On a Friday morning in February, televangelist Paula White-Cain spent more than two hours preaching at the
King Jesus church Supernatural Ministry School in Miami. With top billing on the event website as “Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser,” White stood in front of a stage with
a light show befitting a Pink Floyd cover band. With a sanctuary that holds 7,000 people, one of the nation’s largest Latino churches was packed with “apostles” and “prophets” who’d come to be “activated in God’s supernatural power” and learn to expand their ministry.
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“God kept opening doors until eventually, 19 years ago,
I get a phone call out of the blue, from this man named Donald Trump,” she said, recalling the day in 2002 when the twice-divorced New York real estate mogul
reached out to her after catching her show on a local Florida TV station. “He said, ‘You’re fantastic.’ He said, ‘You have the ‘it’ factor.’ I said, ‘Sir, we call that the anointing.’” White said the Lord told her to help Trump know God. “I took on that assignment never knowing that one day that man that God told me to show him who He was would become the president of the United States of America,” she told the crowd, which cheered with enthusiasm.
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At the Supernatural Ministry School, White deftly offered the audience the secret of her success. “How did I get to the White House from the trailer?” she asked. The answer, of course, was by giving money to God by way of the church—and she’s not talking about tossing the weekly pin money in the offering plate.
Securing Paula White, White House-caliber blessings would require students of the supernatural to give a “First Fruits” offering, one that is significant—the first week’s pay, say, or even the first month’s pay—to signify putting God first in everything. White claimed during the sermon that God once told her that in 2009, a particularly bad year, she needed to give her entire annual salary to God—$8 million.
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They have a lot in common. Like the president, White is twice-divorced, with a history of marital infidelities and bankruptcy, but possessing remarkable TV savvy.
They first connected in that fateful 2002 phone call, not long after White had launched her first TV show and her career was taking off. Trump called to tell White he’d been watching her show at Mar-a-Lago and that she was “fantastic.” Thus began a long relationship that included White gifting him a Bible for his 60th birthday in 2006 that was signed by the late, legendary minister Billy Graham. That same year,
he appeared on her TV show to promote his latest book, Why We Want You to Be Rich. The year before, White bought a $3.5 million condo in Trump’s Park Avenue building. When Trump first considered a presidential run in 2011, he sought White’s counsel. “I don’t think it’s the right timing,” she told him.
The timing was obviously right in 2015, when Trump did decide to run for president. In
Something Greater, she writes
that he asked her to be a bridge to the evangelical community, a critical voting bloc that was far from being supportive of his candidacy. His perceived moral failings—the many wives, the notorious womanizing, his unapologetic vulgarity—
all added up to the support of only 3 percent of evangelical leaders and “insiders” surveyed by WORLD magazine in July that year. When Trump appeared in 2015 at the big Christian Right confab in DC, the Values Voter Summit, he got booed.
White describes how she helped improve his standing
by creating an evangelical advisory council for the campaign, made up mostly of other televangelists like her, including Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, and Robert Jeffress, the controversial Dallas megachurch pastor who in 2012, told evangelicals not to vote for Mitt Romney because, as a Mormon, Romney wasn’t a real Christian.
White says she even schooled Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—
an Orthodox Jew whom she describes as “quite brilliant”—on the “evangelical landscape.”
Later, when Trump appeared headed toward the GOP nomination, White helped organize a meeting for him
with more mainstream evangelical leaders who still had many reservations about his moral character, not to mention concerns about the televangelists he had assembled who were not their natural compatriots.
Most of them fell into line, and after Trump became the GOP nominee, White was on hand to give the prime-time benediction on the opening night of the Republican National Convention. After he was elected with the support of more than 80 percent of white evangelical voters, White gave the
invocation at his inauguration, becoming the first clergywoman to do so, though not the first televangelist.
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Among other things, a Senate report found that White’s personal ministry and the church she ran with her now ex-husband used tax-exempt ministry funds to pay nearly $900,000 one year for the Whites’ waterfront mansion. It paid over a million dollars in salaries to family members and kept the Whites in the air with a private jet.
White and her church refused to cooperate with the investigation and in 2011, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), issued a report outlining the committee’s findings but took no other action. White’s church declared bankruptcy in 2014
after defaulting on $29 million in loans from an evangelical credit union. In 2011, amid controversy, she became senior pastor at the predominantly black City of Destiny—then known as New Destiny Christian Center—after its former pastor died of a drug overdose.
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When every last dime seemed to have been wrung from the audience, White invited all the “barren” women in the room who desired children to come to the front, “because fruitfulness is getting ready to hit this house. God’s about to open your natural womb. God’s gonna open barren places.” She told a story about helping a woman in Hawaii
with no uterus and no fallopian tubes give birth. Then she moved to each hopeful woman—some of whom were infertile, others who struggled with repeated miscarriages—and held their hands or touched her belly, telling one that she’d no longer miscarry. One woman fell on the floor. Others cried in expectation of fruitfulness. White wept and spoke in tongues. “Holy, holy, holy, hallelujah,” she cried,
and then held a basket of money up high. “It is blessed!”
When it was over, White held a book signing for her newest book release,
Something Greater, which is all about her relationship with God. But
Something Greater, of course,
is really all about her relationship with Trump. His name is mentioned 177 times in 288 pages. Jesus merits just 82.