Trump just proved this powerful group is a bunch of dangerous hypocrites. They don't care

Yesterday I watched, horrified and spellbound — which is becoming a regular thing — as an event purportedly built on prayer, humility, and the teachings of Jesus Christ dissolved into a Trump rally, complete with guffaws, applause, and a bizarre reverence for every absurd turpitude that tumbled out of the President’s trashy mouth.

It was supposed to be the National Prayer Breakfast: a moment for spiritual reflection and interfaith unity, a morning convocation with a rich history of presidents offering words about the importance of faith.

In 2022, for example, an actual Christian, President Joe Biden, said: “Rather than driving us apart, faith can move us together.”

He urged Americans to see one another not as enemies, but as neighbors.

When the demonic Donald Trump takes the microphone and begins ghoulishly speaking in tongues, words dripping with his ever-present turpitude, such sentiments get crunched to bits.

This year’s gathering became a one-man show. Trump spent nearly an hour rambling, preening, lying, insulting allies and enemies, and praising himself as the savior of American religion.

He claimed he did more for religion than any president in history. He was right. He heaved heaven to hell in a handbasket.

I watched his senselessness unfold on CNN, and what still stuns me is why networks continue to broadcast these so-called speeches. Trump doesn’t care where he is or who he’s addressing. It’s always the same unhinged refuse. Prepared remarks are abandoned or never even exist — he just presents nasty, confused riffs. So why analyze what he’s saying? It surely serves no purpose.

But here we are. Trump’s audience lapped it up. That should tell us everything we need to know about the state of “Christian” political allegiance.

Right out of the gate, Trump called a fellow Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a “moron.” Remember, this was a prayer breakfast. He babbled about Speaker Mike Johnson calling him at 3 a.m. To what end, no one could decipher. The audience leaned in like it was gospel.

Johnson deserves special mention. This is the man who recently scoffed at Pope Leo XIV’s biblical critique of Trump’s immigration policies, delivering a smug theological rebuttal that insulted just about every religious tradition on earth.

The man who once lawyered for a Noah’s Ark amusement park attempted to explain scripture to the Pope, arguing that borders and assimilation — capitulation, really — are biblical, all while defending cruelty as policy. It was surreal, and it laid bare how in certain corners of American Christianity, politics has now devoured faith.

Back to Trump. He boasted about Republican victories, disparaged Democrats, and lashed out — again, and it is getting as old as he is — at Former President Biden. At a prayer breakfast, remember. The audience smiled as Trump rambled about Biden’s supposed inability to understand what Trump was saying, which would actually be proof of Biden’s solid cognitive state. He’s just like the rest of us.

Trump lied about the recent racist arrest of former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was exercising basic journalistic freedom while livestreaming a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The protesters were confronting a pastor believed tied to ICE. Trump called Lemon’s actions “horrible” and labeled him the protesters “bad people.” The room applauded. Yes, because a gay Black journalist doing his job is “bad people,” to them. That’s three strikes against him. No doubt many in attendance consider Lemon the Antichrist, or at least his emissary.

Thankfully, Trump didn’t linger on his belief that Jesus saved him from assassination so he could turn America into a despotic nation. He did, however, joke about how grateful he was that his hair was unharmed. This from a man whose ludicrous combover tells a different story.

The point is that Trump’s diatribe was utterly unsuitable for the setting but perfectly suited for the audience, which appears to believe that atop his freaky follicles sits a halo.

Trump drew laughter and applause more appropriate for a comedy club or campaign rally than a gathering to contemplate humility and sacrifice. This wasn’t a prayer breakfast. It was an ego-worship service.

And they didn’t just laugh. These deplorable excuses for Christians hung on every word as if it were scripture. That is the truly unsettling part: a supposedly Christian audience choosing nonsense, vanity, and resentment.

Amid this spectacle of sanctified idolatry, one man briefly reminded the room what prayer is supposed to look like.

Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-IL) rose not to flatter Trump, but to pray for his soul. With Trump standing behind him, Jackson asked God to forgive the president, to soften his heart, and to make him mindful of the poor, the suffering, and grieving families — including those mourning in Minneapolis.

The audience response was tepid. Compassion rarely plays well in rooms full of superiority, arrogance, and white power, especially when it comes from a Black Democrat.

Still, Jackson’s invocation was the lone moment that resembled Christianity.

He did not genuflect, as Trump expects Black people to do. He did not confuse nationalism with faith. He spoke truth to power and centered the vulnerable — precisely what Christians are called to do. That took courage.

How far political figures will go to weaponize religion in service of cruelty. In the hands of Speaker Johnson, the Pope’s basic appeal for compassion toward migrants was reduced to ideological idiocy, the gospel warped to match Trump’s inhumanity.

Johnson is publicly devout but his spiritual leader is Trump. That devotion guarantees him a one-way trip to hell.

It’s one thing for politicians to be cynical. It’s another for self-identified Christians to celebrate the subversion of Jesus’s teachings, turning sacred tradition into a platform for seething self-promotion.

If the core of Christianity is love of neighbor, mercy, and humility, what are we to make of a crowd that cheers a man for whom empathy is weakness, humility a disease?

If American Christianity hopes to reclaim its moral spine, it must confront a simple truth: kissing up to Donald the Demon is not the same as following the Prince of Peace.

• John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”