President Donald Trump communicated a misunderstanding of the Gospel message of Jesus Christ during an interview Tuesday morning.
During a telephone interview with “Fox & Friends” regarding his efforts to bring the Ukraine war to an end, the president said, “If I can save 7,000 people a week from being killed, that’s … pretty good.”
“I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he continued. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I hear I’m really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this [war ending] will be one of the reasons.”
His tone was certainly tongue-in-cheek, but what he said about earning his way to heaven is biblically wrong.
Conservative influencer Benny Johnson praised Trump, posting on social media, “Wow. President Trump tells Fox News he hopes his efforts to end wars will bring him closer to Heaven. This is powerful.”
Wow. President Trump tells Fox News he hopes his efforts to end wars will bring him closer to Heaven.
This is powerful. Watch:
“I just want to end it. If i can save seven thousand people a week from getting killed, that’s pretty good. I want to get to heaven if possible. I’m… pic.twitter.com/jcrQy4ixtT
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 19, 2025
First, Trump does get credit for recognizing that God is for peace on earth. Jesus preached in his famous Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” Jesus himself is referred to as the Prince of Peace.
It’s safe to say that the president is doing God’s work on earth by helping bring an end to the war in Ukraine, along with the six other conflicts he’s helped get resolved.
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However, Jesus and his apostles made clear that we don’t earn our way to heaven by our good works, but by faith in the Lord’s sacrificial death on the cross for our sins.
In one of the most well-known passages in the Bible, John 3:16, Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Further, he instructed in that same chapter that people must be born again by receiving the Holy Spirit into their hearts to be saved.
Jesus also said, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”
The Apostle Paul went into even more detail about how people are saved in his book to the believers in Rome. In what some Bible teachers call the Romans road to salvation, Paul wrote in Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
“But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” Romans 5:8 then says.
“For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord,” according to Romans 6:23.
Romans 8:1 states, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Finally, Paul exhorts, “That if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
So we are saved and ultimately heaven-bound by praying to receive Christ into our hearts and thereby being born again by the Holy Spirit.
While speaking at a memorial service at the Capitol for Billy Graham in 2018, Trump recounted attending one of the evangelist’s crusades in New York in 1957.
“I remember that because my father said to me, ‘Come on, son,’ and by the way he said, ‘Come on, Mom, let’s go see Billy Graham at Yankee Stadium.’ And it was something very special,” Trump said.
He certainly would have heard the Gospel message at Graham’s crusade. Trump would have been 11 years old at the time, so he may not have understood it all or been ready to receive Christ.
I heard the Gospel message several times growing up, I’m sure, but it wasn’t until my senior year in college at West Point that I received Christ. I could see, looking back, that God had been preparing my heart for years for the right moment in time.
Last summer, Trump spoke at a pastors’ conference about attending Marble Collegiate Church in New York while he was growing up. It was pastored by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale.
Peale was the author of the best-selling book “The Power of Positive Thinking” and liked to marry psychology with biblical principles. Some contended Peale’s focus on self-help psychology was at the expense of preaching a plain, biblically-grounded salvation message.
Trump has spoken eloquently about God for years, and even more so since his near-death experience at Butler last summer. He has said he believes God spared his life to fulfill his campaign promise to Make America Great Again.
The president has surrounded himself with solid Christian pastors in recent years — people like Franklin Graham and Jentezen Franklin — and no doubt has heard the Gospel message and perhaps even prayed to receive Christ.
Pastors pray over President Trump at the National Faith Summit 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/acdLoGERaD
— Margo Martin (@margomartin) October 28, 2024
So either he does not fully understand that salvation message yet, or he is not born again.
In either case, let’s pray for Trump as Paul did for the early church: “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith — that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
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