WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — President Donald Trump has announced an initiative encouraging Americans to pray for their country and fellow citizens in preparation for the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding on July 4, 2026.

Released on the White House website, the “America Prays” initiative urges citizens to gather in small groups and pray for the nation for one hour every week.

“America has always been a nation that believes in the power of prayer and we will never apologize for our faith,” the 47th president said announcing the launching of the initiative on Monday. “We will never surrender our God-given rights. We will defend our liberties, our values, our sovereignty, and we will defend our freedom.”

During this address at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, Trump added, “When faith gets weaker, our country seems to get weaker. When faith gets stronger … good things happen for our country.”

“Under the Trump Administration, we’re defending our rights and restoring our identity as a nation under God. We are One Nation Under God — and we always will be,” he said.

The White House also encouraged Americans to join online prayer communities including Hallow and Pray.com, each of which has signed onto the initiative along with groups such as Catholics for Catholics and CatholicVote.

Emphasizing the role of prayer from the nation’s founding, the program’s web page quoted George Washington from his Farewell Address where he stated, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

While President Trump has issued other such largely symbolic initiatives which naturally appeal to the hearts of Christians, under his leadership the U.S. government has been recognized by much of the world as being complicit in what Israeli human rights organizations, Jewish holocaust experts, and many more, have confirmed to be a genocide in Gaza.

READ: Former Israeli defense minister affirms IDF is committing ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Gaza

Thousands of children ‘sniper shot,’ ‘incinerated,’ ‘shredded,’ ‘crushed by buildings,’ ‘beheaded’

Under the conditions of a devastating famine caused by the U.S.-backed Israeli military’s illegal restrictions on both the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid into the enclave—which has been home to over 2 million people—the Israelis continue their daily violent massacres as well.

With American Catholics having recently experienced the traumatic horror of two schoolchildren being shot to death while attending Mass in Minnesota, United Nations officials pointed out that the U.S.-backed Israeli army has killed an average of 28 Palestinian children every day in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

And according to at least 48 American physicians and medical professionals who have volunteered during this conflict in the Gaza Strip, they each treated “on a daily basis … pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.”

One such physician, Dr. Mark Perlmutter, further said the massive “level of carnage” he witnessed was aimed at “almost exclusively children.” His testimony includes seeing scores of children “incinerated,” “shredded,” “missing body parts,” and “being crushed by buildings.”

READ: Israeli extremist rabbis instruct soldiers heading to Gaza: ‘Kill all their children’

As one commentator has observed, today there remains online “hundreds if not thousands of videos of beheaded Palestinian babies and children, Palestinian children with severed limbs, killed by Israel” with weapons enthusiastically provided by President Trump and virtually all self-professed “pro-life” “Christian” Republicans in Congress, many of whom routinely glow under affectionate cheers as they grace the stage at the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C.

READ: Jewish pundit says supporters of ‘what Israel’s doing in Gaza’ can never ‘claim to be pro-life’

Israeli soldiers ordered to fire upon thousands of unarmed starving Palestinian civilians

At least 2,430 other starving Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military while trying to access aid packages from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which began operating on May 26, 2025. Israeli press reports IDF soldiers and officers were ordered to fire upon unarmed crowds in these areas.

These Israeli snipers, whose salaries and weapons are at least subsidized by American taxpayers, also evidently targeted different body parts of these civilian victims (head, genitals, legs, chest, etc.) on different days, suggesting they used these suffering civilians for target practice.

READ: On Holocaust Memorial Day, Jewish group protests Israel’s ‘sadistic’ genocide in Gaza

Reliable reports of Palestinian deaths since October 7, 2023 include at least 64,522 killed in Gaza, approximately 20,000 children, with 163,096 injured, and more than 10,000 children who have lost at least one leg. These numbers do not include approximately 14,000 individuals who are missing and presumed dead under the rubble.

According to a rationale presented in a Lancet study last July, one can conservatively estimate total deaths, including indirect fatalities due to causes like starvation, lack of medicine or proper medical care to include 322,610 (141,948 children).

In a July 30 interview with Tucker Carlson, political science scholar and popular commentator Dr. John Mearsheimer summarized “what’s happening here is that the Israelis are systematically trying to destroy the Palestinians as a national group. They’re targeting them as Palestinians and they’re trying to destroy Palestinian national identity in addition to murdering huge numbers of Palestinians.”

READ: John Mearsheimer tells Tucker the US is ‘complicit’ in Israel’s genocide in Gaza

Trump pivots from ‘peace president’ to architect of ethnic cleansing

Two weeks after taking office, in early February, President Trump trashed his own ceasefire agreement he and his team had brokered between Israel and Hamas by announcing his intention to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of its two million Palestinians who have lived in this land of their forefathers for many centuries.

While some experts observed that this move demonstrated to the world that Trump’s word was “valueless” and would lead to “very serious” isolation, other Catholic academics confirmed this policy to be “gravely immoral.”

READ: ‘Pro-life’ GOP starving 1 million children to death in Gaza, USCCB remains silent

Despite most of the world broadly condemning Trump’s plan as a war crime, along with Christian leaders from the Middle East rebuking it as “an injustice that strikes at the very heart of human dignity,” a document leaked from the administration last week indicated the “Gaza Riviera” plan is still proceeding forward. This document details the ongoing process of advancing the long-term Zionist goal to expel the Palestinian people from the land of their ancestors and to put the Gaza territory in U.S. trusteeship for over a decade.

60% of American voters want to shut down support for Israel, 50% judge them to be guilty of genocide, Trump won’t end the killing

A recent poll from Quinnipiac University revealed that 60% of American voters now “oppose the United States sending more military aid to Israel for their efforts in the war with Hamas, while (only) 32 percent support it.”

Furthermore, the same poll found a full 50% of voters believe “Israel is committing genocide” in Gaza, while only 35% reject this conclusion.

With the ongoing crimes of the Israeli army continuing unabated, Mearsheimer has often affirmed in interviews with Judge Andrew Napolitano that Trump could end this genocide “with a phone call” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu given the massive leverage the United States has over Israel due to its enormous financial, diplomatic and military support of the apartheid state.

Yet, despite Trump’s laudable invitations to prayer, his birthday wishes to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and his referencing George Washington’s affirmation of morality as an “indispensable support” to political prosperity, the 47th president has thus far declined from making that phone call and ending the daily killings of innocents at the hands of the Israeli army.

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