All the Times Trump Has Talked About the Afterlife
- - All the Times Trump Has Talked About the Afterlife
Miranda JeyaretnamAugust 21, 2025 at 2:43 AM
President Donald Trump at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown, Pa., on Aug. 3, 2025. Credit - Brendan Smialowski—AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump made a sobering confession about his motivations to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. And it wasn’t to get a Nobel Peace Prize.
“If I can save 7,000 people a week from getting killed, that’s pretty good,” the President said Tuesday on Fox & Friends. “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”
The comment has attracted much attention on social media, with some critics joking that a man known for cheating in his personal and professional lives, degrading people and deporting people, and mocking worshippers while hawking bibles is unlikely to get past the pearly gates. Others have questioned whether his soul-searching is a sign of potentially terminal health concerns.
“I think the President was serious,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday when asked about Trump’s comment. “I think the President wants to get to heaven—as I hope we all do in this room as well.”
It was a stunning display of unknowing about one’s fate from a man who has in the past evinced a messianic complex and who has amassed a number of supporters who believe he’s been “anointed by God.” But it’s also not the first time that Trump has publicly contemplated the afterlife—or even mused about his own prospects.
“We go someplace”
“I don’t believe in reincarnation, heaven or hell—but we go someplace,” Trump said in an interview with Playboy in 1990, according to Buzzfeed News. “Do you know, I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where.”
Through the ’90s, Trump continued to distance himself from the Christian Church. A 1997 profile in Playboy called him “not a religious man.”
Two years later, as Trump was teeing up a potential presidential run in 2000 as part of the Reform Party, he distinguished between a personal belief in God and organized religion.
“Well, I think there’s a difference between believing in God and organized religion, number one,” he said on Today in 1999. “I think that God and the belief in God is more important than organized religion. But I think organized religion’s important in that it keeps people in the straight and narrow.”
“The only way I’m going to get to heaven”
By the time Trump ran for President in 2016, he described himself as a church-goer.
“Can you believe it? Nobody believes I’m Presbyterian. I’m Presbyterian. I’m Presbyterian. I’m Presbyterian. Boy, that’s down the middle of the road folks, in all fairness,” he said in 2015.
That year, he joked about the presidency being his ticket into heaven.
“So go out and spread the word and once I get in [to the White House], I will do my thing that I do very well,” Trump told a crowd of over 700 evangelical pastors in Orlando, Fla. “And I figure it’s probably maybe the only way I’m going to get to heaven. So I better do a good job.”
Major parts of the world are “going to hell”
Trump has also on multiple occasions invoked hell. In his first address to the United Nations General Assembly in 2017, Trump said, “Major portions of the world are in conflict and some, in fact, are going to hell.”
His speech touched on God several more times, ending with: “We will fight together, sacrifice together, and stand together for peace, for freedom, for justice, for family, for humanity, and for the almighty God who made us all. Thank you, God bless you, God bless the nations of the world, and God bless the United States of America.”
He also said that the U.S. was “going to hell” in 2015 and again in 2022, 2023 and 2024, during his campaigns for President.
“I want to just thank everybody, in particular, God,” Trump said during his second-term inauguration speech. “I was saved by God to make America great again.”
“If I’m good, I’m going to heaven”
“I do [believe in heaven],” Trump said in an interview on Fox News in August 2024 after the assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pa. “If I’m good, I’m going to heaven. And if I’m bad, I’m going someplace else.”
When asked what he prays for, he said, “Well, I pray for our country. I pray, obviously. I pray for the same thing you pray—our family and our country … and I guess we have a world. I pray for the world too.”
Later in September, Trump, who is 79, recounted in an episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast how “a very successful” octogenarian friend told him he thinks about death constantly: “He said, ‘I think about it every minute of every day.’ Then, a week later, he called me to tell me something, and he starts off the conversation by going, ‘Tick-tock, tick-tock.’ This is a dark person, in a sense, but it is what it is.”
Trump went on: “If you’re religious, you have I think a better feeling toward it. You’re supposed to go to heaven ideally, not hell, but you’re supposed to go to heaven if you’re good.”
“Not 100% sure” about his father getting to heaven
At a rally in Madison Square Garden last October in the lead up to the election, Trump told a crowd of around 20,000 people that he’s “not 100% sure” about his father’s chances of having gone to the great beyond.
“My father is looking down on me right now,” Trump said. “He was a tough guy. But he was legit. And I know my mother’s in heaven. I’m not 100% sure of my father, but it’s close.”
Trump’s quip came in a rant about the four criminal charges against him, which included conspiring to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat, mishandling classified documents, and falsifying business records to hide “hush money” payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
“He’s looking down at me right now,” Trump said, “and he’s saying, ‘How the hell did this happen to my son? He’s not a bad person.’”
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Source: “AOL Politics”
