WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Thursday that his relationship with religion had “changed” after a pair of failed assassination attempts last year, as he advocated at the National Prayer Breakfast at the Capitol for Americans to “bring God back" into their lives.
Trump joined a more than 70-year-old Washington tradition that brings together a bipartisan group of lawmakers for fellowship. He later spoke at a separate prayer breakfast at a Washington hotel sponsored by a private group.
“I really believe you can’t be happy without religion, without that belief," Trump said at the Capitol. “Let’s bring religion back. Let’s bring God back into our lives.”
Trump reflected on having a bullet coming within a hair’s breadth of killing him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last year, telling lawmakers and attendees, “It changed something in me, I feel."
“I feel even stronger," he continued. "I believed in God, but I feel, I feel much more strongly about it. Something happened.”
He drew laughs when he expressed gratitude that the episode “didn’t affect my hair.”
The president, who's a nondenominational Christian, called religious liberty “part of the bedrock of American life” and called for protecting it with “absolute devotion.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first president to attend the prayer breakfast, in February 1953, and every president since has spoken at the gathering.
Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas are the honorary co-chairs of this year's prayer breakfast.
In 2023, the National Prayer Breakfast split into two dueling events, the one on Capitol Hill largely attended by lawmakers and government officials and a larger private event for thousands at a hotel ballroom. The split occurred when lawmakers sought to distance themselves from the private religious group that for decades had overseen the bigger event, due to questions about its organization and how it was funded.
In 2023 and 2024, President Joe Biden, a Democrat, spoke at the Capitol Hill event, and his remarks were livestreamed to the other gathering.
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AP writers Holly Meyer in Nashville, Tennessee, and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.