Donald Trump’s remarkable 60 Minutes interview was taped at the White House on Friday, three days after Republicans suffered their worst midterm defeat in half a century. For most of the interview, Ross Douthat pressed the President on the things you’d expect: the election, his deportation policy, how his net worth had grown by billions while he was in office. Then, near the end, Douthat, a Catholic who writes often about faith, changed the subject.
What did Donald Trump think would happen to him when he died?
“I hope I’m missed,” Trump said.
Not your memory, Douthat pressed. Yourself.
“Well, I’m a religious person, so in theory I go to heaven,” Trump said. Did he think he was going? “I hope so. I don’t want to go to hell.”
So Douthat asked the question that mattered. He brought up the remarks Erika Kirk had given at her husband’s memorial about Christian forgiveness, and about forgiving your enemies. Then he asked the President to imagine that getting into heaven required forgiving his. People like James Comey. Nancy Pelosi. Could he do it?
“Sure, the easy answer to that is, oh yes, I could forgive,” Trump began.
“No, I don’t think that’s an easy question at all,” Douthat said.
Trump called his enemies “very bad people” and “very dishonest.” To pretend to forgive them, he said, wouldn’t be real.
“Is the answer no then?”
“The answer is no.”
“Before the judgment throne of God?”
“Before the judgment.”
“You are telling me you couldn’t find it in your heart to forgive some of your enemies, after all that’s been given to you?” Douthat asked.
“I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will.”
Donald Trump knew the easy answer. He just couldn’t bring himself to mean it.
Think about the moment he was in. A week earlier, voters across the country had rejected him in historic fashion. He’s facing two years as a lame duck, with a Congress that can subpoena him and a party already fighting over what comes after him.
If there was ever a time for a politician to show a softer side, this was it. He could have said, “Honestly, it would be hard. Some of these people did terrible things to me. But I’d like to think I could. I’d try.” It would have cost him nothing. It might even have helped.
He couldn’t do it. Not for his political fortunes. Not for his legacy. Not even, by his own account, for his soul.
If you’ve been paying attention, none of this should surprise you.
In September of last year, at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, his widow, Erika Kirk, publicly forgave the man accused of killing her husband. A few minutes later, the President took the same stage and said that Charlie hadn’t hated his opponents. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” Trump said. “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”
Douthat was pointing straight back at that moment. More than a year later, with time to think about it and a whole country watching, Trump gave the same answer.
The interview didn’t reveal anything new. For Donald Trump, the grievance always comes first.
The Weight He Chooses to Carry
I’ll be honest that I also find it deeply sad.
Donald Trump is 80 years old. He has survived two attempts on his life. Someone sat across from him and asked, in effect, what he wants to bring with him into eternity, and he clung tightly to his grudges. He’d rather hold on to the hate than let it go, even with everything at stake.
Forgiveness isn’t weakness. In my faith, and in just about every faith I know of, it’s freedom. It’s how you set down a weight you were never meant to carry forever. It doesn’t mean pretending wrongs weren’t wrong, or that anyone escapes accountability. It means refusing to let the people who hurt you decide who you become. Trump has made the opposite choice, and he seems to have made it for good.
Trump claims to be a religious man, and I am in no position to judge a man’s soul. But Jesus addressed this very topic directly, right after teaching his disciples the Lord’s Prayer:
“For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
(Matthew 6:14-15)
I won’t pretend to know exactly what happens to any of us after we pass. But I know what it looks like when a man tells the whole country he’d rather hold on to his hatred than let it go.
And there’s a lesson there for the rest of us who don’t want to live like that.
In a couple of weeks, a lot of us will sit down for Thanksgiving with people we’ve argued with for the better part of a decade. The relative who stopped returning your calls. The neighbor whose yard signs you’ve glared at since 2016.
We need to be abundantly clear about something: this country isn’t going to heal on grievance. And we can’t surely wait for this President to show us how to forgive, because he just told us that he won’t.
So it’s on us. Not to forget. Not to excuse what was done. But to choose, where we can, to let go of the hate before it decides who we are.
— Adam
We've always known who he his...he is just admitting it and reminding us.
I look forward to the day when this collection of loathsome and putrescent organisms can be expunged from our day-to-day lives, remembered only as an eradicated scourge, like smallpox. That would be their most effective punishment.