Thursday’s bipartisan National Prayer Breakfast, where President Donald Trump affirmed he now “much more strongly” believes in God, went off the rails once lawmakers closed their Bibles and opened their social media accounts.
Republicans are hammering Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California’s North Coast, over his accusation that Speaker Mike Johnson eroded the separation of church and state by moving the mostly Christian gathering to the Capitol.
“Speaker Johnson’s National Prayer Breakfast is yet another example of MAGA Republicans taking a sledgehammer to the wall between church and state,” Huffman said in the post on X, inviting others to protest with him.
The congressman charged that the “breakdown of church-state separation is a big part of the dystopic, authoritarian agenda.”
The post prompted the managers of X—owned by Trump’s “special government employee” Elon Musk—to post a community note saying: “Both Barack Obama and Joe Biden attended the National Prayer Breakfast while they were president.” The note provided links to Obama’s remarks at the 2016 Washington prayer event, and C-SPAN footage of Biden’s speech in 2024.
“The faux outrage of the left is hilariously pathetic. I guess they forgot the Obama and Biden both spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast. 🤷🏼♀️,” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) said in response to the post.
She and other GOP lawmakers pointed out that the event has been historically bipartisan, and that Democrats, including Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Maggie Hassan, were in attendance on Thursday morning.
Rep. Nancy Mace expressed her own outrage and included a photo of Biden speaking last year at the annual event, which, like Thursday, was also held in Statuary Hall in the Capitol.
“I’ll pray for you,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) tweeted back at Huffman.
Huffman claimed the speaker, a conservative Christian, refused to entertain his attempts to move the prayer session out of the Capitol.
“I have serious concerns about institutionalizing a religious ceremony in the heart of our secular Capitol and about its ties to extremists who advocate for laws to kill all gay people,” said Huffman, a member of the Congressional Equality Caucus.
Huffman later condemned “Christian nationalist trolls” on X, linking to an inflammatory pro-white nationalist comment to underscore his point.
Trump discussed his own mortality when he spoke at the prayer breakfast on Thursday by recalling the assassination attempt against him last year at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. “God was watching me,” he said. “I believed in God, but I feel much more strongly about it.”
Sen. Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire and a co-chair of the event, which is hosted by the National Prayer Breakfast Foundation, unwittingly yet aptly predicted what would follow the closing of prayers.
“The moment we leave here, the difficult, divisive challenges of our times will engulf us yet again,” Hassan said.
