Trump biography author recalls president's answer to 'Do you believe in God?'
President Trump has not been seen frequenting church services since his assuming office, but his outward rhetoric on God has changed as of late.
The president and first lady Melania Trump attended Easter service at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Church in Florida on Sunday, making it the fourth official religious appearance for the commander in chief. As people close to the president and outsiders looking in conjecture as to how Trump's religious views have changed, one man recalls a moment in which he asked Trump whether he believed in God.
"Donald has never been a spiritually or religiously serious person," Timothy O'Brien, author of the Trump biography "TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald" tells POLITICO.
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That statement, though, is in slight contrast to how Trump answered O'Brien's asking the president whether he believed in God in the mid-2000s.
According to O'Brien's book, this is how Trump responded:
"Yes. There has to be a reason we are here. What are we doing? You know there is an expression: 'Life is what you do while you're waiting to die,'" Trump responded, as O'Brien's book states. "There has to be a reason that we're going through this. There has to be a reason for everything. I do believe in God. I think there just has to be something that's far greater than us."
President Trump has invoked God's use in public rhetoric with relative frequency since his January inauguration. In context to the U.S. airstrikes in Syria, a newly appointed Supreme Court justice and a war on the opioid epidemic -- the president has enlisted a higher power in discussing each of these topics.
President Donald Trump has increasingly infused references to God into his prepared remarks — calling on God to bless all the world after launching strikes in Syria, asking God to bless the newest Supreme Court justice, invoking the Lord to argue in favor of a war on opioids.
In one of the first interviews of his presidency, Trump sat with the Christian Broadcasting Network and talked about his thoughts on prayer.
"I've always felt the need to pray," Trump stated. "The office is so powerful that you need God even more because your decisions are no longer, 'Gee I'm going to build a building in New York.' ... These are questions of massive, life-and-death."
After celebrating the Christian holiday on Sunday in Florida, President Trump and Melania Trump will host their first Easter Egg Roll at the White House on Monday.
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