Rocío Cleveland was at a wedding on Saturday when she heard the news that something had happened to Donald Trump. He had fallen, clutching his ear, while giving remarks at a rally and it wasn’t yet clear if he was injured or even dead.
“It took a little bit for it to sink in,” said Cleveland, a conservative activist from Illinois who attended the Republican national convention this week. “I was speechless, I was crying, I was in tears.”
Trump had been tackled to the ground by a Secret Service detail after a gunman, perched on a nearby roof, opened fire on the crowd at a Trump rally. When the former US president rose, shaking his fist, blood dripping down his face – apparently only grazed by the would-be assassin’s bullet – the moment, for Cleveland, was euphoric.
“I think this tragic event that happened to President Trump, I think it will restore the faith in our country, as horrible as it may sound,” Cleveland said. “The world saw a miracle before their eyes.”
Cleveland’s perspective – that Trump’s survival was more than just luck – is shared widely by Christian believers in the Maga (Make America great again) movement who have seen the hand of God in Trump’s recent escape from serious harm at the hands of a gun-wielding 20-year-old shooter with no easily discernible motive.
It also bolsters Trump’s support in a key part of the Republican base – conservative evangelicals – that he and his team have been seeking to woo be deploying Christian imagery throughout his 2024 campaign.
The religious feeling, that Trump was saved in an act of divine intervention, quickly took hold in the Republican party after the shooting, with grassroots activists, internet personalities and powerful Republican lawmakers offering religious explanations for the near-miss.
“I have no doubt that God lowered a shield of protection over Donald Trump,” Ben Carson, Trump’s former secretary of housing and urban development, told the crowd on Tuesday night.
Carson said he had “watched with horror” as Trump was shot.
“And my thoughts immediately turned to the book of Isiah,” Carson said. “That says no weapon formed against you shall prosper.”
Others have also suggested divine intervention. One viral image that circulated on X in the days after the shooting showed how close the bullet came to striking Trump in the brain, rather than grazing his ear.
“God intervened,” a caption on the photo read. The image has been viewed almost 800,000 times.
Trump has not always been a favourite of the Christian right. A thrice-married man who has referred to the Eucharist as a “little cracker”, who was reportedly unable to name a single Bible verse and says he has never asked God for forgiveness, seemed an unlikely hero when he first ran for president.
But Trump’s selection of the pious Mike Pence as his running mate allayed concerns in 2016, and his nomination of conservative justices to the supreme court paved the way for the overturning of Roe v Wade – a huge victory for conservative Christians and one that appears to have sealed the bond between them and Trump.
While religious Trump supporters at the grassroots level seized on to a biblical interpretation of the shooting, influential figures in the Christian right have amplified it.
In a podcast episode titled Prophecy or Coincidence, Lance Wallnau, an influential pastor and self-described prophet, said that prayers for Trump had “worked” in saving the former president, and speculated that the shooter had been motivated by the left to commit an act of spiritual warfare.
In the episode, Wallnau referred to an apparent authority on the subject: Trump, who in the wake of the shooting, claimed on Truth Social that it was “God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening”.
“We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness,” Trump wrote.
Again and again at the Republican national convention, prominent attendees and speakers echoed the sentiment.
“Let me start by giving thanks to God almighty for protecting president Trump, and for turning his head on Saturday as the shot was fired,” Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, said in his speech.
“Together we lift up in prayer all of our leaders for protection.”
Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman turned election conspiracy theorist and Trump ally, said during a podcast interview staged outside the convention center on Monday that an image of Trump on the ground, alive after the shooting, inspired in him a sense of religious awe.
“It’s like right there, you could feel the presence of God talking to us,” said Lindell, his voice wavering. “It’s gonna be OK. It’s gonna be OK.”
Others invoked darker forces. In his speech Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina, claimed “the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle”, while Marjorie Taylor Greene, the divisive Florida congresswoman, said “evil came for the man we admire and love so much”.
For Marlene Stuck, who traveled with congregants from her church in Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Milwaukee for the Republican national convention, the shooting was evidence of a fundamental spiritual truth.
“The word of God works,” said Stuck. “It saved his life.”
