A Televangelist in the White House

Not widely known is the fact that Donald Trump flirted with the idea of running for president in the 2012 election cycle. According to White, Trump reached out to her in 2011, asking her to gather some Christian leaders to advise him and pray over whether he should run. So Paula convened a group of about thirty pastors and televangelists to meet with and intercede about Trump’s presidential ambitions. As she tells it, she wound up advising Trump against running that cycle, and he ultimately agreed.¹ Ralph Reed, a leader of the religious right who was also discussing the run with Trump at the time, has an alternate theory about this decision-making process, noting that NBC “threw an unbelievable sum of money at him” to do another season of The Apprentice and that Trump simply couldn’t refuse.²

By the time the 2016 campaign season rolled around, Trump was unequivocally running, and White writes that he asked her to “be in charge of reaching out to the evangelicals.”³ She agreed, but there was a hitch. The superstructure of the religious right in the United States, since the 1980s, was predominantly built by denominational leaders, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, institutional players, networked activists, and those in similar circles. But Paula White did not travel in those circles or have those connections.

Instead of trying to cultivate the old guard of the religious right, Paula White reached out to the people she knew and began arranging meet-and-greets for different groups of Independent Charismatic leaders and Trump. Whether this strategy—reaching evangelicals through cultivating Independent Charismatic celebrities—was a stroke of genius on Trump’s part or simply something he stumbled on accidentally, it worked.

These initial Christian leaders to meet with Donald Trump in 2015 were not your typical neighborhood-church pastors or religious right VIPs. No, it was televangelists, apostles, prophets, megachurch pastors, Messianic rabbis, faith healers, and prosperity gospel preachers—the entrepreneurs of the Independent Charismatic celebrity class—who got in on the ground floor of the Trump movement. And given that these were not the stoic and staid evangelical leaders of old, things sometimes got raucous, with prophets prophesying over Trump and prosperity gospel pastors naming and claiming blessings on his behalf. The central position of this new coalition would eventually engender a revolution in the configuration of power in the leadership of the religious right.

Paula White was becoming Trump’s evangelical translator and chaperone, briefing him before these gatherings about each of the people who would be there. These charismatic religious leaders would even sometimes, as they were accustomed to doing in their churches, lay hands on the famously germophobic Trump, inadvertently proving just how far he would go to curry their favor.

Early in the 2016 campaign, most respectable evangelical leaders would not have wanted to lay hands on Donald Trump with a ten-foot pole. What these mainstream evangelical leaders were slow to realize at the time was that rank-and-file evangelicals loved Trump. From the summer of 2015 to the end of the primary, Trump was consistently winning a plurality of evangelical support, even if it was frequently a very small plurality. Members of the respectable evangelical class were endorsing Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Huckabee, or Ben Carson throughout the primary. But the Independent Charismatic leaders, led in no small part, as we shall see, by New Apostolic Reformation networks, became the vanguard of Christian Trumpism.

The movement I track in The Violent Take It by Force is called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), and it has thrived in relative obscurity. This little-known but potent network of Christian leaders built the theology of Christian Trumpism and then inspired thousands of Christians to show up on January 6 to fight for Donald Trump. Further, the NAR’s theological ideas around politics and spiritual warfare are increasingly setting the agenda for the religious right in America and quickening our polarized, zero-sum political environment. It was Paula White who invited the New Apostolic Reformation leaders (friends and colleagues among the Independent Charismatic celebrity class) into Trump’s inner circle.

Over the course of the Republican primary, as Trump’s rivals dropped out one by one and as his evangelical base remained unwavering, the old-guard leaders of the religious right slowly realized that Trump was going to be the nominee—and also that they had no relationship with him. Soon, as Stephen Strang [who, as founder and CEO of Charisma Media, which publishes Charisma News and Charisma magazine, is the headmost media mogul of the Independent Charismatic world in the United States,] put it to me in an interview, “these evangelical hot shots”—most of whom had scoffed at the brash real-estate tycoon and his prosperity-gospel-touting female pastor—“had to go hat in hand to this thin little blonde lady who looks more like a fashion model than she does a preacher.”⁴

In a turn that no one could have predicted even two years earlier, Paula White and her coterie of televangelists, prophets, and charismatic megachurch pastors were suddenly the Christian face of the Republican presidential ticket. Many have asserted that Donald Trump selected Mike Pence as his running mate to “win over” or “secure” the evangelical vote. But I would argue that Pence’s elevation to the ticket in 2016 had much more to do with smoothing things over with the noncharismatic evangelical elite. Trump had already locked down the support of the evangelical multitudes.

In her public remarks about advising Trump, leading his evangelical advisers team, and brokering smaller-group gatherings of religious leaders with him, White returns again and again to the image of being a bridge builder. In September 2017, she would tell a room of religion journalists, when asked about her role as Trump’s spiritual adviser, “I say I’m a construction worker … it is building bridges. It is putting people around him, putting those men and women of God, which so far has totaled more than 400 men and women of God.”⁵ But the most important bridge that White built from 2015 to 2020 was a bridge between the previously isolated and irrelevant Independent Charismatic celebrity class and the leadership echelon of the religious right.

Along the way, Paula White has accomplished a number of notable firsts. In 2016, she became the first woman to offer a benediction at the Republican National Convention:

She also became the first female clergy member to pray at a presidential inauguration in 2017:

Through Paula White’s closeness to Trump, her vast network of relationships among charismatic evangelicals, and her willingness to insert herself into Trump’s—at the time preposterous—presidential campaign, Independent Charismatics moved from the margin to the center of right-wing Christian politics in America. The fringe became the carpet.

And toward the end of the [first] Trump administration, Paula White—the “messed-up Mississippi girl” turned televangelist who hitched her wagon to Donald Trump’s political ambitions—fully moved inside the administration. After years of informally advising Trump and convening and chairing his circle of evangelical advisers, sometimes as the only female religious leader in the room, she found, in 2019, her path finally cleared to take on an official role as a White House staffer in the Office of Public Liaison, running the administration’s Faith and Opportunities Initiative…to focus on advancing Trump’s agenda.

But Paula White was, in many ways, not the first televangelist to get a job in the White House. The first, I would argue, was Donald Trump himself, who had entered the White House two years earlier. In the picture that Paula White paints, Trump has long been an assiduous student of TV preaching, particularly what’s propagated by prosperity preachers and positive thinkers. With his oddly coiffed hair, salesmanship, his bombastic oratory, and his unflinching personal schtick forged out of years of celebrity and television savvy, Trump has pantomimed the televangelists. His celebrity could easily mingle with Paula White’s clique of entrepreneurial charismatic celebrities because Trump’s whole brand is made of similar material. For what is “Make America Great Again” if not a gospel? It’s a nationalistic prosperity gospel, to be sure, mixed with a few “American carnage” fire-and-brimstone threats if Trump’s ways are not followed. Coached by Paula White, Trump has now mastered the religious dimension of his own televangelism career, riding evangelical support all the way to the White House.

There was only one official White House-sanctioned prayer offered on the morning of January 6, 2021. It was led by Paula White. On that cold January morning, before Donald Trump’s speech at the Ellipse telling the lusty crowds to “fight like hell,” before Rudy Giuliani shouted for “trial by combat,” and before the crowds began marching across the National Mall to threaten lawmakers into reneging on American democracy, an invocation from Paula White opened the event.

This tenacious, talented, tragic, triumphant woman—someone who has broken every glass ceiling she came up against—became the first pastor to offer an official blessing over an attempted American insurrection.

It’s true that Paula White has built bridges. She built a bridge that allowed her fellow Independent Charismatics to enthusiastically join the inner circle of power within the religious right. She built a bridge across a major divide in American evangelicalism between charismatics and non-charismatics. And she built a bridge between the Independent Charismatic celebrity class and the White House.

These bridges proved strong enough that the leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation, and other ambitious charismatic leaders and networks, could link arms with other Christians and Trump advisers in an attempt to overthrow our democracy, all under the banner of Christian unity and revival hope.