Author of TRUMP NATION Shares Skepticism of Trump's Religious Practices

By: Apr. 17, 2017
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The president and first lady Melania Trump, although not attending church as often since taking office, appeared at Easter service at Bethesda-by-the-Sea Church in Florida.

Timothy O'Brien, author of Trump biography 'TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald' shared his skepticism to Politco about Trump's faith practices, saying, "Donald has never been a spiritually or religiously serious person."

However, according to his book, when asked about whether he believed in God in the 2000s, Trump said:

"Yes. There has to be a reason we are here. What are we doing? You know there is an expression: 'Life is what you do while you're waiting to die... There has to be a reason that we're going through this. There has to be a reason for everything. I do believe in God. I think there just has to be something that's far greater than us."

Trump also shared his thoughts about prayer with Christian Broadcasting Network, saying, "I've always felt the need to pray. The office is so powerful that you need God even more because your decisions are no longer, 'Gee I'm going to build a building in New York.' ... These are questions of massive, life-and-death."

Read more here.

TRUMPNATION was released in paperback for the first time on July 14th, just in time for Donald Trump's 70th birthday. It has a new introduction about the 2016 presidential campaign, and it's a book that will make America great again, too.

Timothy L. O'Brien, an award-winning journalist, is the author of TrumpNation:The Art of Being the Donald, the definitive biography of presidential candidate and carnival-barker-cum-real-estate-developer-cum-gambling-mogul-cum-celebrity, Donald Trump.

Tim also is the publisher and a member of the editorial board at Bloomberg View, a digital platform for opinion and analysis that explores the most compelling and pivotal news and issues of the day.

Previously, Tim was the Executive Editor of The Huffington Post where he oversaw the site's original reporting efforts. Tim edited a ten-part series about severely wounded war veterans, Beyond the Battlefield, for which the HuffPost and its senior military correspondent, David Wood, received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2012.

Prior to joining the HuffPost in early 2011, Tim was an editor and reporter at The New York Times, where he helped oversee a team of Times reporters that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2009 for coverage of the financial crisis. The Times series that emerged from that work, "The Reckoning," was also a winner of a 2009 Loeb Award for Distinguished Business Journalism.

Prior to becoming Sunday Business editor at The New York Times in 2006, Tim was a staff writer for the Times. Among the topics and people he has written about are Wall Street, Russia, Manhattan's art world, cybercrimes and identity theft, Warren Buffett, geopolitics, digital media, international finance, Hollywood, terrorism and terrorist financing, money laundering, gambling, and white-collar fraud. Tim was a member of a team of Times reporters that won a Loeb Award for Distinguished Business Journalism in 1999.

Before returning to the Times in 2003, Tim was the senior feature writer at Talk, a magazine founded by former New Yorker editor Tina Brown. Tim was with Talk from 2000 until it ceased publishing in 2002. Before joining Talk, Tim was a reporter with the Times and, prior to that, The Wall Street Journal.

Tim is also the author of The Lincoln Conspiracy, an absorbing, fast-paced tale of murder, intrigue and riddles in post-Civil War Washington, available on Amazon. His previous non-fiction book, "Bad Bet: The Inside Story of the Glamour, Glitz, and Danger of America's Gambling Industry," was published in 1998.

Tim has a B.A. cum laude in literature from Georgetown University, an M.A. in U.S. History from Columbia University, an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, and an MBA from Columbia University. He has lived and worked in Europe, South America and Asia.



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