MAGA Republicans Claim Trump’s Shooting Is Proof He Was Chosen by God

In the days following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Republican lawmakers and right-wing media pundits have ramped up the religious rhetoric when speaking about the former president’s narrow brush with death. While prayers and well wishes were to be expected, conservatives’ insistence that Trump survived the attempt on his life by divine intervention, just so that he could be reelected, crosses the line into cult territory.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a known Christian nationalist, took to X (formerly Twitter) Sunday to share his theory that “GOD protected President Trump” during the chaotic shooting, which killed one rallygoer and injured two others. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose hopes of being named vice president on Monday were reportedly dashed, expressed a similar sentiment. But these comments only skimmed the surface of Republican reactions.

“God spared our great leader Donald J. Trump,” said Representative Mary Miller Monday during a breakfast with the Illinois delegation to the Republican National Convention, according to the Chicago Sun Times.

During a prayer at that same event, Demetra DeMonte, the Republican National Committeewoman for Illinois, reportedly said, “Thank you for sparing Donald Trump … surely you sent an angel.”

Fox News hosts Emily Compagno and Kayleigh McEnany also argued Monday that the failed assassination attempt against their Republican candidate was proof of God’s guiding hand in the universe.

“And there by the grace of God, President Trump is still standing there before us,” Compagno said, calling the former president’s subtle head movement “a miracle at a minimum.”

“It is a miracle,” McEnany agreed. “Providence comes to mind, you know. He clearly had Christ protecting him in that moment.”

On Newsmax, anchors Bianca de la Garza and Larry Elder discussed the belief that Trump had survived due to divine intervention.

“Speaking of divine intervention, the greatest football catch in NFL history is called the Immaculate Reception. I call this the immaculate protection,” Elder said. “Just a fraction of an inch. He could’ve been hit in the head.”

But Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick might take the cake for most over-the-top cultism.

Patrick took to X to share a text he sent to Trump shortly after the attempt on the former president’s life.

“By the slightest turn of your head in a mere microsecond or the shield of a teleprompter, your life was spared by the Grace of a Merciful and Holy God,” Patrick wrote. “I shared with you not long ago, on our flight to Houston, that God has had his hand on you since you first ran for President. That I believe. No man could survive all you have been through without the Grace of God upon you.

“The Bible verse ‘And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?’ appears in the book of Esther 4:14,” Patrick wrote. “Praise God your life was spared ‘For such a time as this.’”

The religious fervor for Trump was quick to spread online, as some people claimed to spot a spiritual sign hanging above Trump’s rally before the former president had even mounted the stage: a flag that got twisted looked kind of like an angel.

As MAGA world fuels rumors that Trump’s attempted assassin was linked with antifa or DEI, his former classmates in Pennsylvania say the shooter was a conservative.

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, former classmates remember 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as a mild-mannered right-winger. “He was definitely a conservative,” said Max R. Smith, one of his ex-classmates.

When remembering Crooks, a classmate described a debate in American history class. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”

Others echoed the description, painting him as a quiet loner, while another former student described him as “a quiet kid, not obviously political or violent in any way.”

Public records seem to back up the claim that Crooks was on the right, Crooks registered as a Republican in September 2021, the month he turned 18.

Some have also noted that Crooks appeared to be sporting a T-shirt from gun fanatic YouTube channel “Demolition Ranch.”

On Biden’s Inauguration Day, however, a 17-year-old Crooks also allegedly made a $15 donation to a “Progressive Turnout Project PAC,” which has been given much attention. As Ryan Grim at DropSite news reports, this contribution shouldn’t be given too much weight. The email-based PAC regularly spams inboxes with confusing links and flashy colors and can hardly be seen as demonstrating much about the shooter’s ideology.

The FBI has still not found a possible motive for the shooting.

Judge Aileen Cannon may have dismissed Donald Trump’s classified documents case on Monday, but not everyone was on the same legal page as the Trump-appointed judge.

Democratic lawmakers and legal scholars jointly torched Cannon’s 93-page decision, accusing the ruling of breaking precedent and effectively handing Trump everything he had been hoping for: a near-indefinite delay that erases the case from the immediacy of the 2024 presidential race.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer called for the decision’s immediate appeal, describing the ruling as “breathtakingly misguided” and ”wrong on the law.”

“This is further evidence that Judge Cannon cannot handle this case impartially and must be reassigned,” Schumer told HuffPost.

Representative Dan Goldman also joined the chorus, claiming that Cannon knew that the Supreme Court “has upheld Special Counsel appointments time and time again.”

In an interview with HuffPost, the New York representative argued that the “Trump-packed Supreme Court” had handed Trump an immunity ruling related to his time in office, but that Cannon had “manufactured immunity for him” after term had ended.

Cannon rejected the case on the basis that the Independent Counsel Act, which she claimed served as the foundation for special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment, had expired and therefore invalidated Smith’s work on the case. That notion had been elevated by just one Supreme Court member—Justice Clarence Thomas—who wrote in a concurring opinion in Trump’s immunity ruling on July 1 that “if there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution.”

Cannon began hearing arguments in June over whether Smith’s appointment to the case was constitutional, but she caught considerable flack from legal experts for taking up the arguments, including from former Trump attorney Ty Cobb, who argued that there were mountains of legal precedent behind Smith’s appointment.

Smith has the ability to appeal the dismissal, though his office has not yet announced what their next steps will be.

Donald Trump is already celebrating Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to toss his entire classified documents case.

Trump took aim at Democrats and his court cases in a long rant, praising “this dismissal of the Lawless indictment in Florida” as a good first step that should be “followed quickly by the dismissal of the ALL the Witch Hunts,” mentioning his cases in New York, Washington, D.C., and Georgia.

The former president and convicted felon seems to be trying to tie Cannon’s dismissal of his classified documents case to any sympathy he’s gained after he was shot at a rally on Saturday. It’s more of the political opportunism that Trump is known for, continuously complaining about unfair treatment and claiming that everything is rigged against him. His supporters will probably start repeating it, especially since many of them have blamed Democrats and the left for the attempt on Trump’s life.

Cannon has long been suspected of either incompetence or rigging the case in favor of the former president and convicted felon. Trump has made no secret of his approval of Cannon and his expectation that she would dismiss the case, even hinting at it last month. Other reports seem to indicate that Cannon may have been biased toward Trump from the moment she was assigned the case. The fact that she went beyond the facts of Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and used a dubious constitutional argument to dismiss the case suggests bias, as the ruling will likely be reversed and will end up adding a longer delay.

The fact that Trump is now celebrating Cannon not only seems like a blatantly corrupt arrangement, it also shows that Trump isn’t changing his tone after the shooting.

“Getting shot in the face changes a man,” fellow Republican National Convention speaker Tucker Carlson told Axios, but it wasn’t even two full days after the shooting that Trump was back to his bombastic self.

If Trump’s post, Monday morning after one of his cases was dismissed, is any indication, his definition of unifying the country might be different from what the average person expects. Even his fellow Republicans are worried about how he will act at the Republican National Convention this week, fearing chaos from a nominee who goes off script even in normal speeches. No matter how much his speech is “toned down,” there will definitely be drama at the convention, and Trump will probably say something inflammatory.

Donald Trump and his team are pushing a so-called pivot toward unity in the wake of Saturday’s assassination attempt on the former president, and the media is absolutely eating it up—with positively no actual evidence to suggest that anything has changed.

While Trump’s allies were quick to blame Democrats and the media for Saturday’s shooting, the former president’s team has opted to go a different route, and switch up the script on his speech at the Republican National Convention. Trump is now touting the address, scheduled for Thursday, as a chance to “bring the country together.”

As a result of Saturday’s chaotic events, and early reports out of the Trump camp, many outlets are optimistically reporting a likely shift in rhetoric from the Republican candidate who has been using the same deeply divisive, violent, racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric for the past eight years.

“Trump will adopt an unfamiliar, almost benevolent posture, and call for unity in the face of tragedy,” Politico reported Monday, citing Trump’s “near-death experience,” which “would rattle and forever change even the strongest among us.”

Maggie Haberman of The New York Times said during a CNN interview Sunday that Trump seemed “completely normal” after the attempt on his life, but noted that she thought the former president might choose to recognize this as a “different kind of moment.”

Haberman pointed out that Trump hasn’t yet started selling merchandise featuring the photograph of him with blood on his face and his fist in the air, which could be a sign of a tonal shift.

But immediately after, Haberman warned against making such predictions. “Anybody who is trying to predict, number one, what the rest of this campaign looks like, or how he is going to talk about it, or how Democrats are going to talk about him, I think it is a mistake. There’s a lot we don’t know,” she said.*

Tucker Carlson certainly thinks Trump’s turn toward the light is real. “Getting shot in the face changes a man,” the erstwhile Fox News host told Axios.

In the same piece, Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen speculated about Trump’s next moves.

“He could unify America,” they wrote. “Imagine he gave a speech featuring something he rarely shows: humility. Imagine him telling the nation that he has been too rough, too loose, too combative with his language—and now realizes words can have consequences, and promises to tone it down and bring new voices into the White House if he wins.”

Similarly, Elliot Ackerman penned a piece for The Atlantic arguing that “Trump could take a different path” than the one he’s been set on for almost a decade. “Trump has called his enemies ‘bad people’ in the past, but now he’s suffered a near-death experience,” Ackerman wrote. “Sometimes that changes people.”

This kind of speculation is pure fiction, however, as Trump’s assassination attempt has only emboldened his preexisting victim complex, which has convinced him he’s the target of systemic political persecution, and not criminal prosecution. By Monday morning, when it was announced that Judge Aileen Cannon had tossed Trump’s classified documents case, the former president was back posting his same old martyred talking points on Truth Social.

“As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts—The January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia ‘Perfect’ Phone Call charges,” Trump wrote.

“The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME.”

He did include one limp appeal toward unity: “Let us come together to END all Weaponization of our Justice System and Make America Great Again!”

It took about 36 hours for Trump to abandon his call to unite a divided America and get back to talking about himself. As the Republican National Convention begins, it’s worth remaining skeptical of Trump and his team’s attempts to paint him as a changed man. Trump was desperate to widen his appeal to centrist voters long before this weekend, and he will continue to use Saturday’s violent unfoldings to distract voters from his own equally violent rhetoric.

* This story has been updated to include Maggie Haberman’s full quote.