't have any, he doesn't have any conception of, like, struggling with something, like a contradiction. Let me give you one more because he doesn't think that God only cares about him. That's really unfair.

He also thinks that God. cares about America and God cares about America by putting oil on the ground. This is from two months ago. You need oil and we have it. So we have a big advantage in that way. We have more oil and gas and coal and energy than any other country in the world by far. For whatever reason, God was very good to us. This is a consistent theology in America, right?

God sort of blessed this country, gave us amber waves of grain, purple mountains, and oil. it's it is a kind of prosperity it's a kind of prosperity gospel nationalism isn't it there is a serious version of this and there's a stupid version of this the stupid version of this is like a truck commercial right we're american go america because america's awesome we have all the awesome right here in america yeah by dodge ram you know like that's and that's the trump version of this the sophisticated version of this is that the creation of the united states is providential. It's really an accident of history. You get this place which is geographically isolated from the old world, and you get a bunch of guys who come together and kind of

miraculously, A, when they're independence, but B, then build the framework for a nation which is built on an idea and not on blood and soil, which is a very new conception and which begins the reordering of the world towards liberty and liberalism. Of course, what's funny is that Maga rejects this and does not believe that America should be a place based on ideas and ideals and laws. They want it to be about blood and soil. So, you know, the Trumpian view is an explicit rejection of the sophisticated view of America as a providential nation in the world. Does that make sense?

I think it's totally in parallel with what you were saying about the problem of evil. I mean, you're talking about a thought-out, mature version of blessing, of being blessed. And that's just beyond him, like, all he can think. You said it yourself, blood and soil, right? So he can't, he can't think about America as this idea, a place where we, he's thinking about literally what's in the ground. It's in the soil, the oil, or blood and oil in his case, right? If all of a sudden someone discovers a bigger deposit of oil in Saudi Arabia, does that

make Saudi Arabia God's chosen country? this is all like weirdly contingent once you start thinking of the world transactionally like this nothing makes sense let me let me close with let me come back to your idea of the prosperity gospel because this is after trump made this statement on air force one about worrying about getting into heaven eric trump was on benny johnson's podcast and was asked to respond to this and here's what eric said if he wasn't heaven bound if he wasn't meant for this purpose he wouldn't have beaten hillary we wouldn't have beaten Hillary. We wouldn't have got through the landmine of what under siege was where they tried to destroy us in every way, shape, or form. They tried to suck the breath

out of us. They tried to suck the money out of us. They tried to suck the voice out of us. They did everything humanly possible to destroy us. So that sounds a lot like what you were saying about being heavenbound is reflected in what's happening to me now. Not that I need to do good deeds to get into heaven. but that do i am i showing signs of prosperity am i showing signs that god has already blessed me and therefore i am favored to get into heaven does it sound out yeah this is this is it's it's like prosperity gospel slash cargo cult and everything begins with the result and then reasons backwards from there right and of course none of this makes any sense find any any child who dies well did the child die because god didn't

love him or her right you know a soldier who's killed on a battlefield the bullet hit the them because God doesn't love them. Is that what happened? There is a strain of American Christianity, which is a real, like, salvation through works, right? And if you wanted to put a serious gloss on Trump's religious views, you might say that. I think it's more likely, though, that he's influenced by, like, Norman Peel and the power of positive thinking. And I think Peel is connected with the church he grew up in. And so Trump's upward, is really in a version of Christianity that's like half Christianity on the

exterior, but underneath the hood, it's really self-help. And, I mean, one of the things you can, a very, very early tell in this, and I think it was in 2015, and he was asked about, like, repentance and the things he's had to ask God for forgiveness for. And I don't have to clip of my hands, but he essentially was like,

no, I've never had to ask God for forgiveness of anything. And I'm just like, if that isn't disqualifying to every, single Christian listening to this, then, like, I don't know what to say to them. Because, like, the very foundation of Christianity is, A, we're all sinners, B, we all need for God's forgiveness, and C, none of us deserve his forgiveness. The only reason we get it is because his mercy is divine and infinite. For Trump to just short-circuit this whole thing and be like, I pretty much think I nailed it.

Perfect. I'm sorry. I'd ask for forgiveness. I thought I had to. But I, you know, boom. I think I got this life thing down. It's the most unchristian view of like man, the nature of man, original sin, any of that stuff. And the fact that American Christians didn't bat an eye over that has always just amazed me. Well, I would go beyond saying it's unchristian. I mean, I'm Jewish. I would say it's unspiritual. It's on, it's the first step in any kind of religion is there is something greater than you. That's it. That's it. Like, you can call it what you want to call it. I would call it God. Other people would call it something else. That first step is what he's lacking.

He doesn't believe that. And so forgiveness hinges on that. Lots of religious concepts hinge on that. You can't have any kind of faith that way. I think in Trump's worldview, God is like. the final counterparty to a deal, you know, like for Trump, Trump looks at God. He's like, man, that's the ultimate deal I got to close. Everything else I've done in life was just prelude to this moment for me to sit down there at a table with God and really work my magic.

And, you know, I'm very confident that once me and God get to know each other, we're going to do some beautiful things, some things people never thought were possible. We're going to come to a very strong result that a lot of people are going to be very happy with. I am so disturbed because I think you nailed it. There's like Putin and there's President Xi and then God is the ultimate dealmaker on the other. Yeah, that is absolutely right. Trump is trying to strike the final deal. Guys, hit like, hit subscribe. It helps the channel out tremendously. We'll be back with the occasional fun piece of content, but mostly very boring and depressing and unbelievably dreary content because this is the world we live in. Good luck, America.

Thank you.