Before President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union address on Tuesday, his Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins stood in a circle together with many of the administration’s other cabinet members, their arms linked and heads bowed, a huddle she later shared in a photo on social media.
Rollins reported: “So proud of @POTUS and his incredible SOTU last night. What a blessing to be a part of this moment in our country’s history.” She added, “Someone captured this photo of our Cabinet praying before the address. Just us, working to put God first as we fiercely battle to save America’s soul.”
Note: The four people standing outside of the circle are EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler, and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer.
[Kennedy shared video of Trump’s speech from the White House account (below), and talked not about “America’s soul” but about drug prices and medicine in his post-SOTU interviews.]
President Donald J. Trump’s 2026 State of the Union Address https://t.co/UqD2fvZOWV
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 25, 2026
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also shared the cabinet prayer image, commenting: “This Cabinet knows who is really in charge.”
While MAGA supporters largely replied with praise and comments including “This is what I voted for,” others saw hypocrisy — or at least schism between Trump loyalty and religious faith. One commenter replied with a link to the 2020 memoir Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man written by Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, who wrote “the only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there.”
Trump, who does not claim to be a regular churchgoer, has embraced his role as a de facto — if unlikely — representative of the religious right, appointing numerous Christian nationalists to influential roles in his administration and establishing “an ‘anti-Christian bias’ taskforce and a White House Faith Office (WHFO),” as The Guardian writes.
Critics aligning behind the Constitutional principles of separation of church and state — or foundational disestablishmentarianism — have repeatedly called out Project 2025, the purported blueprint for Trump 2.0, as a roadmap to Christian Nationalist regime change, citing its goal of creating a “government that would be imbued with ‘biblical principles.’”