At the White House, religion invites itself into diplomacy. Donald Trump said on Tuesday that obtaining a peace agreement in Ukraine could help him go to paradise, a joking that his chances of accessing it are currently weak.
The 79 -year -old American president had already suggested that he wanted to end the war in Ukraine to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, whom he thinks deserves.
Trump concedes that he was “not well placed”
But in the aftermath of the visit to the White House of the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and several European leaders to find a way out of the conflict with Russia, he said Tuesday that he also had less prosaic motivations. “I want to try to go to paradise if possible,” he told “Fox & Friends”, a Fox News program, a chain that has the favors of the American conservatives.
“I hear that I am not well placed, that I am really at the bottom of the scale!” But if I manage to go to paradise, it will be one of the reasons, “he said.
Married three times and brought twice by the US Congress (Impeachment), Donald Trump is not a saint. He has been involved in a number of scandals over the years and is the first American president to have been sentenced to criminal, for paid payments to an X films star. He, on the other hand, adopted an increasingly mystical tone after having survived an assassination attempt last year. During his inauguration in January, he said he was “saved by God to return his greatness to America”.
Religion as a political strategy
Above all, benefiting from the full support of the American religious right, Donald Trump seeks to appear more pious than during his first mandate. He thus appointed an official spiritual advisor, Paula White, who directed several collective prayers during which the participants put their hands on him during events at the White House.
Our file on the war in Ukraine
The White House spokesperson estimated Tuesday that “the president was serious” when he made this statement on Ukraine. “I think the president wants to go to paradise like, I hope, we all want it in this room,” Karoline Leavitt told journalists, who herself organizes prayers before her press conferences.
