Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the Duck Commander family, is very worried about what he sees happening in the United States, and he doesn’t even watch TV anymore.
“I watched it all the way up to the election, and I said, ‘You know, I’ve had enough looting — the shooting, the burnings, the marching,’” said the Duck Dynasty star and head of Duck Commander, a national outdoors equipment and hunting empire. “It’s a sin-cursed world.”
He hated to see the inner-city violence from antifa and Black Lives Matter in 2020. But he was just as horrified by the pro-Trump Capitol riots on Jan. 6 and the Right’s efforts to “cancel” voices on the Left, like he was canceled a few years back for quoting the Bible on gay sex.
In his latest book, Uncanceled, which decries cancel culture and how it cost him $10 million, he said both sides have gone too far.
“Soon after the election, the two sides dug in their heels and began to attack one another with a new kind of viciousness,” he wrote. “Now, instead of just the extreme left taking to the streets in waves of violence and destruction of property, the extreme right briefly got in on the party when they invaded the Capitol and threatened the safety of the lawmakers and their staff.”
Robertson has a suggestion for solving the division: following God.
“It’s time to hit the streets, America! I am in the revolution business, but I’m not into setting other people’s stuff ablaze or taking human life,” he wrote. “You won’t find me invading the United States Capitol when my candidate loses an election. No, my only goal is to destroy bad ideas that stand opposed to the knowledge of God with the gospel of truth.”
But as much as he is a Bible-thumper and country preacher who sees no 2024 candidate as the nation’s savior, he also would give former President Donald Trump another shot.
“As far as his policies goes, he’s pro-life, pro-gun, pro-God. I shared Jesus with him multiple times, and he listened,” Robertson said.
That was the second time I’d heard a direct report that Trump was religious, though hardly ever in public. I told Robertson that Paula White, a pastor, told me the same thing when she prayed with Trump, who once vowed to build a church for her.
Robertson revealed that in one meeting with Trump during the 2016 campaign, he drew a story about Jesus on paper.
“I was just walking out the door, the first time I ever met him when he was running. He said, ‘Hey, that sheet of paper you showed me a while ago about Jesus and him dying on a cross for my sins, being resurrected.’ He said, ‘Can I have that?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I drew it out and kind of like a hieroglyphic form, just an arrow coming out of heaven. God became flesh. He died on a cross. There’s a cross there. There’s a tomb there where they put him, where we’re all going. And there’s an arrow coming out of it. The resurrection of the dead,” Robertson said.
“When I talked to Donald Trump, I said, ‘Trump, we’re the same age.’ We’re both about 75 or whatever,” Robertson said. “I said, ‘Look, we got a 6-foot hole waiting on us. And this person came forward from the grave and then gave us immortality.’ I said, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m following him. I’m just giving you the opportunity here.’ And he said, ‘Can I have that piece of paper?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ And I gave it to him. The next time I saw him, he said, ‘Hey, I still got that piece of paper you wrote down.'”
“I’d vote for him again,” he added.
