Trump’s Evangelical Leaders Are Working Overtime to Spin The Iran War

In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

On Easter Sunday, I received an email “alert” from the National Faith Advisory Board (NFAB), an organization led by the televangelist Paula White, a longtime friend of President Trump who is also the senior advisor to the White House Faith Office. The “alert” came six hours after Trump’s Truth Social post threatening war crimes against Iran if the “crazy bastards” did not “Open the Fuckin’ Strait.” While the NFAB email delivery might have been scheduled in advance, it nonetheless was jarring in the context of Trump’s vulgar and violent morning. “Dear Faith Leader,” it read. “This sacred weekend from the greatest platform in the free world and beyond, President Trump proclaimed the Gospel to all that could hear.” The email linked to a short video, establishing that the platform in question was not Truth Social, but the Oval Office. From there, Trump robotically read (and at some points strangely shouted) an Easter message about Christ’s resurrection. At points, he sounded like someone who was hearing about John 3:16 for the very first time.

We may be increasingly mired in a war Trump started and doesn’t know how to end, but for the NFAB, which seems to exist as a communications arm of the White House, portraying Trump as a divine leader of a Christian revival is central to every missive. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants every American to pray for the troops “on bended knee” and “in the name of Jesus Christ,” and has cast Trump’s Iran war as a holy crusade. But for Trump’s evangelicals — who are more likely to adopt Jewish rituals and symbols as a sign of their supposed love for Israel than the crusader iconography favored by Hegseth — the real savior in the Iran war is Trump himself. 

The problem for them is that Trump, their anointed one, is falling apart.

As Trump flounders in the prosecution of his war on Iran, his evangelical loyalists are feverishly closing ranks, including during a Holy Week marked by Trump’s and Hegseth’s Christianity-infused bloodlust, which prompted papal rebukes. But Trump’s evangelicals are facing mutli-front challenges to what they would like to portray as their dominance in the MAGA coalition, and their claim to represent the “true” American Christianity. That is why they are intensifying their messaging that Trump is divine, that he is persecuted like Jesus was, that his war is destroying Iran and protecting Israel from Iranian savagery, all while igniting a Christian revival in America. They need to make sure that, lest their followers hear an anti-war message from another MAGA figure, that their allegiance remains to Trump, who God sent to save Christian America, and who demands your adoration no matter what.

Last week, a clip of White comparing Trump to Jesus at an Easter luncheon at the White House went viral. Turning from the dais to address Trump, White said, “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused,” which she described as “a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us.” And because of Jesus’s resurrection, she continued, “you rose up. Because he was victorious, you were victorious. And I believe that the Lord said to tell you this, because of his victory, you will be victorious in all you put your hand to.” Anytime Trump feels down and out, like things aren’t exactly going his way, his evangelicals are standing ready to tell him his divine appointment includes the ability to rise from the dead like Jesus. 

One might not have known that Trump was in trouble in the war from his own characteristically rambling, disjointed remarks, which preceded White’s heavenly boost. After an extended brag about the stock market (which in reality has been roiled by his war), he said, “we’ve done so well now it’s time to go out and take out these lunatics in Iran that are trying to get a nuclear weapon.” He claimed that he never wanted regime change in the country, but got it just by being so amazing: “I never talked about regime change, but we got it.” He followed that detachment from reality with a preview of the speech he would deliver to a national television audience later that night. “Basically I’m going to tell everybody how great I am, what a great job I’ve done,” he said. “What a phenomenal job. What a phenomenal job I’ve done.” From there, he segued to his supposed heroism for Israel. “If you had some different type of a president, you wouldn’t have Israel,” he said, adding that evangelicals “like Israel more than Jewish people like Israel.” He fully understands what he needs to say to that audience to maintain this essential relationship. Evangelist Franklin Graham then praised Trump as an Esther-like figure raised up by God against “the wicked regime of this government [that] wants to kill every Jew and destroy them with an atomic fire.”

In the past five weeks, the broader public has soured on Trump’s aimless yet bloody prosecution of the war, as well as its devastating economic fallout. But Trump’s evangelicals are not just contending with an increasingly repulsed public, who they could write off as disgruntled, anti-American, Trump-derangement-syndrome-plagued liberals. Until recently, Trump’s magic power (aside from being like Jesus Christ) was that the MAGA base was relatively united. But the war has intensified intra-MAGA feuds, which are imbued with both rank antisemitism and disdain for the Christian Zionism that is driving evangelical support for the war. That is why an organization like the NFAB is making a bubble within a bubble — that is, a Christian Zionist bubble inside the MAGA bubble. They need to shield followers who might be at risk of absorbing MAGA anti-war messages, including those from figures like former Georgia GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who saw tanking approval ratings on her road to Damascus and has now deemed Trump “insane.” 

In the pro-Trump evangelical messaging, the president, who did not attend church on Easter, is deemed to be a historic figure igniting a revival of Christianity in America and, importantly, in its government. For the evangelicals who now have their long-awaited Iran war, there is no failure for Trump, who is both a strongman and a victim of persecution who can perpetually emerge unscathed from defeat. Their pursuit of Christian supremacy through Trump now depends on their followers continuing to accept their reality-defying portrayals of the president at war.