Bartholomew's Notes

From Stephen Strang at Charisma News:

If you keep up with current events at all, you know the left loves to hate President Donald Trump. But no matter how much Democrats rage against him, it doesn’t change the fact that several prominent prophets—including Kim Clement and Chuck Pierce—predicted his presidency years before the 2016 election.

Strang has written two books explaining how Trump is the manifestation of God’s purposes, and, by extension, how leading figures in the neo-Pentecostal Christian Right receive special messages from God about current affairs and the near future. This may seem somewhat marginal, but in 2005 Time magazine identified Strang as one of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America”, and Trump has been photographed waving around a copy of his book God and Donald Trump. Strang is primarily a publisher, although he also appears on various talk shows.

The specific claims in Strang’s new article are nothing new. I looked at the example from Kim Clement here – Clement’s supposed “prophecy” was obscurantist, but insofar as any sense can be made of it he seems to have predicted that Rudy Giuliani would become president and that Trump and Bill Gates would become evangelists: “Trump shall become a trumpet” while Gates will “open up the gate of a financial realm for the church”. The main point was that powerful businessmen will join the neo-Pentecostal movement, with God revealing who precisely via puns on names.

As for Chuck Pierce, he

…prophesied a similar word in 2008. He said God would play a “trump card,” and it was only later on that he realized the word was in reference to Donald Trump. 

In Strang’s book, he quotes this as “America must learn to play the Trump card”, pointedly capitalising the “T”. It should be noted that this was something God supposedly said to Pierce, but not something Pierce is on record as having said at the time. There’s also a variation of the story, promoted by the neo-Pentecostal evangelist Dutch Sheets, in which Pierce received the message in 2007 and was specifically told that it pertained to 2016, the year of Trump’s election:

In 2007, Chuck Pierce was caught up to heaven and saw a vision of all 50 states and their condition before the Lord. The last thing God said to him in this vision was, “In 2016, I will play my trump card.” 

The claim is curiously similar to an account by Cindy Jacobs, which she also shared with Strang:

“Someone reminded me that at the New Year’s celebration that Chuck Pierce did the year before the election, I had prophesied, ‘And the Lord says I have a trump card in my hand and I’m going to play it and I’m going to trump the system.’ I didn’t even recall it, sad to say. But in retrospect—sometimes it’s like that with the prophetic—in retrospect you see what God was trying to say.”

Strang’s article continues with a reference to Mark Taylor, the supposed “firefighter prophet” who says that he received a direct message from God that Trump would be the next president. Taylor was promoted by Strang and also appeared on The Jim Bakker Show, and his claims were made first into a book, The Trump Prophecies, and then a film, The Trump Prophecy. The book was published by Defender Publishing, owned by an evangelical conspiracy theorist named Tom Horn, and the film was made with the assistance of faculty and students at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Alas, however, it has since become obvious that Taylor is unhinged, and he has made numerous bizarre statements promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory and revelling in sanguinary visions of Trump unleashing imprisonment and executions against enemies.

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