Donald Trump enthusiastically endorsed displaying the Ten Commandments in schools (end elsewhere) over the weekend, despite quite famously violating at least four of the said 10, and one one of them literally thousands of times. On Truth Social, he told his followers: “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? … BRING BACK TTC!!! MAGA2024.” And on Saturday, speaking at a gathering of the evangelical group the Faith and Freedom Coalition, he asked the crowd, “Has anyone read the ‘Thou shalt not steal’? I mean, has anybody read this incredible stuff? It’s just incredible. They don’t want it to go up. It’s a crazy world.”
Setting aside the fact that he talks about the Ten Commandments like they’re some hot new indie band he just discovered, it’s obviously extremely rich for Trump to back displaying the religious directives given that he’s spent his entire adult life flagrantly disregarding them. For instance, he apparently wasn’t concerned with abiding by his favorite one (“Thou shalt not steal”) when he helped himself to an array of government documents that were not his to take upon leaving the White House in 2021, or when he used his charitable foundation’s funds to buy, among other things, a six-foot portrait of himself. He’s also publicly taken the Lord’s name in vain.
Additionally, Trump ran afoul of a different commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy”) when he posted the following message on Easter: “HAPPY EASTER TO ALL, INCLUDING CROOKED AND CORRUPT PROSECUTORS AND JUDGES THAT ARE DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO INTERFERE WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024, AND PUT ME IN PRISON, INCLUDING THOSE MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA, A NOW FAILING NATION, LIKE ‘DERANGED’ JACK SMITH, WHO IS EVIL AND ‘SICK.’”
Perhaps most significantly, there’s also the commandment that says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” i.e: don’t lie. Which Trump literally does all the time.
And of course, one cannot forget the whole “Thou shalt not commit adultery” line. Even if one were to buy Trump’s claim that he did not have an affair with Stormy Daniels—and just paid her $130,000 for the fun of it—he did have an affair with Marla Maples while he was married to Ivana Trump. (In a deposition last year, he boldly claimed to not recall if he’d started seeing Maples before he was divorced, saying, “It was towards the end of the marriage. So I don’t know, really. It could be a lapover, but I don’t really know.”)
Despite Trump’s long history of engaging in behavior many actual Christians would find problematic at best, he’s managed to convince large swaths of evangelicals that he’s basically the second coming of Jesus, in part by embracing Christian nationalism (and killing Roe v. Wade). As for whether or not Louisiana’s new Ten Commandments law survives a likely appeal to the Supreme Court, that remains to be seen, though clearly there are some people on the bench who could be convinced it’s a great idea, separation of church and state be damned. One thing we probably can count on? That a line of Trump-branded Ten Commandments, with his signature slapped on the bottom, are in the offing.
