God Wants Donald Trump to be America’s Leader!

  

God Wants Donald Trump to be America’s Leader!

Does Trump have a Biblical mandate to become president?

In evangelical parishes (and more than a few very conservative Catholic churches), there is a very real belief that Donald Trump is indeed the “chosen one.” His “miraculous” head movement, which so many of his followers see as a sign from God of Trump’s “special status,” saved his life from a bullet. For non-adherents of this extreme evangelical belief, they wonder how a man – who divorces with abandon, whose companies have opted for serial bankruptcies to avoid paying employees and vendors, whose “grab them by the p%&y” admission and legendary sexual exploits are well-known, who has been charged with serious felonies and convicted on 34 felony counts, who has been determined in a civil action to have committed an act of rape, whose companies have been judicially determined to have filed fraudulent documents with the government, who had to pay $25 million to settle a fraud suit against Trump University and who lies with unprecedented frequency – could in any way lead a God-fearing flock of devoted Christians in the November election.

Well, let’s start with a frequent Biblical reference – the 45th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, which describes God’s sixth century B.C.E. anointment of Cyrus the Great, the first Persian king, to protect and save the Jews… even though Cyrus was neither particularly moral nor Jewish. But to evangelicals, Cyrus is thus a Biblical hero, and that he appears in that chapter 45 is frequently cited as further evidence of Trump’s 21st century “anointment” to lead the United States; you see, Trump was this nation’s 45th president. In 2018, a feature motion picture opened on approximately a thousand screens just before the 2018 mid-terms– The Trump Prophecy – on the Christian movie circuit. Unless you are in that community, you probably never heard of this film, even though it was a wildly successful release and became a cultural icon in the evangelical world.

Trump has given a voice to a White Christian former majority (now reduced to a minority), who feel left behind, marginalized and whose control of the nation is slip-sliding away. To explain Trump’s rather obvious questionable morality, they can either buy as truth everything he says and blame “falsehoods and persecution” from the “deep state” for the latter’s malign depravity – as many do – or simply resort to the Cyrus analogy to show being moral, devout and deeply religious are simply not necessary parts of God’s mandates for presidential leadership.

Enter the Courage Tour into the current presidential race, denying their harshly judgmental Christian nationalism while saying “we have to vote Biblically” with Donald John Trump as the only Christian choice. Often in broiling summer heat, the Courage Tour is a traveling tent revival featuring a lineup of charismatic preachers and self-styled prophets promising healing and delivering a political message: register to vote. Watch, or work, the polls. And help deliver the 2024 election to Donald Trump. It is a mandate from a bevy of pastors, in their churches or at events like the Courage Tour. Trump himself has frequently noted that he is God’s choice in the November election.

At one such recent Tour event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, “Heavy-hitting Maga organizations – including America First Policy Institute, TPUSA Faith and America First Works – had a presence outside the tent. Inside, headlining the event was Lance Wallnau, a prominent figure in the New Apostolic Reformation – a movement on the right that embraces modern-day apostles, aims to establish Christian dominion over society and politics and has grown in influence since Trump was elected president in 2016…

“According to the preachers who sermonized… the correct biblical worldview is a deeply conservative one. The speakers repeatedly stated their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, ideas that were elaborated on in pamphlets passed around the crowd and on three large screens facing the audience. (‘Tolerance IS NOT A commandment,’ read one poster, propped up in front of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA stall outside the tent.)

“After Wallnau spoke, Bill Federer, an evangelist who has written more than thirty books weighing in on US history from an anti-communist and rightwing perspective, offered a brief and often intensely inaccurate, intellectual history of the US and Europe. During his talk, Federer dropped references to the villains of his historiography – among them Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, the German philosopher Hegel and, ‘a little closer to home’, the political theorist of the New Left, Saul Alinsky. The crowd, apparently already versed in Federer’s intellectual universe, groaned and booed when Federer mentioned Alinsky.

“Federer also railed on ‘globalists’, tapping into the longstanding antisemitic idea of a shadowy cabal led by wealthy Jewish people who dictate world events… ‘Globalists,’ Federer said, ‘are giving money to LGBTQ activists to get involved with politics.’… It would be up to God-fearing Christians with a biblical worldview to push back against ‘wokeism’, by influencing what New Apostolic Reformers refer to as the ‘seven mountains’ of society: religion, family, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and, most important at the Courage Tour, government.” Alice Herman writing for the August 2nd edition of the Guardian, UK.

These hard-right Christian nationalists seem to have effectively rewritten the Bible to eschew brotherly/neighborly love, to champion sitting in harsh judgment of others and fallen in love with a charismatic politician who shows no sign of believing in Christian values (as Cyrus showed no sign of believing in Jewish values), has appointed judges to impose very intimate evangelical Christian mandates on everybody, and who promises to purge those who adhere to any level of liberal thought and deed not only from the government, stripping them of any political voice, but perhaps from any legitimate place in American society. Try and counter Trump’s never-ending effusion of lies with empirical facts, challenge his character based on his own words and behavior, and you will hit the immovable wall of “God’s mandate,” supported by pastors across the land.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you wonder how autocratic leaders find traction to persecute and decimate those of differing beliefs with massive angry public support, you merely have to look at the White Christian nationalist movement under leader Trump for the clearest example.