If you were God you’d be thoroughly pissed off with Donald Trump. And if you weren’t God you’d probably feel the same.

As the protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police spread across the US, the President retreated to his bunker in the White House and sent out vicious and inflammatory tweets. One bit of digital phlegm included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” – a clear reference to a white police chief cracking down on black protesters in the Civil Rights era.

He then held a conference call with US governors and ranted that they risked “looking like jerks” if they didn’t control the civil unrest – said to be the most widespread in the US since the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.

Today he declared himself the “law and order” president in a Rose Garden speech worthy of a tinpot fascist, swearing to set the US military on the American people to quell the unrest.

At this point, Trump grabbed a Bible bearing the words “God is Love” and hijacked the All Mighty for a photo-op.

What he wanted to do was stand outside St John’s Episcopal church, one block from the White House, the traditional place of worship for presidents. A sea of peaceful protesters impeded his way so they were forcefully parted by police firing teargas, allowing Trump to walk between the dispersed masses for his shameless publicity stunt.

Seeing the ungodliest president of them all brandish a Bible like that must surely be enough to bring on the heavenly vapours.

For if God is love, Trump is hate.

When an agnostic on the safer side of the Atlantic can feel outraged by this mugging of God, what must a religious American feel? Thankfully, another bishop is on hand to speak common sense, following our own Bishop of Ripon only the other week.

The Right Rev Mariann Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, told the Washington Post: “I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop.”

She added that Trump’s message was at odds with the values of love and tolerance espoused by the church.

Still clearly annoyed when she spoke to CNN, she said: “Let me be clear, the President just used a Bible, the most sacred text of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and one of the churches of my diocese, without permission, as a backdrop for a message antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.”

You’d like to think that Trump was mutually incompatible with the teachings of anyone, divine or otherwise. We’ve had three-an-half years to come to terms with the worst man in America being elected president.

Perhaps his racially inflammatory attitude towards protest – black rioters bad, white rioters toting guns “very fine people” – will deny him a second term.

What the US needs at a time of Covid-19, economic collapse and social breakdown is a president who can speak to his people with calm wisdom and authority. What they’ve got is a petulant septuagenarian toddler who can only sniff potential personal advantage in any situation, however dire.

Trump may pretend to be the “law and order” president when sounding tough appears to be to his advantage, but he will never be that. He is the disorder president; the hateful president; the open-his-mouth-and-a-lie-rolls-out president.

And as the law Professor Robert Reich just tweeted: “The President of the United States is deploying the military to perpetrate violence against their fellow citizens ­– because their fellow citizens are protesting unjust violence at the hands of the state.”

Many worried Trump would want to start a war; now he seems to want one against his own people.