President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and their spouses attended Tuesday’s National Prayer Service at the Washington National Cathedral, and leaders from the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faiths participated in the event.
The president and First Lady Melania Trump sat in a pew next to the vice president and Second Lady Usha Vance, with House Speaker Mike Johnson sitting in the adjacent pew.
The National Prayer Service served as a metaphor, in a way, for Trump’s campaign, as Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious leaders all participated in the event. Trump expanded his coalition to reach Christians, Jews, and Muslims this cycle, and the results were evident in shifting demographics in Arab-dense Michigan.
There were readings from the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur’an, and an Imam delivered the Islamic call to prayer.
“Trump is currently sitting in the National Cathedral and listening to the Islamic call to prayer as part of an interfaith #Inauguration service. If that isn’t ecumenicalism and tolerance, I don’t know what is,” Breitbart News senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak wrote in a post on X.
During a press call weeks before the election, an Islamic leader from Dearborn, Michigan, said that Trump aligns more closely to the readings of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam than former Vice President Kamala Harris does.
“So the reason I lean towards Mr. Trump because I found him closer to the Bible, and Torah, and the Quran because I support peace, no war,” Imam Husham Al-Husainy told reporters at the time. “We should stop the war, whether in Europe or in Middle East. And I believe in justice evenly between all the children of Ibrahim [Abraham].”
“And I thirdly believe in the morality, which is the holy logic in the Bible, and the Torah, and the Quran, where God supports normality and respect; appreciates the marriage between male and female. So this is why I believe that we need a special president, special leader,” he added.
The service included excellent vocal performances from opera singer Christopher Macchio, who sang “Ave Maria,” “How Great Art Thou,” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
While there were positive moments during the National Prayer Service, the liberal anti-Trump Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC, Mariann Budde, delivered a highly partisan sermon, calling on Trump to have “mercy” for LGBTQ children.
“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives,” she said, adding a request for mercy for illegal immigrants.
Budde, who called for replacing Trump as president in June 2020 and was described by the Washington Post as “unapologetically liberal” in 2011, is facing a wave of criticism for her sermon.
“As a Catholic & legal immigrant, it’s outrageous that some woke Bishop would lecture President Tump [sic] about deporting illegals. It’s an insult to all of us who came to this country the right way,” wrote Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), a legal immigrant from Colombia, in a post on X.
Donald Trump Jr. reposted Moreno’s tweet and agreed.
“This is exactly right and the immigrants who actually worked their asses off for years to come here LEGALLY, learn English and assimilate into our culture understand it better than anyone else!” he wrote.
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