Donald Trump has often praised William McKinley, a White House predecessor who shared the current president’s love of tariffs and territorial expansion. A pious man, McKinley claimed he had divine sanction for the 1898 US annexation of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War. According to McKinley’s account, he was tormented by what to do with the former Spanish colonies when he “went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance.” Then he was struck by a divine insight: that the United States had a mission to “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

It’s impossible to imagine Trump, for all his stated admiration of McKinley, going down on his knees and seeking heavenly council. While Trump is the head of a political coalition whose largest element is evangelical Christians, his own personal faith seems, at best, a cynical and barely disguised performance. In 2015, at the start of his political career, he said he had never asked God for forgiveness. When asked if he preferred the Old or the New Testament, he said, “Probably equal. I think it’s just incredible.”

Yet, in a curious way, Trump has managed to reinvent McKinley’s fusion of imperialism and piety—and never more so than in his current war on Iran. There was only a cursory effort to prepare the public for the conflict; as The New Yorker tartly observed, this is a “no-explanation war.” Since it started last Saturday, the White House has offered a plethora of conflicting justifications, including regime change, pressure from the Israeli government, fear of an imminent attack by Iran, fear of Iran getting nuclear weapons, and a desire to pressure Iran in negotiations.