Donald Trump Plays Church | The New Yorker
It’s usually gauche to take pictures in church. But at St. John’s, the Episcopal Church just across a sedate Lafayette Square from the White House, photography is inevitable at least once every four years. Every Inauguration Day, many of the most powerful representatives of the United States government, past and quickly matriculating, go to the so-called Church of the Presidents, notionally to pray. The intimate sanctuary, with its air of contemplation, is, in this way, a small part of the theatre of American continuity. Presidential Administrations, so often wildly divergent one from the other in tone and in political direction, are concatenated by this littlest nod toward God.
Back in 2020—a lifetime ago politically, but just yesterday when you think about it—the air outside that church was thick with tear gas. Troops deployed by Donald Trump’s orders beat back a crowd gathered in the square to protest police brutality. Trump needed the space to stand in front of the church’s marquee and hold up a Bible: a photo-op dense with symbols over which Trump—a producer of spectacle, yes, but seldom of deep meaning—had no interest in exerting control. He just wanted a picture.
On Monday morning, just before his Inauguration, Trump was back inside the church, juicing its ceremonial power for a few more drops of self-aggrandizement. There were pictures from the pews, most notably of the gaggle of tech titans who have taken to following Trump around, from Mar-a-Lago to D.C., throwing laurels at his feet and offering him sacrificial gestures. They all want to be seen wanting him to succeed. It’s been a long way down from their kind’s originary pose as benign geniuses who wanted to bring peace, love, and connectedness to the world one byte or bit of binary code at a time. These are the people who used to use Gandhi’s likeness in TV commercials for personal computers. Maybe they were fated for this recent rendezvous with Trump: they’re all wishing someone would notice that they’re the messiahs, not the guy bleeding out up there on the cross.
Nobody looked especially pious; you’d be silly to expect it. Mark Zuckerberg’s floofy hair and blank aspect could be glimpsed, as could Jeff Bezos’s shiny face, which is each time somehow plumper and more moist-looking than it was the last time you saw it. A few rows ahead of the techies was the “comedian” and podcaster Joe Rogan, who used to pretend to “just be asking questions” but has lately become convinced that everybody in the world but him is always being unfair to his new friend Don.
Soon Trump loped out of his limo looking how he usually does at moments like this: like a kid already restless to be let out of church. Because he has no sense of his own continuity with the past or debt to the future, he seems baffled by the choreographies and ceremonial duties of the state. He understands a nice big desk—it’s where you fire people, or get on the horn with whichever big shot will take your call (these days, it’s most of them), or take pictures of yourself looking busy and important. But an altar, where you kneel, will always be alien to Trump. He was accompanied by his wife, Melania, who was ready to do another tour of duty, wearing a sharp-looking, wide-brimmed navy-and-white hat that brought Michael Jackson to mind. The razor blade rim said “Stay away” and “I’d rather not have to see this” all in one breath. The Trumps are experienced at their version of this job now, and so, woefully, are we.
After church, Trump cruised to the White House, where he had his obligatory staged meeting with Joe Biden—Trump opted out of this encounter back in 2020, because, again, he thinks this kind of stuff is for chumps unless it’s him on the winning end—and then went to the Inauguration ceremony, inside the Capitol, yet another locale that he has found astounding ways to desecrate. You’d think he’d feel funny standing there on the dais in the rotunda, about to be sworn in not so long after inciting a riot in the very same building. But Trump’s sense of humor—you have to admit that it exists; like it or not, his Dangerfield act is one of the reasons for his continued political relevance—doesn’t extend far. He certainly has no irony when it comes to interior décor. His great aesthetic talent is at turning austere environments into staging grounds for schlock.
The rest of the crowd, seen through the roving, irony-hungry cable-news cameras, was all farcical adjacency: Jared Kushner sat not far from Zuckerberg, both shaking hands robotically and otherwise playacting at human social skills. Jill Biden—who reportedly gave her husband some of the worst advice of this American century, already somehow a quarter spent—looked stricken, and sometimes seemed, at least to my eyes, to be choking back tears. She should’ve spent that emotion on a selfless talk with Joe long before July. A piano rendition of Thomas Chisholm’s hymn “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” played as Elon Musk looked around with his gonzo eyes and inexplicable body language. A fickle billionaire set to advise a faithless President—a version of American greatness only the tartest satirist could love.
There were cameras set up in a hallway to the rotunda, so television viewers could see former attempts at national stewardship enter the building. Bill and Hillary Clinton strolled in looking strained. Barack Obama, who has taken to showing up stag at this sort of thing—Michelle said no thanks a couple of weeks ago to Jimmy Carter’s funeral, another set piece for the assertion of a thinning American civic religion—did his usual bop, a cool-guy act that’s starting to get old as real emergencies keep licking at our heels. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, those totems of Democratic impotence, entered together and acted as if they’d been instructed never to shoot each other so much as a passing glance. The old bipartisan establishment that somehow keeps giving way to the New York real-estate fraud looked every bit as blithe and befuddled as Trump has twice now shown them to be. Trump is a disaster, but he has confirmed the growing sense, almost everywhere in our country, that these people deserve to be defeated, over and over, until they change or, better, pass the baton of leadership for good.
Trump’s consistently bad taste in music is almost funny. He brought on the yowling Christopher Macchio—apparently a favorite of his late brother Robert—to sing not one but two numbers at the inaugural ceremony. As things got going, Macchio wrestled with his own pitch, and, while singing a mushy version of the song “Oh, America,” struggled against the tempo set by whoever was on the drums.
Timothy Dolan, the publicity-friendly Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of New York, impressed upon the assembled that “without God our efforts turn to ashes.” That’s a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., whose holiday—yet another irony, probably sadder than the others but no less natural an outgrowth of this nation’s continually multiplying paradoxes—was made, this year, to share space with the unstinting agitator of the Central Park Five. Franklin Graham, son of Billy—one of those classic, homegrown examples of slight decline from one American generation to the next; his dad could sometimes be a bigot, but at least the man could preach—kowtowed to Trump, directing his prayer more to the man than to God. “The last four years, there were times I’m sure you thought it was pretty dark,” he said. “But look what God has done.”
When Trump was sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts, he gave a little fourth-wall-breaking smirk. He knows better than most where the cameras are and who his real audience is: the folks back home huddled around their TVs. What he said with that gesture was: Now would you look at this? These losers are letting me back in!
Without full knowledge of the past few days of Trump’s life, it’s impossible to claim this as a fact, but I felt sure, watching Trump deliver his Inaugural Address, that he was reading it for the first time. His energy was low, especially at first, and his vocal tone was that of an elementary-school kid thrust toward the front of the class and made to recite. He emphasized the wrong parts of several longish sentences and rushed through whole paragraphs whose content he manifestly found boring. “Sunlight is pouring over the entire world,” he said, inanely. When he read his speechwriter’s promise that the incoming Administration would “not forget our God,” Trump added, in his faux-solemn mocking way, what seemed to be a glib ad-lib: “Can’t do that.” And it’s true: you can’t forget what you’ve never given a thought.
It’s strange, though: Trump clearly has no real respect for religion and its adherents—for at least part of his swearing-in, his hand was not on the Bible that Melania held for him, but hanging at his side—and no connection to the strong, sometimes unhinged belief in providence that has hummed under all kinds of American glories and American malfeasance, but he has chosen, this time around, to cast himself as an especially favored vessel of the Almighty. He’s still using the genuinely shocking attempt on his life last July in Pennsylvania to give himself the glowing cast of true religion. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said. If you believe in God, it’s hard to deny that he was spared on that day. But in order to keep your faith and like life as it presents itself to us—let alone like America—one has to keep a rich sense of divine comedy and cosmic inscrutability. Who can know, until time has finished its unfolding, what Trump’s really still around to accomplish? Maybe just to keep repeating lies so grand that we can all assume their opposite meanings to be uncontroversially true—such as this tossed-off whopper later on in the speech: “That’s what I wanna be: a peacemaker and a unifier.”
