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Does Heaven exist? And if so, is Donald Trump going to get in?
In the last year, President Trump has been publicly musing about the afterlife and his place in it with increasing regularity. No one really knows why we’re suddenly seeing this metaphysical side of Trump — is it age, health issues, surviving assassination attempts, glimmers of deeply suppressed guilt for his many sins? Whatever the reason, Trump keeps giving updates on his current odds of getting into Heaven, which seem to fluctuate a lot.
Honestly, all of these questions are beyond Intelligencer’s purview. The only solid information we can share is what Trump himself has said about the ultimate fate of his soul. Below, we will provide ongoing coverage of this important developing news story, which you can share with your pastor, rabbi, theology professor, Reiki healer, or extremely religious aunt for further discussion.
At 42, Trump’s concept of the afterlife was pretty hazy, and he didn’t seem all that concerned about where he’s headed. Here’s what he told Glenn Plaskin when he asked him if he was worried about his own mortality in a 1989 profile for the Chicago Tribune:
Seven years ago, Donald Trump remembers, he gazed at his $200 million Trump Tower and thought to himself: “I’ll be 36 next year and I’ll have done everything I can do… . Sometimes, I think it was a mistake to have raced through it all so fast… .”
Was it?
“I don’t know,” he answers thoughtfully, near the end of a long day.
“What’s the next level up? The grass isn’t always greener… . I might try a different step. Right now, I’m genuinely enjoying myself. I work and I don’t worry.”
Not even about death. “No. I’m fatalistic and I protect myself as well as anybody can. I prepare for things. But ultimately we all end up going.”
Heading upstairs for dinner with his children, Donald Trump looks back, hesitating, wanting to finish: “No. I don’t believe in reincarnation, Heaven or hell — but we go someplace.”
“Do you know,” he says, “I cannot, for the life of me, figure out where.”
A year later in a Playboy interview, Trump said that “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. You know, it is all a rather sad situation.”
Asked if he meant life or death, Trump continued:
Both. We’re here and we live our sixty, seventy or eighty years and we’re gone. You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot. But it is something to do — to keep you interested.
Nine years later, Trump told Diane Sawyer that he hoped Heaven was real so there could be some purpose for living:
I believe in God. I’m religious. I’m religious in my thought. And I just hope, in fact, that we’re all right in believing that there is a heaven, and perhaps in believing that there is a hell. I mean, we have to be here for something. We have to be doing this for some reason. There has to be a reason. And I believe that there is in fact a reason, and I believe heaven could be that reason.
During a Playboy interview published in 2004, Trump reiterated:
I look at life and, sadly, life is what you do while you’re waiting to die. From the time you’re born, you’re here for an instant. When you look at — They found Neanderthal man two billion years ago. When you think of time, we’re here for a speck. If you live to be 100 years old, it’s just a millisecond in the overall scope of things. You realize that. You realize that nothing is really so earth-shattering, nothing is really so important. You realize that you live a life, you live a good life, enjoy it, have a lot of fun — which I do — and you’re only going to be here for a short time. On God …
I believe in God. I think that there’s got to be something, because I can’t believe we’re doing this all for no reason.
If Trump did any additional deep thinking about Heaven and hell over the next dozen years, he apparently did not share those thoughts publicly. The next time the topic came up was in August 2016, when Trump was begging Evangelical leaders at a “Pastors in the Pews” event to help him get elected.
“Once I get in, I will do my thing that I do very well,” Trump said. “And I figure it is probably, maybe the only way I’m going to get to Heaven. So I better do a good job.”
It’s pretty clear that at this point, Trump was just telling a joke tailored to pastors, not actually asking for help getting past the pearly gates.
Three weeks after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump sat down with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. He argued that the country needs religion because it gives people “hope.” (This came up as Trump was accusing Democrats of being “fascists” who were “violent and ruthless to religion during COVID,” but the widely circulated Fox clip omitted the nasty lead in.) Ingraham asked Trump if he believes in Heaven.
“I do!” Trump said. “If I’m good, I’m going to Heaven. If I’m bad, I’m going to someplace else, like over there, right?”
A month later, Trump reiterated his basic understanding of the afterlife as good = Heaven, bad = hell while talking with podcaster Lex Fridman.
“You know, you’re supposed to go to Heaven, ideally not hell, but you’re supposed to go to heaven if you’re good,” he said.
Just as Trump dodged the original question (“How often do you think about your death?”) he didn’t say where he thinks he falls on this spectrum.
A year later, Trump had returned to office and his afterlife prognosis had taken a turn for the worse. During a call to Fox & Friends, he said he wanted to broker an end to the war in Ukraine because his chances at getting into Heaven weren’t looking so hot.
“I want to try and get to Heaven, if possible,” he said. “I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.”
Days later, Trump took his new concerns about the great beyond directly to his donors. As Mediaite reported, his Never Surrender PAC sent an email with the subject line “I want to try and get to Heaven”:
So, can a rich man buy his way into Heaven? Again, this question is above our pay grade. But apparently some element of this plea worked, since the PAC sent an email with the exact same text as recently as January 2026.
Trump gave us a lot to ponder in this Oval Office press conference. First he declined to rule out a pardon for Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislane Maxwell, though a reporter noted she was convicted of child sex trafficking.
Then he asserted that we need religion because the fear of burning in hell for all eternity is the only thing that motivates us to make moral decisions, and getting into Heaven is really “important” to him.
“I felt for a long time that if a country doesn’t have religion, doesn’t have faith, doesn’t have God, it’s gonna be very hard to be a good country,” he said. “You know, there’s no reason to be good. I wanna be good because you wanna prove to God you’re good so you go to that next step, right? So, that’s very important to me. I think it’s really, very important.”
While talking with reporters on Air Force One, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked the president if he was still looking to improve his shot at getting past St. Peter.
Trump shrugged off his recent on-air existential musings, saying, “I’m being a little cute.” Then he suggested he’d resigned himself to eternal damnation.
“I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me into Heaven. I think I’m not maybe Heaven-bound,” Trump said. “I may be in Heaven right now as we fly on Air Force One. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to make Heaven, but I’ve made life a lot better for a lot of people.”
Laura Ingraham informed Trump that all of his public ruminating about possibly winding up in the bad place wasn’t sitting well with the MAGA faithful.
“A lot of Christians were sort of sad to hear that because Christ came to forgive our sins, if you believe that as Christians, and they opened Heaven to all of us,” she said. “So don’t you believe that?”
Trump said he was just joking when he talked about going to hell, and attacked the New York Times for failing to understand sarcasm. But he didn’t actually say he’s confident he’ll go to Heaven.
“I was kidding, I was having fun. I don’t know if I will or not, I don’t know,” Trump said. “I was having fun, and they made it, like, serious.”
During a Weave at the National Prayer Breakfast (in which he asserted “religion is back now, hotter than ever before”), Trump reiterated that he was just joking about hell, not questioning the meaning of his life.
“I really think I probably should make it,” he said. “I mean, I’m not a perfect candidate, but I did a hell of a lot of good for perfect people.”
So Trump’s Heaven outlook has been upgraded to probably getting in, if only because you don’t actually have to be that good.
This post has been updated.
