This Guelph

 One of Trump's odd-ball riffs that he periodically refers back to is his ongoing contention that he probably isn't going to make it to heaven after death. 

"I want to try and get to heaven, if possible;" as he put it; "I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole." 

As usual with Trump, he has repeated some version of this same bit multiple times. That "totem pole" almost always comes up. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene does not interpret this as a cutesy riff. She thinks we should take Trump seriously and literally on this one. 

"I don’t think the president is being tongue-in-cheek," she said in an interview last month. "He repeatedly and repeatedly says he’s not going to heaven."

And indeed—with his current open conflict with the Pope and the Vatican—it does seem a bit hard to imagine Saint Peter looking too inviting at the Pearly Gates. 

With Trump openly insulting the Pope as "weak on crime" and a mouthpiece for the "radical left," one feels that he might indeed get side-eye from a few of the angels. 

I recall Byron's observation in the "Vision of Judgment"—his satirical riposte to Southey's depiction of George III's triumphant entry into heaven.

Byron was skeptical that Saint Peter himself would enthusiastically welcome a monarch whose chief domestic policy was to oppose Catholic emancipation in Britain (a civil rights cause that was dear to Lord Byron's heart—despite his own hardly orthodox theological views). 

As Lucifer argues his claim for the king's soul, in Byron's poem: 

“Five millions of the primitive, who hold

   The faith which makes ye great on earth, implored

A part of that vast all they held of old,—

Freedom to worship — not alone your Lord,

Michael, but you, and you, Saint Peter! Cold

   Must be your souls, if you have not abhorred

The foe to Catholic participation

In all the license of a Christian nation.

“True! he allowed them to pray God; but as

   A consequence of prayer, refused the law

Which would have placed them upon the same base

   With those who did not hold the Saints in awe.”

But here Saint Peter started from his place

   And cried, “You may the prisoner withdraw:

Ere Heaven shall ope her portals to this Guelph,

While I am guard, may I be damned myself!

One feels that Saint Peter might respond rather similarly to Trump's petition for entry in the next life, so long as he seems to have declared open war on the Pope. 

But as much as he opposed the King's policies, Byron still plumped for universalism, as I do too. 

There is no human being so awful that they deserve eternal torment. Any human offense, by definition, can only be finite—and so could never merit an infinite punishment. 

And so Byron too—as much as he mocked the king and opposed his bigoted domestic policies—imagines the pearly gates opening for him at last. 

“God save the king!” It is a large economy

   In God to save the like; but if he will

Be saving, all the better; 

—as Byron put it. 

And indeed, it would be a large economy to save Trump. He is surely one of the worst human beings presently in existence on the face of the earth. But human being he is nonetheless, for all that. 

and so I say—with Byron: not one am I

  Of those who think damnation better still:

I hardly know too if not quite alone am I

   In this small hope of bettering future ill

By circumscribing, with some slight restriction,

The eternity of Hell’s hot jurisdiction.