US election Could the Christian right be Donald Trump's salvation?

A thrice-married man who refers to holy communion as involving a "little cracker", was apparently unable to name a single Bible verse and says he has never asked God for forgiveness was always an unlikely hero for the most conservative Christians in the US.

- Adam Gabbatt

But in both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump resoundingly won the vote of white evangelicals. Now, with Trump having almost certainly secured the Republican nomination for 2024 and eyeing a return to the White House, his campaign is doubling down on religious imagery, securing the evangelical base and signalling sympathies with Christian nationalism. Indeed, the former US president's relationship with the religious right has deepened so much that Trump is now comfortable with comparing himself to their messiah.

"And on June 14 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said: 'I need a caretaker,"" booms a video that Trump shared on his Truth Social account, and that has been played at some of his rallies. "So God gave us Trump."

The video, made by Dilley Meme Team, a group of Trump supporters, continues: "God said: 'I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay up past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state.' So God made Trump."

To some, it is a baffling pairing. Evangelicals, who typically adhere to a literal reading of the Bible and, theoretically, follow a strict code that opposes infidelity, immorality and abortion, and is critical of same-sex relationships, seem an odd match with a man like Trump.

But the pairing has had benefits for both parties: Trump was elected in 2016, and evangelicals got a conservative supreme court that has already overturned the Roe v Wade ruling, which enshrined a constitutional right to abortion.

Now Trump is believing the hype he's had from some on the religious right: that he has been chosen, or anointed, by God himself.