Trump rally veteran issues warning after seeing alarming shift in opening prayers

A reporter who has been to more than 100 rallies for Donald Trump has noticed an alarming shift in tone in the opening prayers at these political events.

The former president often makes news with outrageous, insulting or authoritarian remarks during his rallies, but The Atlantic's McKay Coppins told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that the prayers offered by various preachers are noteworthy in their own right, and he described how those invocations have changed over the years.

"The prayers that are given at the beginning of these campaign events don't often get that much journalist attention," Coppins said. "We focus on what Trump is saying, but they provide an interesting and revealing insight into the religious right's attitude toward Trump."

Coppins studied 58 prayers given at events since Trump's latest campaign started.

"One of the things you really see is that in 2016, the way that you heard conservative evangelicals talk about Trump was that he was like Cyrus the Great, who was a 6th century B.C. Persian king who liberated the Israelites from Babylonian captivity," Coppins said.

"The idea was he was an unlikely vessel. He is not a believer himself, but he is going to help us do God's will. You don't see that language in these prayers anymore."

The right-wing pastors who open Trump rallies with prayers instead have elevated the former president to a quasi-religious figure himself, Coppins said.

"You see him being compared to righteous, prophetic heroes, that he is not only somebody who is kind of a tool in God's hand, but that he is godly and righteous himself," Coppins said.

"In fact, in many of these prayers, the stakes of the election are really ratcheted up to the point where Trump is considered, you know, the representative of the forces of good, and Joe Biden, Kamala Harris are the forces of evil. So you really see the way that the election is being framed in these prayers as an example of how the stakes of the election have come to feel so kind of biblically, apocalyptically high for so many Americans."

Bradley Onishi, a a former evangelical minister who studies the relationship between politics and religion, has noticed the same shift.

“No one prays for Trump to do right," Onishi told Coppins, "they pray that God will do right by Trump."

Watch the video below or at this link.