Donald Trump Is Absolutely Not Going to Heaven

Whether he's actually worried about it or not, this must be said.

Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images

The world is roughly 10 years into having to take Donald Trump seriously, though if I’m reading the room correctly, I think a large swath of us stopped doing that a very long ago. That’s not to say his existence and actions don’t matter deeply; they do, but trying to understand his words or him as a person became a secondary issue a long, long time ago.

Of course, some lost souls are continuing to try (ugh, sorry to my celeb crush Sebastian Stan!), but I think most people now experience Trump less like a human being and more like the weather. He is a spectacle, a wrecking ball, an agent of chaos and terror. Sure, he has thoughts and feelings and agency, but to spend time untangling those things is to wade into an irredeemable cesspool of limited sentience.

Alas, occasionally his words still break through and pull my focus. In a truly unpredictable manner, a soundbite will leap up and activate a part of my brain that was running on all cylinders way back when, circa 2015. A clip will still (still!!!) trigger a genuine curious response that sends a chill down my spine: Who the fuck is this guy?

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Let’s sit with this a bit longer. Trump said (emphasis mine): “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he explained. “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 full context is important to understand just how weird and disturbing this quote is. Trump dialed into Fox & Friends to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Apparently, this man thinks that his efforts on this matter might land him entrance into the pearly gates. Okay!

This is a psychotic and delusional line of thinking on many levels. While it does bear many of the hallmarks of Trump’s regular blather—self-interest, self-obsession, make-believe, bizarre use of language, and possibly completely meaningless bullshit—it also infuriatingly conjures up many questions about this clown demon and his sense of self.

I did some poking around to see if Trump had ever said anything about the promised land before.

Way back in 2016, while appealing to evangelical pastors on the campaign trail, he said, “Once I get in [to office], I will do my thing that I do very well. And I figure it is probably, maybe the only way I’m going to get to heaven. So I better do a good job.”

He’s done a lot more talking about heaven in the last few years, though. Last June, he did a Fox News interview where he said this about religion: “When you have something like that, you want to be good. You want to go to heaven, OK? You want to go to heaven. If you don’t have heaven, you almost say, ‘What’s the reason? Why do I have to be good? Let’s not be good, what difference does it make.’”

Then, in August 2024, Trump sat down for an interview with Laura Ingraham, who asked him about his prayer practice and then asked if he believes in heaven.

Trump said, "I do. If I'm good, I'm going to Heaven. And if I'm bad, I'm going someplace else, like over there, right?"

He dropped heaven AGAIN in October 2024 during a rally at Madison Square Garden, though this time he turned his gaze outward. He said, “I know my mother’s in heaven. I’m not 100 percent sure about my father, but it’s close.”

Does this add up to anything at all? Tough to say. Prior to all of this, Trump said he didn’t believe in heaven or hell, and a cursory stroll through his comments on religion paint a pretty clear picture of someone who does not, in fact, have any relationship at all to spirituality, let alone god or the afterlife.

It’s entirely possible that old age and failing health have brought this corpse of a man to some place of fear of mortality and a level of reflection on par with a child at Sunday school. We know at least one bishop who seems to quietly hate his guts, but who exactly is telling him that he’s “not doing well” and “at the bottom of the totem pole”? Is that voice somehow louder than the many others in his circle who I have to assume would rush to tell him he could pray his evils away? And does he actually regard his actions as…

No, no, never mind. This is where I stop myself from doing the kind of useless examination I left behind in 2016. I don’t know what’s in this man’s heart or mind, and I don’t care. What I do know with pure certainty is that if there is a heaven, Donald Trump is not going there when he dies. I don’t believe in the place myself, but if that surprise is waiting for me in the great beyond, I know in my bones that Trump will not be there.

I don’t actually remember hearing a ton about heaven in my Catholic upbringing. Upon reflection, I have to assume it’s because our original sin was absolved! We had to confess and follow the rules, but heaven was kind of a given. All of that is to say, I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that someone who has repeatedly and gleefully violated the seven deadly sins does not have a ticket to eternal glory. I actually looked them up to remind myself, thinking maybe one wouldn’t apply because of an idiosyncrasy, and lol: pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth. Same goes for the Ten Commandments! He is an unholy, covetous, thieving, greedy man, and those stone tablets would probably defy the laws of physics and burst into flames in his presence.

Yeah, I feel quite confident that an unendingly cruel fascist with blood on his hands many times over, who has violated countless people in unspeakable ways, who has helped embolden a mass of others to do the same, and has done so with total delight, is not going to heaven. It makes sense for a man like Trump, who seems to have an emotional state frozen in adolescence, to regard religion (either seriously or unseriously) in this way: It’s not a way of life or a means of coping, but an almost Pavlovian system of cosmic reward and punishment, and nothing else. I could imagine that in the last years of his life, maybe he’s making a half-assed effort to play “the art of the deal” with the great scales of justice in the sky.

I guess that’s why I found myself ruminating on this. I mean, first of all, it is indeed funny. But beyond that, it’s disturbing to imagine that someone as cartoonishly wicked as Donald Trump might get to the end of his life and consider himself exculpable in the eyes of the universe.

My sense of worldly justice is teetering on the edge of a cliff right now, so I can’t guarantee that the history books will regard Trump with the appropriate fire and brimstone. Maybe that’s why I’m grasping for a conviction that the fantasy land of heaven would cast him to a depth of hell few occupy. Perhaps more immediately, I need to believe that he believes that.

If this maniac goes to heaven, the world is much, much crueler than I thought.