Analysis by Daniel Burke, CNN Religion Editor
Updated 9:42 AM ET, Thu May 21, 2020
The theology of Trump
(CNN)As the novel coronavirus has spread across the globe, President Trump has repeated one phrase like a mantra: It will go away.
Since February Trump has said the virus will “go away” at least 15 times, most recently on May 15.
“It’s going to disappear one day,” he said on February 27. “It’s like a miracle.”
Invoking a miracle is an understandable response during a pandemic, but to some, the President’s insistence that the coronavirus will simply vanish sounds dangerously like magical thinking — the popular but baffling idea that we can mold the world to our liking, reality be damned.
The coronavirus, despite Trump’s predictions, has not disappeared. It has spread rapidly, killing more than 90,000 Americans.
In that light, Trump’s response to the pandemic, his fulsome self-praise and downplaying of mass death seems contrary to reality. But long ago, his biographers say, Trump learned how to craft his own version of reality, a lesson he learned in an unlikely place: a church.
It’s called the “power of positive thinking,” and Trump heard it from the master himself: the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, a Manhattan pastor who became a self-help juggernaut, the Joel Osteen of the 1950s.
“He thought I was his greatest student of all time,” Trump has said.
Undoubtedly, the power of positive thinking has taken Trump a long way — through multiple business failures to the most powerful office in the world.
Trump has repeatedly credited Peale — who died in 1993 — and positive thinking with helping him through rough patches.
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Article URL : https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/21/politics/trump-magical-thinking-peale-coronavirus/index.html