Renee White was sitting behind Donald Trump a week ago when shots were fired at a rally in Pennsylvania and a gunman attempted to assassinate the former US president.
On Saturday, she attended his first campaign rally since the shooting and was convinced that God had built a “protective wall” around the Republican who is seeking a return to the Oval Office.
White, a 57-year-old from North Carolina who has attended dozens of Trump speeches, was one of many believers in the thousands-strong crowd at the Grand Rapids rally who said they had no doubt that Trump is alive today by divine providence.
Messianic fervor has only grown since the shocking shooting a week earlier, and it has been flowing through the arena since a prayer for Trump opened the event.
“God has a protective wall around him,” White told AFP, recalling the chaos in Butler, Pennsylvania, when Trump was injured by an assassin and how the 78-year-old Republican stood up and raised his fist in the air in defiance.
“Trump has a job and a mission to fulfill, like Noah and Moses” from the Bible, said White, wearing a light blue “Make America Great Again” cap.
“Do we believe this is a moment of God? Yes,” she added. “He is catching the arrows for all of us.”
Trump himself, who wore a smaller, less conspicuous bandage on his ear on Saturday than the large white square seen earlier in the week, also mentioned the role that providence played in the process.
“I stand before you only by the grace of Almighty God,” he told the crowd.
“I shouldn’t be here right now, but something very special happened.”
– ‘Closer to God’ –
Jan Dejong, a retired nurse who waited in line for hours to attend Saturday’s rally, said the energy after the shooting, the mood and Trump himself – everything felt different.
“Something has changed,” she said, referring to Trump’s somber performance at the recent Republican convention, where he was crowned the party’s front-runner to face President Joe Biden in November.
Trump is grateful to be here, Dejong said. “I believe he was spared to be our president.”
While many insist that Trump’s survival was also due to faith, rally attendee Danny Clemons of Benton Harbor, Michigan, said that does not make Trump a divine figure.
However, he is convinced that faith went both ways on that fateful day in Pennsylvania.
“The fact that he was not murdered, in my opinion, made him a more religious person and brought him closer to God,” Clemons told AFP.
Before entering politics, Trump expressed an aversion to religion and boasted of actions that were in clear contradiction to Christian principles.
But Trump looks “like a different person” after this assassination, Clemons said.
Trump said he was raised as a Presbyterian but now considers himself a “non-denominational Christian.”
Sitting in the arena, 60-year-old Fred Kopplow, a health care executive from Traverse City, said he also believes “faith played a role” when Trump turned his head ever so slightly and a bullet grazed his ear rather than causing catastrophic damage.
“It wasn’t the wind,” said Kopplow. “Something had to intervene.”
While Trump and two other people were injured, a participant in the rally in Butler – a firefighter – was killed in the shooting while protecting his family amid the chaos.
“I find it more than sad, but he had a higher goal,” said Kopplow. “He did not die in vain.”
mlm/acb
