As you probably know, I’ve not only written four books about President Donald Trump, but I’ve also been an unabashed Trump supporter for several years now. Now that the Senate has confirmed Joe Biden as the next president of the United States, I want to share my personal thoughts on the prophecies about President Trump and how Charisma Media will cover this going forward.
My first book, God and Donald Trump, was really about his miraculous win and how different Christian leaders, many of whom I know personally and had written about and reported on in Charisma magazine, had said God had raised up this very unlikely leader. If you’ve read the book, you know I actually attended the victory party in New York City the night of the 2016 election. And even though in the natural, everybody said Trump would never win, I just thought, Well, the prophets prophesied, and I believed he would do it.
God and Donald Trump is still a good read. In some ways, it may even be the best of the four. It was successful enough that I wrote a sequel, Trump Aftershock.
As the 2020 election drew near, I decided to write God, Trump and the 2020 Election. Writing this book was really my way to try to wake up the Christian community. The first chapter is called “Why Trump Must Win,” because I thought, Things are so difficult in America that we just cannot turn this country over to the Left.
But the second chapter is “Why Trump Might Lose.” This chapter boiled down the possibilities to several things that might happen. The first was if the economy crashed (and when I wrote the book, it looked like the economy was going to continue to roar forever). Of course, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economy tanked (even though it has come roaring back—at least in terms of the stock market. Yet many people are still having great financial struggles.)
But the other reason—and probably the main reason—I said Trump might lose was fraud. And I documented a lot of the potential fraud that we have since seen take place. When the election happened, officials stopped the voting the night of the election only in the states where it made a difference. It looked like Trump was way ahead, and by morning, they had mysteriously found boxes of ballots, and he was behind.
In some of his rallies, Trump listed 18 specific examples of election fraud. Most are bad enough that alone they would flip the election results his way. I thought all these examples would be investigated, and the courts would step in to change the election outcome. And at the same time, a number of Christian leaders were saying that somehow God had said Trump would be in for two terms. There were several pathways to this outcome, including the U.S. Senate rejecting the electors for Joe Biden from the seven states that chose electors for both candidates or even only a couple of those states. And as it unfolded, we all got a civics lesson on how this could happen and even had happened earlier in our nation’s history.
During the period where it looked like the election might go in Donald Trump’s favor, we decided at Charisma Media and cn.mycharisma.com to play it fairly straight but avoid calling Joe Biden the president-elect until the election was certified.
Now that the U.S. Senate has certified the election, we will, when appropriate, refer to him as President-elect Biden. And of course, after he’s inaugurated on Jan. 20, we will respect him as President Biden. We are instructed to pray for our leaders, which we will do.
In my books, I reported prophecies going back to Kim Clement in the 2007 time frame. He prophesied in a service in Redding, California, that God was going to raise up a person who loved him the way King David did. And he said Trump was going to be a trumpet, but he also said Bill Gates was going to be the gate that God would open. Again, his prophecy was somewhat ambiguous, but still interesting. So far Trump has been that trumpet for religious freedom. The prophecy about Gates has not yet come to pass. There were other prophets whom I also cited in my books.
As the election tightened, I asked a Christian leader in confidence what I should do if Trump weren’t elected. And this leader, whose name you would recognize, said, “Well, you’re not really making the prophecies; you’re just reporting that they happened.”
And that’s right. I am not a prophet. I’ve never been a prophet; that’s not my gift. But there were a number of prophets who were very certain that Trump would be elected. Now that it has not happened, they are apologizing one by one. Since we covered their prophecies (and I personally hoped they were right), we are covering their apologies. So far, we have published two of them, from Loren Sandford and Jeremiah Johnson. I thought they both said it well. They refused to blame other people; they refused to say, “Well, Trump won, but the election was stolen.”
Now, I believe people who are spiritually attuned will understand something even if they don’t see the full picture. And I personally do believe Trump won, and I personally do believe the election was stolen. But it’s not my responsibility to fix that. I can’t make anything happen. All I can do is try to be faithful to do what God has called me to do. And that’s to inform people and provide a platform for different ministries to report things you can’t read in secular media or even in some of the liberal Christian periodicals out there.
As I said before, we will play this in a very straightforward manner. And we will grapple with how to understand times like this when God doesn’t come through in the way we thought He should.
As I close, I’d like to share a personal anecdote God brought to mind in the last few hours. One of them is about Jamie Buckingham, my friend and mentor who, when he was in his 50s, wrote widely about how he was sure God was going to let him live to be 100. He felt he actually had a word from the Lord about that. Yet he came down with cancer at age 58 and went into remission for a while. A lot of prayer went up for him, and he believed he would be healed. But then his cancer came back with a vengeance.
Jamie had treatments, very radical treatments, and I believe that he died in 1992 from those treatments, not from the cancer itself. But because Jamie believed he would be healed, I decided to stand in faith with him and believe the Lord would come through. And it wasn’t until about a week before he died that I realized this prayer was not going to be answered.
In a way, many of these prophecies were probably like Jamie’s word about his healing: wishful thinking and praying that God would come through and turn things around in America. We live in very serious times. And the things the Democrats say they’re going to do are also very serious, but we just have to trust God, and I think I have.
Job 1:21b says, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” And whenever things happen that don’t make sense to us, we have to remember that God is still in control. He has plans and purposes we don’t understand.
I don’t understand what’s happened, and I’m not going to try to defend Donald Trump. He is who he is; he answers to God, not to me. But I also don’t back off from what I have written or from the different podcasts I’ve done. They were all sincere, and they were all from the perspective of what I believed God was saying. And I hope that you’ll give me the grace—and Charisma Media the grace—of missing this, in a manner of speaking.
I also want to go on record as saying we do not condone violence in any way, and we believe that apparent Trump supporters breaking into the Capitol is far worse than Black Lives Matter rioters burning a police precinct or burning down a store—which we also condemn. We’re sad for the loss of life of the woman who was killed at the scene.
In the end, we must remember the words of the prophet Isaiah: “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder. And his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6).
To hear more of my personal opinions regarding the events of Wednesday, Jan. 6, please listen to the entire Strang Report podcast at this link and share it with friends who may need a word of encouragement that God is still in control. Be sure to subscribe to the Strang Report podcast on Apple Podcasts and on our home at the Charisma Podcast Network. {eoa}
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