If you've been looking for God's Chosen One, his name is Donald

I'm aware that many people who visit this blog, notwithstanding its churchless nature, are either believers in God or are searching for a sign of God's presence in the world.

Well, I've got some good news for you. There's no need to journey to India, no need to pray deeply, no need to meditate assiduously. For I learned today that God's Chosen One isn't hiding from view but is readily apparent.

Way too readily apparent for my liking. But I'm biased, since I neither believe in God nor in God's Chosen One. So I'm pleased to share the name of the Chosen One for those who have a stronger belief muscle than I do.

Donald. As in Donald Trump. 

This may be difficult for some to accept. However, my source is reputable: a Politico story, "Does Trump actually think he's God?" Short answer is probably not, but Trump does believe he has been chosen by God to do great things. 

For those skeptics who doubt his Trumpian divinity, which definitely includes me, the number of links in the opening paragraph of the Poltico story is indeed impressive. After all, how many links are in the New Testament? Zero, yet hundreds of millions of people accept the divinity of Jesus.

“I’m supposed to be dead,” Donald Trump said, the day after he got shot at his rally last summer in Butler, Pennsylvania. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he said four days after that. “But something very special happened. Let’s face it. Something happened,” he said two days after that. “It’s … an act of God,” he said the month after that. “God spared my life for a reason,” he said in his victory speech at Mar-a-Lago in November. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said in his inaugural address at the Capitol in January. “It changed something in me,” he said in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in February. “I feel even stronger.”

...“I think he does believe he was saved to do great things as president,” Stephen Mansfield, the author of the 2018 book Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him, told me. “I think he does believe that he is a tool of God.”

I found interesting the mentions of how Trump went from being a strict determinist, which seems to me to be an entirely defensible philosophical position, to being a believer in God choosing certain people, namely himself, to carry out the divine will.

Some say Trump believes nothing. That’s not true. He believes, for instance, in tariffs, and always has. He believes in the importance of genes and always has. He believes in the power of positive thinking, and he believes in the power of negative publicity. And Trump, at best an intermittently observant Christian who reportedly has mocked those more devout, nonetheless believes, and has for a long, long time, in … something like predestination.

“I’m a great fatalist,” he told a reporter from New York’s Newsday in 1991.

“What scares you the most?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Whatever happens, happens — and you just have to go along with it.”

But that was the old Trump. The new Trump embraces his godly chosenness. 

“I think,” Robert Jeffress, the Trump-supporting pastor from Dallas, said last month, “he came to the conclusion — the right conclusion — that God has a purpose for him.”

Christian believers believe, of course, that God has a purpose for them, and for all of them — that they’re all potential tools of his will, and beneficiaries of his grace. Most of them don’t, though, think of themselves as the literal second coming of Christ. And the extent to which Trump might think that of himself, and that his supporters might agree, speaks to the unprecedented expansion of power he has asserted and that many in the country seem content to grant.

“No previous president in American history has claimed that he was saved by God to enact his political agenda,” Mercieca, the rhetoric expert, recently wrote. Asking God to watch over the nation? Yes. Claiming to have been saved specifically by God to enable the enactment of political priorities? No. “Invoking the power of the unified people and God gives Trump an awesome and unquestionable power — whoever defies Trump is at risk of defying the people and God. It’s impossible to argue against Trump when he claims the power of God …”

Not really true. It is indeed possible to argue against Trump claiming the power of God.

Other scholars and observers say he’s an opportunist who also is a narcissist who also recognizes considerable political utility in wrapping himself in such a divine mantle.

“The authoritarian leader presents himself as a divine or messianic figure who is uniquely able to vanquish the forces of evil and make the world safe for the faithful. As God incarnate, the leader is by definition omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent,” David Livingstone Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England, wrote before Trump won for the second time. “Sacred leaders are messianic figures, who promise salvation for true believers. When a movement is headed by a sacred leader, it resembles a religion,” he wrote after. “Trump is a sacred leader. His evangelical followers often refer to him as a ‘savior’ or ‘anointed one’ chosen by God …”

“Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion. Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual,” Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina and an expert on the intersection of religion, culture and politics, wrote in her book Spellboundthat came out just this week. “He’s a nihilist for whom the only source of meaning is the amassing of personal power, turning his will into personal, political, financial and territorial domination, and that’s totally compatible with a messiah complex,” Worthen told me. “I don’t see the recent turn in his language as a deviation from past patterns, but the fuller realization of those patterns.”

Comments

[Ron E.]

America is a bit of an anomaly when it comes to religion and belief in God. Usually, the trend is that the poorer the country the more religious it is. The Pew Research Centre says that “Americans feel far less secure economically and in relation to their health and well-being than would be expected given the overall wealth of the country in terms of GDP per capita. This existential insecurity provides a fertile ground for religion.” And: “It has often been pointed out that poor people in America tend to vote against their economic interests by voting for Republican politicians who are interested in further concentrating wealth in the hands of the affluent. They do so, in part, because the Republicans appeal to their religious propensity. That propensity is further fed by the increasing insecurity in the lives of the poor.”

Belief is a funny animal. Psychologists have found that 7–8-year-olds will ascribe meanings to things such as ‘rocks are pointy so that animals can scratch on them’, while adults on the other hand only attributed functions to things, not meanings.

Studies show that Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are much more likely to embrace conspiratorial thinking. Is this to do with a country’s ingrained culture of belief – or a deep need of wanting to believe? Not necessarily religious belief but a general tendency to believe stories and myths that have an almost numbing effect that counters reality.

What then powers the ‘belief mechanism’. I would reckon it has a lot to do with our human insecurities. And also, (my usual bug-bear), particularly the insecurity of the illusory ‘self structure’. Always needing to make itself feel safe and solid by investing in a world that echoes its self-validity. If this means adopting a belief or a figure-head (spiritual or political) that promises a way to maintain and promote some sort of meaning or purpose, however fantastical, then an insecure self will adopt it.

There’s a lot to be said with regard to studying the various systems that help, through self-enquiry to understand what the self/mind is and how it operates – often to our own detriment, contributing to its own and others conflict and suffering.

[Donald]

For every Donald there is an opposite and equal Donald, possibly the antiDonald Donald. Christ was a loser and not what he appeared to be.
War , Donald

[manjit]

Christ was a Bigly Loser. Forget hotels, he didn't have a bed and was born in a manager with other lowly animals!

Very Bigly loser and I'm sure his parenthood is just fake news, a hoax.

On the other hand Musk is just Bigly Bigly:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/30/elon-musk-trump-drug-use

"Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/elon-musk-drugs-children-trump.html

Bigly High. You just can't beat a hippy-flip. A few folks here on this forum could do with one imo;

https://tripsitter.com/hippie-flipping/

My man, my respect for him just skyrocketed! Though to be fair, the signs were pretty obvious.

If he had the balls to double the dosage he may have got somewhere.

Instead the mushrooms just used him to do their thing, and paid him off for his support with petty trinkets like billions of dollars and power. Sucker, so easily bought off!

[Kranvir]

Look no further than the self proclaimed fake @ss baba of beas - gurinder singh dhillon - Surely he's the gods one and only chosen one. But hold on, for the very first time in RSSB you have another fake @ss baba, jasdeep - breaking all tradition.
So now there's 2 people who think they are both gods chosen ones simultaneously, and added to that, it runs in the one chosen family of god...LOL you can't make it up!!!! . Looks like gurinder has legged it to early retirement in shame and embarrassment. God sees everything and would want the same justice that you demand of your sangat gurinder , , on everyone, no matter what position or how much money they have. Time to face your karma...game over