(New York) Every American president since Abraham Lincoln has lived in the awareness or fear of his possible and sudden end. He is certainly not the only one among his compatriots to know he is mortal, but a bullet arrived so quickly.
Donald Trump is particularly well placed to know this, having narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in July 2024, when he was a presidential candidate.
But there are other possible endings, including that brought about by advanced age.
And if he does not yet know when or how his days will end, the president is, at 79 years old, more talkative than any of his predecessors about how he will spend eternity.
Will the doors of Paradise open for him?
Last August, Donald Trump said he could facilitate admission by saving “7,000 people a week from death.” It would be enough for him to help end the war between Ukraine and Russia.
But he wasn’t sure.
“I want to try to go to heaven, if possible,” he told the hosts of Fox & Friends. “I hear I’m not doing well. I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can go to heaven, that will be one of the reasons. »
Last week, the president clarified that he was joking when he spoke of his hope of achieving supreme and eternal happiness.
“When I made that statement, I was joking, I was being sarcastic,” he told Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
But he could not help but return to this tenacious, even obsessive, hope, which he often expresses in a manner contrary to Christian doctrine, as we will see later.
“I don’t know whether or not I will enter (heaven),” said the president, who no longer appeared to be joking.
A “lame duck”?
Another end awaits Donald Trump. A political rather than existential end.
There comes a point during his second term when a president becomes a “lame duck”. The head of the executive is still in office, but his influence is inexorably diminishing. Normally, this moment comes sometime after the midterm elections, as the ruling party in the White House begins searching for a candidate for the next presidential election.
However, on November 6, the following headline topped an article published on the Politico news site: “Donald Trump enters his lame duck period.” The media cited as proof the resounding victories of the Democratic Party in the local elections the day before, as well as the refusal of Senate Republicans to accede to the president’s request to eliminate a parliamentary rule (the “filibuster”) to put an end to the budgetary paralysis.
The “lame duck” theme has inspired several other media. Some of them pointed out that Donald Trump had never seemed more “out of touch.” So, while his own constituents were complaining about rising prices and his administration was cutting off food aid to the poor, the president was tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a huge ballroom and throwing a Halloween-themed party at Mar-a-Lago. The Great Gatsbywith sumptuous decoration from the 1920s.
This image of a weakened and disoriented president could be reinforced or contradicted by the vote that the House of Representatives must hold on Tuesday on the Epstein files.
If dozens of Republican representatives voted to release these documents, as rumored, the “lame duck” theme would gain momentum.
It would be, for Trump, hell on earth, or almost.
His parents in heaven
That said, the word “hell” rarely crosses Donald Trump’s lips when he talks about what he will experience in the afterlife. He usually reserves this term to describe the fate that awaits his enemies or adversaries.
“Your countries are going straight to hell,” he told the UN last September, criticizing Europe’s migration policies.
But the word “paradise” constantly reappears in his speeches when he talks about his family or himself. After his conviction in the Stormy Daniels case, he imagined his parents’ reaction several times in front of his supporters.
“My parents are in heaven. They are up there watching us. They say, “How could this happen to my son?” “, he said at a rally.
Sometimes he admits to having doubts about his father’s final destination.
“I know my mother is in heaven. I’m not 100% sure about my father,” he said at the rally held at Madison Square Garden in late October 2024.
Donald Trump seems to believe that God keeps a record of the good deeds of Christians, much like Santa Claus does before handing out his gifts.
“If I am good, I will go to heaven. And if I’m bad, I’ll go somewhere else,” he said after the assassination attempt on him in Pennsylvania.
Of course, heaven cannot be reduced to mere reward. In the heavenly equation, faith in Jesus and God’s grace count more than personal merit.
