The False Prophets of the 2020 Election
People who predicted Trump's second win weren't "wrong." They were lying.
Matthew 7:15 — “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”
A few people, most notably retired firefighter Mark Taylor, said that he believed Trump would become president, claiming that God sent him a message in 2011 asserting such. He published a video about it shortly thereafter. In 2016, of course, Trump did become the president, making Mark Taylor instantly famous. Liberty University, where Taylor was now working, even made a movie about it. Of course, Taylor now uses this as a grift where he regularly makes prophecies, including that Trump would win again in 2020 despite him badly mishandling a pandemic, letting Americans die, and ushering in an economic recession. When Trump lost in 2020, and when that became official last week, Taylor and his ilk were exposed as “false prophets” to many Christians. Here’s the thing, though. They weren’t wrong about Trump. They were just lying.
Taylor probably really wanted Trump to be president the first time in ran in 2012. The same types of people were drawn to him, but the GOP was still trying to pretend to be respectable with people like Mitt Romney, and the full amount of racist rage mixed with economic failures toward Barack Obama had not come to full fruition yet. The far-right was getting stronger, but it wasn’t quite strong enough yet. And, most importantly, the so-called good conservative Christians of the world hadn’t yet thrown their support behind a nationalist, populist, offensive figure like Trump. It would take the now-disgraced Jerry Falwell, Jr. to do that.
Christians conflate, quite often, what THEY want with what GOD wants. Not just for things like comfort, health, fortune, love — those are things all humans desire. But specifically for things like political elections. Sporting events. Wars. Any result they crave, that’s the lens through which they see God. So in America, God is often a white Christian nationalist “patriot” who loves America and wealth and capitalism and power. So when Mark Taylor wanted Trump to be president, he may or may not have sincerely believed that God wanted that as well. But he was definitely lying when he said God told him Trump would be president, even when Trump DID legally become president in 2016. The reason I know this is because Taylor, like so many other charismatic Christians, made the same exact claim in 2020.
I took a gander at Mark Taylor’s Twitter feed, and I’ll spare you the rabbit hole, or the myriad YouTube prophecy features to just simply state that he, along with hundreds of others of charismatic people, still strongly believe that Trump will still be president on January 21, and that anyone who doesn’t believe this — even Franklin Graham, himself going viral for saying that the GOP Congress members who voted to impeach Trump a second time were like Judas betraying Jesus — is a traitor, for simply uttering the words, even in a negative context, “President-elect Biden.”
It’s definitely not just Mark Taylor.
Other famous charismatic “prophets” who declared that Trump would win? Let’s go. Pat Robertson of The 700 Club, Paula White-Cain, Trump’s spiritual adviser, Kris Vallotton, pastor of Bethel Church, Kat Kerr, author and YouTube prophet, Marcus Rogers, writer of the song “The Trump Card” and author, Kevin Zadai, author who got rich off a claim of a “supernatural event” with Jesus during a surgery, Greg Locke, pastor at Global Vision Bible Church and one of the most violent, hate-filled people on this list, Taribo West, leader of The Storm Miracle Ministries and YouTube prophet, Denise Goulet, pastor of the International Church of Las Vegas which Trump attended in a maskless rally in October, Curt Landry of Curt Landry Ministries, R. Loren Sandford of Prophetic Moments, Kenneth Copeland of Kenneth Copeland Ministries, and Jeremiah Johnson of Jeremiah Johnson Ministries and author of several pro-Trump prophecy books.
Of this list, only the following have come out and said they were wrong as of writing: Vallotton, (who waffled back and forth) Robertson, Sandford, and Johnson. Those four have received endless death threats for having done so, even if they said they believed it was “stolen” or whatever. Because in their minds, God just isn’t as powerful as blundering centrist Joe Biden, who is somehow capable of illegally stealing an entire presidential election by millions of votes. The rabid people they themselves enabled now want to kill them for going back on their word. I wonder, what will these people do on January 21?
My guess is that they will continue in extreme delusion, saying Trump is somehow the real president of the real government, and Biden is the antichrist installed by the devil, and they will continue to deny reality in all the most predictable ways. I wonder how they’d feel if Trump ran for president again for real in 2024? Would it even be “legitimate” at that point? I can’t predict these people, honestly. Unlike them, I won’t claim to be a prophet. I can only guess at their actions based on how they currently behave, how they’ve behaved in the past, and in my own extensive history growing up Pentecostal.
A lot of mainstream news media sources aren’t really following these charismatic people and their failed prophecies, and I can’t blame them. The real news is nonstop, and all eyes are on D.C., hoping that people don’t die before, during, or after Biden’s inauguration because of the far-right extreme terrorists that charismatic Christians have been courting steadily for decades. The few articles I’ve read about it are pretty good, though. This one discussed how the charismatic prophets who predicted Trump’s 2020 win are now fighting among themselves in the aftermath: those without enough faith who uh, believe that Joe Biden will be president at noon on January 20 and apologized versus those who still believe magic angels will come from heaven, led by Q or E or whoever it is now, and kill Biden while making Trump the forever president of white America, ridding it of BLM and LGBTQ and all the other acronyms of people they hate. WaPo published a piece about the Christians still holding onto that hope, too.
To be fair to the charismatic prophets, this is absolutely the closest we’ve ever come to overturning a legal election. But, you know, it’s mostly their fault, and the fault of the president who was perfectly willing to go along with all of it until Mike Pence was nearly lynched on Capitol Hill.
One thing I just want to make clear, though, is that none of these people received a prophetic word from God saying that Trump would win the election in 2020. My ex-Pentecostal heart can’t bear to say that NOBODY hears the voice of God, ever, in a direct way — maybe they do — but God did not tell these people jackshit. That I can promise you. Even if they got it right in 2016. They just believed what they wanted to believe, and then they told their followers what they wanted to believe too. In the face of the polls which said repeatedly that Biden would win, they brought up 2016 polls that said Clinton would — even though the gap was bigger, the polling better, the circumstances highly different, especially in those key swing states in the Midwest. The prophets had a chance of being right, after all. Even if it was a coin flip, but the coin flip was going to be head over tails 99 out of 100 times, it still could have been tails.
And when they weren’t right, they were the FIRST to proclaim that the election had been stolen, and Trump sowed that discord early on as well. The election was simultaneously stolen by Joe Biden and their powerless God could do nothing to stop it, while Trump will still somehow win by the 21st and all will be right again, because God wants Trump, and they want Trump, and God wouldn’t ever be against what they want, would he?
I just hope that the media, if they choose to insist on continuing coverage of Trump and his many charismatic, evangelical enablers long after he’s on his sad plane to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday morning — and they will — is able to call all these people out for what they are, finally: liars. Just because they seem like nice Christians or stupid trivial people doesn’t mean they’re not liars. They’re false prophets and they’re doing it on purpose. Everyone I’ve just mentioned has gotten rich during the Trump era, gaining influence and power beyond anything they had previously. I imagine they will continue feeding on this animosity for the next four years, and the cycle of reactionaryism continues with white Christian evangelicals at the helm.
Just know that they are all, to the core, rotten fucking liars.
Well said. Thank you.