Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) hit back on Wednesday night, after President Donald Trump lashed out at him on his Truth Social platform to attack his Christian faith.
"Warnock spent the entire show using Religion to try and divide the Country! If a Republican, in particular ME, made those statements, it would be FRONT PAGE NEWS," Trump proclaimed, adding that Warnock is "a bad guy" whose wife "correctly states that he tried to run her over with a car" and NBC News won't "get away" with interviewing him.
Warnock, who has been the senior pastor of Dr. Martin Luther King's old church in Atlanta for 20 years, didn't take these remarks lying down.
"I wanted to ask you about a very odd post from the president today, and obviously that doesn't narrow it down, in which he was reacting to an interview you did with Kristen Welker on 'Meet the Press' on Sunday," said anchor Chris Hayes. "He said that you 'spent the entire show using religion to try and divide the country' ... Now, I have to say that we watched the entire interview, and that's just it's actually kind of an opposite characterization. It's the opposite of what you were saying quite clearly about religion and unity. But do you have a reaction to this very strange, seemingly out-of-nowhere attack?"
"Well, three days later, when Americans are waiting to hear from this president about what he's going to do about their costs, he apparently is catching up on television from this past Sunday," said Warnock. "I can tell you, at the top of the list of things that ... I don't need him to advise me on, certainly that's faith. And he's got a lot of nerve saying that I'm using faith to divide people. This is a man who literally had protesters gassed and beaten down so he could hold up a Bible in front of a church."
"He ought to read the Bible," Warnock continued. "If he would crack open that Bible, he would see that Jesus said that I came to preach good news to the poor. There's some 2,000 verses that counsel us on how to treat the poor. The Bible, over and over again, tells us how to welcome the stranger. Jesus spends much of his time healing the sick. And over against that view, we've seen a president who literally is taking health care away from millions of Americans and creating fear and terror throughout immigrant communities."
"My faith is not a weapon. It's a bridge," he added. "And I'd invite the president to come on over to my church. Maybe we ought to have some Bible study, because apparently he doesn't know the faith that I talk about on Sunday morning."
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