National Prayer Breakfast

Here he is congratulating the Democrats because Trump is magnanimous in victory and defeat.

If you remember what he won in 2016, after all of those lock her up chants, he was asked at the National Prayer Breakfast, are we going to lock her up? And he was like, no, I'm not going to lock her up.

I don't think it helps the country stay together.

We've got to heal.

He will do a lot of TV commercials at times.

He will speak at the National Prayer Breakfast.

He'll pray with Trump.

But it's very, very different under him than it was under Billy.

And the reason we were having these economic issues and these trade issues could purely be blamed on one side, the US side.

So I wanted to go to the National Prayer Breakfast in D.C. earlier this year, and I decided I was going to go down a bit early and just hit up JD and say, look, man, can we talk about this? Yeah.

So he introduced me to a few other people.

I met with Marco Rubio.

And we were just kind of considered like this powerhouse Christian couple.

I, at the height, sang for Donald Trump's 2017 National Prayer Breakfast weekend.

And so there's all of this rhetoric around anti-LGBTQ and anti-women's rights perspective within the institution of the religion.

And as a Christian artist, you would often have to sign these statements of faith.

Broke my heart.

But then, February, National Prayer Breakfast, the president evidently had a change of heart.

He said, I kinda like my chances.

And he put it this way.

If we forget about that, I think that's a, that's a issue for us as a country.

And my father was very much, uh, engaged with, matter of fact, the Kennedy administration, um, very much with the, the Presidential Prayer Breakfast.

He was highly engaged in that.

Highly engaged in government at that time, too.

It's just saying that you need to pray to God and not pray for the praises of people.

You know, I just heard the, uh, National Prayer Breakfast today, and, uh, anyway, after President Trump spoke, they had some people get up and pray, and I was doing something else, so I didn't listen to everything.

[laughs] But I saw enough that they were reading their prayer.

They were praying in Elizabethan English, and in my estimation, it was just religious.

Now, again, I wasn't focused on it.

I may be passing an incorrect judgment there, but I know I've been to the National Prayer Breakfast before, and I've seen people do that exact same thing.

And those kind of prayers where you're just reciting something and going through the motions are absolutely useless.

They may get you a pat on the back, but they do not connect with God.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that the tech oligarchs would ultimately succeed in, uh, getting them to come to their side because how did Putin get them on, on his side? Through the National Prayer Breakfast.

Mm-hmm.

NRA, the gun lobby, through the National Prayer Breakfast.

It just seems like, you know, Trump, that Jerry Falwell Jr. is the whole reason that we have Trump as president because he got the evangelicals to go vote for Trump.

And I think that the evangelical movement is so broken right now.

What did she say about the connection between hyper-religious people and fascism?

basically that it takes the same mentality it's not really about religion and it's not really so much about a way of politics that it's a cult mentality that the strong man is propped up number one by oligarchs and number two by the cult of personality and so if you think about this group of evangelical christians they're very easily co-opted so you have they've been co-opted by uh Vladimir Putin, that he entered through the National Prayer Breakfast.

The NRA, because when you think about, you know, AR-15s, you certainly think about Jesus Christ, right? Well, they have made guns and God, just like they have the Republican Party and Christianity.

They have enmeshed those things together.