REJOICE!! Trump Will Sign Executive Order Making Him The Head of All Chruches In The Country

[Krell]

He knows that Christians are gullible dupes and mocks them daily.

Our prisons will be overflowing with Christians if they continue to
criticize him. He will not tolerate questions or criticizm from anyone,
especially Religious people.


Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters
Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism
and contempt about believers.

One day in 2015, Donald Trump beckoned Michael Cohen, his longtime
confidant and personal attorney, into his office. Trump was brandishing a
printout of an article about an Atlanta-based megachurch pastor trying to
raise $60 million from his flock to buy a private jet. Trump knew the
preacher personally—Creflo Dollar had been among a group of evangelical
figures who visited him in 2011 while he was first exploring a presidential
bid. During the meeting, Trump had reverently bowed his head in prayer
while the pastors laid hands on him. Now he was gleefully reciting the
impious details of Dollar’s quest for a Gulfstream G650.
Trump seemed delighted by the “scam,” Cohen recalled to me, and eager to
highlight that the pastor was “full of shit.”

“They’re all hustlers,” Trump said.
The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been
premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats
hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes
praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My
administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he
declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. It’s a message his
campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to
confirm Amy Coney Barrett—a devout, conservative Catholic—to the Supreme
Court.
But in private, many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by
cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former
aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders,
dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride
certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who
constitute his base.
Read: The Christians who loved Trump’s church stunt
Reached for comment, a White House spokesman said that “people of faith
know that President Trump is a champion for religious liberty and the
sanctity of life, and he has taken strong actions to support them and
protect their freedom to worship. The president is also well known for
joking and his terrific sense of humor, which he shares with people of all
faiths.”
From the outset of his brief political career, Trump has viewed right-wing
evangelical leaders as a kind of special-interest group to be schmoozed,
conned, or bought off, former aides told me. Though he faced Republican
primary opponents in 2016 with deeper religious roots—Ted Cruz, Mike
Huckabee—Trump was confident that his wealth and celebrity would attract
high-profile Christian surrogates to vouch for him.
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“His view was ‘I’ve been talking to these people for years; I’ve let them
stay at my hotels—they’re gonna endorse me. I played the game,’” said a
former campaign adviser to Trump, who, like others quoted in this story,
spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity
preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their
hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube
video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,”
while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some
racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at
Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised
sermons.
In Cohen’s recent memoir, Disloyal, he recounts Trump returning from his
2011 meeting with the pastors who laid hands on him and sneering, “Can you
believe that bullshit?” But if Trump found their rituals ridiculous, he
followed their moneymaking ventures closely. “He was completely familiar
with the business dealings of the leadership in many prosperity-gospel
churches,” the adviser told me.

The conservative Christian elites Trump surrounds himself with have always
been more clear-eyed about his lack of religiosity than they’ve publicly
let on. In a September 2016 meeting with about a dozen influential figures
on the religious right—including the talk-radio host Eric Metaxas, the
Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress, and the theologian Wayne
Grudem—the then-candidate was blunt about his relationship to Christianity.

In a recording of the meeting obtained by The Atlantic, the candidate can
be heard shrugging off his scriptural ignorance (“I don’t know the Bible as
well as some of the other people”) and joking about his inexperience with
prayer (“The first time I met [Mike Pence], he said, ‘Will you bow your
head and pray?’ and I said, ‘Excuse me?’ I’m not used to it.”) At one point
in the meeting, Trump interrupted a discussion about religious freedom to
complain about Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska and brag about the taunting
nickname he’d devised for him. “I call him Little Ben Sasse,” Trump said.

“I have to do it, I’m sorry. That’s when my religion always deserts me.”
And yet, by the end of the meeting—much of which was spent discussing the
urgency of preventing trans women from using women’s restrooms—the
candidate had the group eating out of his hand. “I’m not voting for Trump
to be the teacher of my third grader’s Sunday-school class. That’s not what
he’s running for,” Jeffress said in the meeting, adding, “I believe it is
imperative … that we do everything we can to turn people out.”

The Faustian nature of the religious right’s bargain with Trump has not
always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the
Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than twice as likely as
the average American to say that the president is a religious man. Some
conservative pastors have described him as a “baby Christian,” and insist
that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his savior.

To those who have known and worked with Trump closely, the notion that he
might have a secret spiritual side is laughable. “I always assumed he was
an atheist,” Barbara Res, a former executive at the Trump Organization,
told me. “He’s not a religious guy,” A. J. Delgado, who worked on his 2016
campaign, told me. “Whenever I see a picture of him standing in a group of
pastors, all of their hands on him, I see a thought bubble [with] the words
‘What suckers,’” Mary Trump, the president’s niece, told me.

Greg Thornbury, a former president of the evangelical King’s College, who
was courted by the campaign in 2016, told me that even those who
acknowledge Trump’s lack of personal piety are convinced that he holds
their faith in high esteem. “I don’t think for a moment that they would
believe he’s cynical about them,” Thornbury said.

Trump’s public appeals to Jewish voters have been similarly discordant with
his private comments. Last week, The Washington Post reported that after
calls with Jewish lawmakers, the president has said that Jews “are only in
it for themselves.” And while he is quick to tout his daughter Ivanka’s
conversion to Judaism when he’s speaking to Jewish audiences, he is
sometimes less effusive in private. Cohen told me that once, years ago, he
was with Trump when his wife, Melania, informed him that their son was at a
playdate with a Jewish girl from his school. “Great,” Trump said to Cohen,
who is Jewish. “I’m going to lose another one of my kids to your people.”
One religious group that the Trump campaign is keenly fixated on this year
is Mormons. In 2016, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints rejected the Republican ticket in unprecedented numbers. To win them
over in 2020, the campaign has made Donald Trump Jr. its envoy, sending him
to campaign in Utah and other Mormon-heavy states. The president’s son has
cultivated relationships with high-profile conservatives in the faith.
Earlier this year, he invoked Mormon pioneers in a call with reporters to
describe his father’s “innovative spirit.”

In fact, according to two senior Utah Republicans with knowledge of the
situation, Don Jr. has been so savvy in courting Latter-day
Saints—expressing interest in the Church’s history, reading from the Book
of Mormon—that he’s left some influential Republicans in the state with the
impression that he may want to convert. (A spokesman for Don Jr. did not
respond to a request for comment.)

I’ve been curious about the president’s opinion of Mormonism ever since I
interviewed him in 2014 at Mar-a-Lago. During our conversation, Trump began
to strenuously argue that Mitt Romney’s exotic faith had cost him the 2012
election. When I interrupted to inform him that I’m also a Mormon, he
quickly changed tack—extolling my Church’s many virtues, and then switching
subjects. (He remained committed to his theory about 2012: During his
September 2016 meeting with evangelical leaders, Trump repeatedly asserted
that “Christians” didn’t turn out for Romney “because of the Mormon
thing.”) I’ve always wondered what Trump might have said if I hadn’t cut
him off.

When I shared this story with Cohen, he laughed. Trump, he said, frequently
made fun of Romney’s faith in private—and was especially vicious when he
learned about the religious undergarments worn by many Latter-day Saints.
“Oh my god,” Cohen said. “How many times did he bring up Mitt Romney and
the undergarments …”

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Yay ! I wonder what Pope Don will do first ? :-)