Though he professes to be a Christian, Donald Trump seems to be unfamiliar with one of the Bible’s most memorable stories.
If the president knew the story of the golden calf, constructed by Aaron while Moses was on Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments from God, one would assume he’d think twice before displaying a goat with gold hooves, horn and tail, covered in $100 “Trump bills” that replace “In God We Trust” with “In Trump We Trust,” in his Florida home.
A picture of the goat idol, which rests on a black base with an American flag on the side and Trump’s signature following a message, “I love you,” was posted on Bluesky by a Mar-A-Lago member posing in front of it.
“They are literally worshipping a golden calf,” one Bluesky commenter wrote. “Hmmm… where have I heard that story before?”
The story appears in Exodus. Moses had left the Israelites for 40 days and nights to ascend Mount Sinai. The Israelites had grown restless and worried Moses would not return. They demanded that his brother Aaron make them “a god who shall go before us.”
Using the Israelites’ golden earrings and ornaments, Aaron constructed a golden calf, and he declared, “‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’
Aaron built an altar before the calf and declared the next day a feast for their new god.
Exodus 32:6 describes the scene: “Early next day, the people offered up burnt offerings and brought sacrifices of well-being; they sat down to eat and drink and then rose to dance.”
God told Moses what the Israelites had done and vowed to destroy them and start a new people. Moses successfully pleaded with God to spare them and then descended the mountain. When he saw the false idol, he became angry and threw down the two Tablets of Stone containing the Ten Commandments. Moses burnt the golden calf in a fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on water, and forced the Israelites to drink it.
Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, a frequent Trump critic, noted the similarities in a post on X, writing, “Nice golden calf you got there.”
“It’s like someone built a statue for the singular purpose of idolizing wealth, and Christians happily take selfies in front of it,” wrote one commenter on Bluesky.
Added another, “Of course, an anti-Christ would expect its followers to worship it as a ‘golden’ calf. This is truly disgusting and bizarre. I get the modern cultural reference. It just increases it’s weirdness!”
The Second Commandment literally forbids worshipping false idols: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
Trump’s evangelical supporters were conspicuously silent about the goat idol. White Christians identifying as “Protestant and other Christian” overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024, with only 26 percent of that bloc voting for Kamala Harris. Seventy-eight percent of Jewish voters, meanwhile, backed Harris.
