The AFP reports from Davos:
“He was very, very hospitable and personal. He just said ‘Yes, I’ll sign that for you’.” — Deborah O’Hara Rusckowski, 58, who held out a book for Trump to sign called “God and Donald Trump”, a study on whether supernatural intervention brought the US leader to power.
Photos posted to social media show that Trump did not just sign the book (previously blogged here) – he also held it aloft. One of those photos can now be seen in a review of the book by Amy Sullivan published at Politico a couple of days ago; another appears on Charisma News, the neo-Pentecostal news service owned by Steven Strang, the author of God and Donald Trump and a significant figure in evangelical publishing.
The Charisma News article refers to Sullivan’s review and is headlined “Ultra-Liberal Website Delivers ‘Surprisingly Accurate’ Review of ‘God and Donald Trump”. The headline is odd, given that Sullivan’s assessment is quite critical:
At a certain point in “God and Donald Trump,” the recent theological gymnastics on display from Tony Perkins and Jerry Falwell, Jr., among others, to explain ongoing conservative Christian support for a president who (allegedly) paid off a porn star weeks before Election Day so she would keep quiet about their (alleged) affair become clear. There will be no point at which Trump’s most loyal evangelical and charismatic supporters declare they have had enough. Because to do so would be to admit that they were wrong, that God wasn’t behind Trump’s election, and that their Holy Spirit radar might be on the fritz. That it was, after all, about something as temporal and banal as hating his Democratic rival.
However, Sullivan describes the book as “surprisingly fascinating”, and she notes the various Christian Right activists who came out for Trump:
Strang attempts to explain evangelical fervor for Trump and provides a window into the world of charismatics, a subset of evangelical Christians who believe God still speaks to people through prophesies and is still actively involved in arranging the world of human affairs.
…A Catholic holy man named Thomas Zimmer who spent much of his life in Italy even claimed to have received a prophesy in the 1980s that Trump would “lead America back to religion.” And the book is filled with testimony after testimony from Christian leaders who were amazed to find themselves supporting Trump in 2016, who each claim that he was their very last choice up until he won the Republican nomination.
Strang’s view is not just that Trump is God’s man for the hour – it is also that this can be confirmed by signs following. Background to the Zimmer claim was published by Strang on Charisma News in July; the “Hermit of Loreto”, who died in 2009, was apparently
so sure Donald Trump would become a great spiritual leader of America that he wrote his name on a brick and had it placed in the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Holy Door after the Jubilee [in 2000] so Trump would receive blessings from the many Masses that would be said in the Vatican.
The source for the story is an American priest named Fr. Giacomo Capoverdi, who says that he heard it from a doctor named Claudio Curran.
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