Donald Trump said Thursday that his challenger, Joe Biden, is “against God,” and that the former vice president will offend both God and the Bible if he’s elected.
As USA Today reported, Trump made the remarks in Cleveland, where he spoke to supporters on the tarmac of the airport. There, he told the crowd that Biden will try to take away freedoms Americans hold dear, including firearms and religion.
“Take away your guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything. Hurt the Bible, hurt God. He’s against God, he’s against guns, he’s against energy, our kind of energy,” he said.
Trump appeared to be repeating the same talking points about his opponent that he made in an interview with Geraldo Rivera on Thursday. As reported by The Inquisitr , Trump mentioned the same three things — oil, guns and religion — to the Fox News host.
“I’m in favor of the Bible. I’m in favor of Second Amendment. Biden is against all of those things. He’s against oil, he’s against the Bible — essentially against religion — but against the Bible, and he’s against the Second Amendment.”
It’s a line of attack against his opponent that Trump hopes he can use in his quest to court Evangelical voters, the same electoral bloc that helped him get elected in 2016, The Hill writer Brett Samuels opined.
Just last week Trump had claimed that the “radical left” was bent on “[wiping] away every trace of religion from national life.”
Similarly, he told supporters at a Pennsylvania tele-rally that Democrats are “against God” when it comes to religious matters.
Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement that Biden is a devoutly religious man whose faith is “at the core of who he is,” noting that it was that devotion that helped him survive the death of his first wife and their daughter in a car wreck in 1972.
Bates also claimed that it was Trump who tear-gassed a peaceful crowd in front of the White House and kicked a priest out, so that he could go to a church and “profane” it by posing in front of it for a photo op while holding a Bible. Further, the campaign spokesman said that Trump had “abused” a photo of the devoutly Catholic former vice president praying in a church in order to “demean” him.
Doug Heye, a former Republican Party communications director who opposes the president, said that this type of remark isn’t actually going to endear Trump to moderate and independent voters, saying instead that it will appeal only to a small portion of Trump’s Evangelical base.