Fresh off of posting an image of himself as Jesus and attacking the pope for being “soft on crime,” on Tuesday night, Christian nationalist President Donald Trump shared a pre-recorded a video of himself reading 2 Chronicles from the Bible for a livestream event called “America Reads the Bible.”
The event was organized by Bunni Pounds, the founder of an organization called Christians Engaged, which considers homosexuals and gay marriage to be “abominations.”
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The other readers in the event included a pastor at the Christian ministry Faith and Liberty. The ministry lobbied against a 2025 bill to establish LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections, complaining that it would help “the obscenities and recruiting efforts of the LGBTQ agenda” and turn “’America the Brave’ … into ‘America the Queer’,” The Guardian reported.
Other readers also came from the Her Voice Movement, which tells people they can help avert an LGBTQ+ “crisis” by becoming a “visionary” member of its organization for just $4,000 a month.
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Trump’s public relationship with the Bible seems quite strained: He has sold autographed copies of it for $60 a pop; when asked in 2016, he couldn’t recite a single Bible verse, and he refused to swear upon it during his 2024 inauguration ceremony.
Trump, of course, has focused a great deal of his second presidential term on persecuting trans people. He may be unaware of Matthew 25:40, a Bible verse in which Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The verse implies that one’s actions towards the most vulnerable reflect one’s own relationship to god.
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