God of Grift
As Trump plays God on Truth Social, a few disciples are getting rich.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” is the threat of someone simultaneously auditioning for the History Channel and the Book of Revelation. It was a threat as empty as Trump’s moral code — the very lack of which made the world watch and wait under the possibility that he might follow through purely for the infamy.
If I were a betting man, free of qualms about profiting off genocidal threats by a U.S. President, I could have retired early on my hunch that an 11th-hour “deal” would be struck. Alas, I’m a risk-averse humanist and living off the modest means that come with it. Still, I spent the afternoon watching prediction markets and oil commodity trades for anomalies. Sure enough, Brent and U.S. crude futures traded a few hours before the ceasefire to the tune of $950 million.
The only promise from this president’s Truth Social mirage of omnipotence is the grift that follows. For weeks, he’s ended his posts aimed at Iran with little religious flourishes — a “God bless,” a “Praise be to Allah,” or an Easter Sunday demand to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” His blessings are not benedictions. They’re the “no offense” after a backhanded compliment, the wink after a bully’s joke about someone’s mother. His escalating rhetoric reveals something else: the man with the golden commode believes he’s as powerful as a God. The fate of civilizations rests on his whims. After all, this is his chosen war. It was the pro-life president’s decision that put 170 schoolgirls in graves instead of desks.
Due to his decisions, the U.S.’s global standing has deteriorated in nearly every aspect. Thousands have been killed, billions of dollars have been wasted, and the alliances that formed the post-WWII order are collapsing. Iran and Russia are both financially strengthened. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and is charging a toll paid in Crypto or Chinese Yuan. Europe is learning that it can deal with an emboldened Iran directly to move its ships, reducing U.S. leverage. That hasn’t stopped Trump from expecting praise for a few ships passing through the Strait, even though more than a hundred a day passed through prior to Operation Epic Fury.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s conference following the ceasefire was a sermon filled with that very praise. If she had sung “Our God is an Awesome God” while facing a banner of Trump’s mug shot, it wouldn’t have seemed out of place. As we’ve grown accustomed to the adulation of his cabinet, what was most extraordinary was her victory lap while unable to answer when asked if the Strait had been closed again due to Israel dropping 100 bombs on Beirut within 10 minutes.
In the hours before the ceasefire was announced, news networks displayed the “whole civilization” quote on their lower thirds. Pundits and politicians called it genocidal, unprecedented, and extreme. As the focus shifts to the odds of the ceasefire’s success, it would be a dereliction on my part not to address the messianic rhetoric of a man who has attached his name not only to buildings but to coercion of theological proportions.
With the rise of the religious right over the last half-century, past presidents have invoked God’s name, some believing their leadership was blessed. Though even George Bush Jr. had the decency to launder his crusade through a State of the Union speechwriter. Despite Trump’s amorality, he owes both of his terms to the same evangelical machinery that supported Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr.
While there’s more evidence suggesting the president is a sexual assailant than a Christian, his administration goes to great lengths to champion him as a man of faith while maintaining their own devout images. The morning after the ceasefire, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “God deserves all the glory.” Operations were carried out under the “protection of divine providence.” His war fighters received “miraculous protection.” Hegseth has framed war and the military in religious terms ever since he was picked from the bench of Fox and Friends. He has instituted monthly worship services at the Pentagon. In February, he invited Doug Wilson — the Christian nationalist pastor whose self-described paleo-Confederate theology and postmillennial dominionism make him one of the most influential religious figures in the administration's orbit — to preach at one of them.
Meanwhile, the Vice President is in Budapest campaigning for Viktor Orbán’s reelection, which is what postliberal white Catholics do when they are vying for an autocratic future they expect to inherit. The common trait among Trump, Hegseth, and Vance isn’t faith; it is an understanding that the grandeur of Christian language is a veil for the pettiness of personal ambition. Trump takes this even further. He doesn’t invoke God to justify his power — he presents himself as its source.
Trump mentioned God 15 times in his public address on the war because he believes God is his opening act. If there were any doubt, for $1000, you can buy one of his God Bless the USA Bibles with his autopen signature. They retail for $60 without it, meaning his name alone is worth nearly 16 times as much as the Bible itself. The actual content of his godhood is that of a man who counts the money on the table and signals to the bettors which way to bet. This goes far beyond Bible sales.
Along with the vast corruption funding his family businesses, there have been multiple instances over the past year in which suspiciously well-timed bets preceded a Trump policy announcement, including oil futures, equity options, and Polymarket contracts. These involve hundreds of millions to over a billion dollars in total positioning. The pattern is established. Wire services have noted it. When this President speaks, his words move money before they move policy, and those positioned to profit are close enough to the house to know which slot machine will pay out and when.
In Christian theology, the incarnation, when the Word becomes flesh, is a miracle. In this case, the word is a Truth Social post, and the flesh is $950 million worth of oil futures placed hours before the post that justified them, a Polymarket contract that settled at ninety-six percent within minutes of the announcement, and six anonymous wallets that funded their positions in the hours before a U.S. military strike that killed Khamenei.
Trump and the Christian nationalists in this administration selectively cite scripture. Perhaps there is no scene they’d rather avoid mentioning than that of a furious carpenter walking into the temple to find the sacred space turned into a market. Jesus overturns the tables of the money changers and drives them out with a whip of cords. It is the only act of physical violence attributed to Jesus in any of the four gospels. It is not directed at the Romans or unbelievers but at the men who turned a place of worship into a place of grift. That’s the scene the man who held a Bible upside down in front of a church for a photo op — after federal officers gassed clergy to clear his path — could see himself clearly in if he could see himself as anyone other than God. But he can’t.
No civilization died tonight. Eventually, though, every civilization has to face what it lets a false god do with the miracles he grants his disciples.