Politico Magazine reporter Michael Kruse says President Donald Trump has always “seen himself as special, and he has always, of course, been notably self-aggrandizing,” but the president is now moving into a new phase.
“His rhetoric has gone from borderline nihilistic to messianic,” writes Kruse.
Many of Trump’s followers have described him as “chosen,” or “anointed,” or a “savior,” or “the second coming” or “the Christ for this age.” Only now Kruse says Trump is in on it and his “narcissism and grandiosity has metastasized into notions of omnipotence, invincibility and infallibility.”
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And that matters, says Kruse, “because it offers a window into how he is approaching his second term — even more emboldened, even more unilaterally oriented, even more apparently uncheckable and untouchable than the first.”
“I run the country and the world,” Trump told The Atlantic last month.
“I have no reason to doubt that he would … prefer to believe he was saved [from assassination] by a supreme being because he himself is special rather than the would-be assassin was a lousy shot or he got lucky,” said former Trump consultant and publicist Alan Marcus to Kruse in an interview. “… His world is fantasy, scripted like a movie — not biblical unless, of course, that helps bring a particular scene or chapter to life.”
Marie Griffith, the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics tells Kruse it is likely a combination of “opportunism and genuine belief” driving the president’s evolving self-view, while author Stephen Mansfield (‘Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him’, 2018, by Baker Publishing) said Trump probably believes “he is a tool of God.”
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And now, four months into his term, Kruse says “Trump is on a spree of a show of supremacy.”
“He’s pledged a ‘Golden Age.’ He’s punished Trump and MAGA unbelievers. He’s exacted or attempted to exact subservience and acquiescence from media execs and tech titans and major law firms and top universities and both chambers of Congress that he and his party control,” Kruse writes. “He’s tried to command the global economy and crack intractable issues of war and peace as if he were wielding a scepter over subjects far and wide.”
Kruse notes a point from journalist Ezra Klein that a big difference between Trump’s first and second terms is the willingness of his staff to buy into the belief, too. The first group was “perfectly comfortable thinking: President Donald Trump is very wrong about this. His judgment is bad. His impulses need to be foiled. We are the resistance inside the Trump administration,” said Klein. “In Trump 2.0 … there is both a sense that they’re there to serve him but also a sense there is something in Trump … that exists beyond argumentation,” Klein said.
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One late Wednesday post from Trump on Truth Social features a meme of the president walking confidently down a dark city street.
“HE’S ON A MISSION FROM GOD,” read the words. “NOTHING CAN STOP WHAT IS COMING.”
“Does the president mean with the post of this meme,” Kruse says he asked White House communications director Steven Cheung, “that he’s literally on a mission from God?”
“As people of faith, we are all on missions from God,” Cheung responded. “The President has the biggest mission — to Make America Great Again and to help bring peace across the world. And he’s doing just that.”
Read the full Politico Magazine report here.