https://godanddonaldtrump.com/ CHAPTER 5 MOBILIZING THE FAITHFUL ★★★★★ EVEN THOUGH EVANGELICALS almost always vote Republican, they won’t vote for just anyone. Because of the vast differences between the platforms and ideology of the Republican and Democratic parties, it is nearly impossible to persuade conscientious Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates. However, it’s often just as difficult to get them to vote for candidates in their own party, as we wit- nessed in the 2008 election, when many Evangelicals stayed home rather than cast their votes for John McCain. According to Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coali- tion, as many as seventeen million Evangelicals refused to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012,¹ presumably because he is Mormon. The impact of that becomes appar- ent when you realize that Barack Obama won a second term by a margin of only five million votes. For a while it looked as if the 2016 election was going to follow the same
pattern. Hillary Clinton’s nomination for the Democratic ticket was essentially a foregone conclusion. No one in her party had the backing to compete with the Clinton machine, and the Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders was more of a diver- sion than a bona fide opponent. His only function was apparently to draw the Democratic base further to the left. For Republicans, however, it was a very different story, and the image fixed in my mind of seventeen smiling candidates standing there on the debate platform, each claiming to be the real conservative and the only true friend of the evan- gelical base, perfectly illustrates the problem of finding even one candidate the faithful will support. The campaign trail was crowded with sixteen men, one woman, and millions of evangelical voters who couldn’t make up their minds. Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Ben Carson were strong early favorites for a variety of reasons, but none of them managed to break out of the pack. After Ted Cruz finally dropped out on May 3, leaving Donald Trump as the pre- sumptive nominee, many die-hard conservatives said they couldn’t bring them- selves to vote for Trump and would stay home rather than vote for such an
CHAPTER 5
MOBILIZING THE FAITHFUL
★★★★★
EVEN THOUGH EVANGELICALS almost always vote Republican, they won’t vote for just anyone. Because of the vast differences between the platforms and ideology of the Republican and Democratic parties, it is nearly impossible to persuade conscientious Republicans to vote for Democratic candidates. However, it’s often just as difficult to get them to vote for candidates in their own party, as we witnessed in the 2008 election, when many Evangelicals stayed home rather than cast their votes for John McCain.
According to Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, as many as seventeen million Evangelicals refused to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012,¹ presumably because he is Mormon. The impact of that becomes apparent when you realize that Barack Obama won a second term by a margin of only five million votes.
For a while it looked as if the 2016 election was going to follow the same
pattern. Hillary Clinton’s nomination for the Democratic ticket was essentially a foregone conclusion. No one in her party had the backing to compete with the Clinton machine, and the Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders was more of a diversion than a bona fide opponent. His only function was apparently to draw the Democratic base further to the left.
For Republicans, however, it was a very different story, and the image fixed in my mind of seventeen smiling candidates standing there on the debate platform, each claiming to be the real conservative and the only true friend of the evangelical base, perfectly illustrates the problem of finding even one candidate the faithful will support. The campaign trail was crowded with sixteen men, one woman, and millions of evangelical voters who couldn’t make up their minds. Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Ben Carson were strong early favorites for a variety of reasons, but none of them managed to break out of the pack.
After Ted Cruz finally dropped out on May 3, leaving Donald Trump as the presumptive nominee, many die-hard conservatives said they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Trump and would stay home rather than vote for such an
unsavory candidate. That would have almost certainly meant a repeat of the 2008 and 2012 election disasters, and Hillary Clinton would have ascended to her long- awaited destiny as the first female president. But there was change in the air, and by the time Donald Trump passed the threshold of 1,237 delegates on May 26, guaranteeing his nomination, the first inklings of a paradigm shift were beginning to appear on the horizon. One by one various Christian leaders slowly began speaking out, making a case for voting for Trump, warts and all. One of the most persuasive was Dr. Jim Gar- low, pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego. Jim, who has a reputation as one of the most politically astute and doctrinally sound pastors in the evan- gelical movement, has spoken out on many important issues. He was one of the most visible leaders working to pass California’s Proposition 8 in 2008, which amended the state constitution to say that marriage should henceforth be defined as the lawful union of one man and one woman.² More recently Jim cofounded The Jefferson Gathering, a worship service for members of Congress in the US Capitol building in Washington, DC. In July 2015 Jim received a Facebook message from an old friend saying she
despised Hillary Clinton, but she just couldn’t bring herself to vote for Donald Trump. After thinking it over, he fired off a fifteen-hundred-word reply explaining his own perspectives on the election. That message was picked up and shared an amazing twelve thousand times on Facebook in a matter of days. Realizing he had struck a chord, Jim, whom I’ve known for more than twenty-five years, con- tacted me and asked if I might be interested in seeing what he had written. Natu- rally I was curious to see what had stimulated such widespread interest, so I agreed to take a look, and it didn’t take long to realize how insightful Jim’s mes- sage had been. His rationale was so good and so succinct, I forwarded a copy to my wife, Joy, who had been debating with her friends about the candidates in this election. Failing to vote for Trump, she said, would be an automatic vote for Clinton, and you can be sure Clinton would immediately nominate a new Supreme Court jus- tice who would trample on our Christian values and drive this country further and further to the left. Joy’s logic had changed the minds of several close friends, and now Jim’s Facebook post outlined many more good reasons why a vote for Trump was the only logical option. When Joy urged me to spread the word, I
decided to publish the document, minus the Facebook references. So I asked him if he’d allow us to publish the article on our organization’s website, and he agreed. We posted it on August 11, two weeks after the Democratic National Con- vention in Philadelphia. The article began by saying that the Democratic and Republican party platforms are as different as night and day. In his opinion they were as far apart as evil ver- sus good. “I don’t care for the ‘Right vs. Left’ nomenclature,” he said. “I am far more concerned with ‘right vs. wrong.’” Then he used an analogy only a pastor could bring to a political discussion, saying, “As a pastor, I would rather deal with a church attendee who is blatant and brash in his sinning than one who is devi- ous, lying, cunning, and deceptive. Both are problematic,” he said, “but one is easier to deal with than the other. If I were a pastor bringing correction to a parishioner, I would prefer dealing with a ‘Trump type’ over a ‘Hillary type’ any day. That’s because the chances of making progress with the ‘Trump type’ are many times greater.” By the next day we could tell the article was attracting a lot of attention. The number of views kept climbing, and by early September it hit one million social
interactions, usually called “shares.” Someone on Trump’s Faith Advisory Board mentioned during a conference call of the board that the article had been shared a million times. As it turned out, Jim was on that conference call as well. Trump said he had already read the article and thanked him for his comments. By Elec- tion Day the total had grown to 4.1 million shares. TO VOTE OR NOT TO VOTE Dr. Steve Greene, my colleague and the publisher of Charisma magazine, said he felt Jim’s article had “an anointing”—an Old Testament term used by many Chris- tians when they believe something has been blessed by God. Whether or not there was a supernatural aspect to the message, there’s no question it resonated with believers who needed an apologetic for why they should vote for Donald Trump even though there were some things about him they didn’t like. When the editors of Charisma planned the special election issue for publication in October 2016, Jim’s article was displayed prominently with the headline “Deciphering Hillary’s Strong Delusion” and subtitled, “Why another Clinton presidency could destroy what’s left of America as we know it.” Readers who didn’t have access to
the printed magazine could access it online at CharismaMag.com. Early in the article Jim wrote, “Not voting is not a viable option, contrary to what the ‘purists’ claim.” A lot of disagreement exists, he acknowledged, but given the fact that refusing to vote for either candidate merely increases Hillary Clinton’s chance of winning the presidency, pretending to be more honorable or more righteous is not wise; it is not noble. It is wrong. Jim has a gift of under- standing the evangelical mind, and his words obviously struck a nerve. Many Evangelicals said they were afraid of the fact that Donald Trump can be a loose cannon. You never know what he’s going to say, or tweet, or who he’s going to at- tack next. And since he had never held political office, no one knew for sure if he would have any idea how to govern a nation of three hundred million people. To answer this “fear of the unknown,” Jim used a very personal analogy. “When my late wife’s remarkable and much-loved oncologist said, ‘Don’t take Carol to that alternative (non-FDA-approved) treatment,’ I asked, ‘Why not?’ He warned me of ‘the unknown.’” But Jim told him, “Doctor, your ‘known’ is much worse than the alternative treatment’s ‘unknown.’” So Jim took his wife for the alter- native treatment, and her improvement was remarkable. A year later that same
oncologist went to the alternative treatment facility to find out why Carol had im- proved so much. Although the treatment did not ultimately save her life, it ex- tended it from two or three years to six. The application of Jim’s analogy was simple: Clinton’s known is considerably worse than Donald Trump’s unknown. “Although America has had some scandal- ridden candidates in its history,” he said, “we have never seen any one major party candidate more constantly scandalous [than] Hillary and her husband. She seems to exceed all previous boundaries for wrongdoing.” And he added, “While I do not excuse Trump’s wrongful words or his past personal behavior, I am more deeply concerned with Hillary’s devious and illegal actions.” Jim pointed out that America has been blessed with three great freedoms: polit- ical, economic, and religious. Few countries in the world have ever had that honor. Donald Trump appears angry and aggressive in his public statements be- cause he perceives that all three of those freedoms are at risk, and he has promised that his administration will defend this great heritage. Even if the priv- ilege of appointing the next two, three, and possibly four Supreme Court justices were the only reason to vote for Trump, Jim said, that ought to have been enough.
Trump’s marriages, his casinos, and his rants on Twitter didn’t come close to justifying the decision to sit out the 2016 election. “Every rational person knows the Supreme Court appointments are paramount,” Jim said. “Trump has listed eleven superb potential nominees. Hillary’s appointments would snuff out the tiny vestige of the three freedoms that are left.” On the positive side, he said, was the fact that Trump was being surrounded by increasingly good people. As a billionaire builder and businessman, he knows how to pick great managers, and he knows how to delegate. Jim expressed his be- lief that Trump’s choices of leaders for cabinet positions—including the Depart- ment of Justice, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pen- tagon, and the rest of his twenty-four cabinet picks—would be men and women of principle, many of whom would be Christians and all of whom would be fair- minded conservatives. Jim asked, “Can these good people impact him?” He said there’s a very good chance they would. If you stop to consider Trump’s beliefs on each of the major issues he ad- dressed throughout his campaign, it would be very hard to find fault with any of them. Jim suggested Trump gets it right on at least 75 percent of the issues. Then
he asked people to compare that to Clinton, who he said is wrong on 100 percent of the issues. But there was one more issue that many people failed to consider closely enough, and, according to Jim, it could be the biggest issue of all: the Left’s relentless push for globalism. Globalism is more than a geographical issue, he said. It’s not simply about eliminating borders. It is a spiritual issue that is de- monic at its core. It means the dismantling of American sovereignty, opening our borders to the world, and abandoning our great heritage of freedom and indepen- dence based on the Christian worldview of the Founding Fathers. Globalism would transform this country into something we no longer recognize, and Hillary Clinton thrives on it. Jim suggested that Trump’s outspoken resistance to the globalist agenda may be the main reason the Left hates him. Think “principalities and powers,” he warned. “This is extremely serious.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump has promised to support the Christian pro-life position, while Clinton remains the biggest de- fender of Planned Parenthood and believes there should be no limits to a wom- an’s right to kill her unborn child. Planned Parenthood traffics body parts from the babies its clinics have killed, which has to be as evil as anything the Nazis
ever conceived. Toward the end of his article, Jim wrote that Donald Trump wants to build a strong military and defend the nation, which is the main purpose of government. Clinton’s track record as secretary of state, on the other hand, shows that she is more attuned to the interests of our enemies than our own. Trump has not hesi- tated to call “Islamic terrorism” what it really is, Jim said. But in the same way that Obama has refused to use those words, and even denies that Islamic extremism has anything to do with the terrorist attacks we’ve suffered through, Clinton can’t bring herself to admit what’s really going on. She claims everything is fine in America, which defies every single fact. But facts, Jim said, have never been an interest of hers. Trump understands, Jim said, that America stands at 11:59 p.m. on the “cultural clock.” We are racing toward the end, morally, economically, militarily, and spiri- tually. America no longer holds our position as the world’s leading superpower, and a Clinton presidency would only hasten our final destruction. Trump could either slow that down or possibly, with God’s help, reverse it. But we had to give him that chance. Jim concluded his message by saying, “Candidly, I want King
Jesus. I want Him to rule here—now. That day is not fully manifested—yet. So we prayerfully navigate this challenging election to honor Jesus.”³ Jim’s op-ed was shared more than twice as much as our previous most-shared viral article on CharismaNews.com. I think the fact that so many people were moved enough to share it with their friends and loved ones showed how impor- tant they believed the election to be. And it showed their level of enthusiasm. Many Christians wanted to vote for Trump, but they had to be given permission because, as I said in the previous chapter, they felt he had failed most of our usual litmus tests. My Presbyterian friend Tom Ertl says he thinks Jim’s article had a huge influence on the election. “I would say it helped swing the evangelical vote,” he told me.⁴ THE SOUTH CAROLINA MODEL Months before we published Jim Garlow’s op-ed, Rev. Ray Moore, a Baptist pas- tor and former Army chaplain from Columbia, South Carolina, was a pivotal fig- ure in Trump’s win in the all-important South Carolina primary, which was held on February 20, 2016. Moore has been involved in public policy issues and
Republican politics since the 1980s when he was involved with Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential campaign, which, as I mentioned earlier, gave birth to the Chris- tian Right. With more than forty years in pastoral ministry, Moore understands a lot about how born-again Christians think, as well as how their pastors think, and that can be very important when trying to rally Evangelicals around a political candidate. Political insiders, pollsters, and policy wonks always follow the South Carolina primary very closely. In every election since 1980, with only one exception, who- ever won the South Carolina Republican primary went on to win the GOP nomi- nation. Trump had come in second to Ted Cruz in Iowa. He won the New Hamp- shire primary, but Cruz, a Southern Baptist, was heavily favored in South Car- olina, where Evangelicals make up 58 percent of the state’s electorate.⁵ Moore said he usually voted for the strongest pro-life candidate and preferred candidates with a strong Christian witness. Cruz met those criteria, and Trump did not, so Moore intended to be a Cruz man. But one day he had a chat with Ed McMullen, a publicist and political consul- tant who had worked in South Carolina politics for decades. They debated the
virtues of the various candidates, and eventually McMullen convinced Moore that Trump’s courageous stands on the issues made him deserve support. McMullen had been a friend of Donald Trump for more than thirty years. They met in George Steinbrenner’s box at Yankee Stadium. McMullen’s political work over the years happened mostly behind the scenes, but he remained a close confidant and adviser of Trump. He had been involved in the vetting of vice presidential candidates, and he recommended Mike Pence to Trump as a possible running mate. Moore told me he believes McMullen’s recommendation of Pence, who was widely known as a born-again Christian, tele- graphed a message to the evangelical Right that “Trump can be trusted.”⁶ McMullen is known as a savvy strategist, and during an interview with a re- porter from a national newspaper he was asked how Donald Trump could hope to overcome Hillary Clinton’s vast ground game that had already been mobilized in the key states. McMullen responded that political strategies had changed, and thanks to the Internet, Trump had been getting his message out in ways no other candidate had been able to duplicate. And perhaps even more importantly, Mc- Mullen said, there was a huge volunteer army out there, not readily visible as part
of the campaign, working around the clock for Trump.⁷ Hearing that reminded me of a story Tom Ertl told me about a Christian truck driver in South Carolina who always carried a supply of Trump’s yard signs with him wherever he went, and he would stop his truck and stick a sign in the ground whenever he got a chance. There were many people with that kind of passion in the palmetto state who never showed up on the party roster. The Trump sup- porters viewed 2016 as a historic election, and they joined the battle, much as their patriot ancestors had done, fully expecting to win it. Chances are these people wouldn’t have volunteered for a normal estab- lishment candidate, but they saw something different in Donald Trump, and they liked his message. It was a unique situation, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to elect an American patriot who would do battle with the established order. Many took time off from their jobs and their normal routines. Some even put their busi- nesses on hold for a season so they could do their part for Trump. Meanwhile evangelical leaders around the state were still backing Ted Cruz. Virtually every Southern Baptist pastor in the state endorsed Cruz, Moore told me. The few who didn’t—such as charismatic pastor Greg Surratt of Seacoast
Church in Charleston—gave their support to Sen. Marco Rubio. Both Rubio and Cruz needed a big win to propel them into the Florida primary, but Trump went on to win South Carolina with 32 percent. Rubio and Cruz each received 22 per- cent of the vote, with Rubio narrowly beating Cruz to take second place to Trump.⁸ Moore speculates that if some of Rubio’s supporters had encouraged their man to withdraw earlier and give his support to Cruz, Rubio would have been per- fectly situated to become vice president on the Cruz ticket. If that had happened, the Cruz–Rubio ticket could have gone into South Carolina and other southern states with a substantial base of support that would have been too formidable for Trump to overcome. But that didn’t happen. Consequently Cruz and Rubio split the evangelical vote, to Trump’s advantage. If Rubio could have been persuaded to wait until 2020 for his presidential run, Tom Ertl believes there is a good chance Cruz would have been the Republican nominee in 2016. And since Cruz was a divisive figure in his own party and not the sort of contender to withstand the barrage the Democrats and their compliant media supporters would put up, he believes Clinton would have become the
forty-fifth president of the United States instead of Donald Trump. All this is speculation, but I find it interesting nonetheless. How did Trump pull off a win in South Carolina? Moore says it was a series of political “miracles,” including Trump’s first national endorsement from a statewide elected official, Lt. Gov. Henry McMaster, whom Moore has known for more than thirty years. When McMaster came out in favor of Donald Trump, a lot of South Carolinians came along with him. That was a miracle, according to Moore. Conservative Christians ignored what many leaders had been telling them and voted for Trump anyway. He said it may be no coincidence that when South Carolina governor Nikki Haley was nominated and later confirmed as ambas- sador to the United Nations, Henry McMaster ascended to the governorship. But the miracle that had been developing for several years was the voters’ will- ingness to ignore what they were being told in order to elect the person with the best chance of becoming our next president. Most Republicans had come to dis- trust their party’s leadership as much as they distrusted the leadership in Wash- ington. And that was true for evangelical voters all over the country. While most Christian leaders were backing Cruz, Trump ended up getting the evangelical vote
in state after state. WHEN THERE IS NO WAY There’s more to the evangelical part of Donald Trump’s victory than well- reasoned articles like Jim Garlow’s or the work of grassroots supporters like Ray Moore appealing to voters by conventional means. There’s also a previously un- told story of how Evangelicals gave Trump a ground game that many political ex- perts completely ignored. And here again there’s a miraculous aspect to it. Meet David Lane. He is a political adviser, organizer, and planner who gener- ally tries to keep a low profile. He is well-known to the Left, however, because of the Pastors and Pews events he has organized since 1994. Over the years these events have attracted an estimated twenty thousand pastors and ministry leaders from all over the country. Media reports on the meetings often describe them as a subversive operation, mobilizing right-wing conservatives and teaching them to impose their will on the public. Lane, of course, sees it differently: There are sixty- five million to eighty million Evangelicals in this country, he says, and only 50 percent of them (roughly forty million) are registered to vote. Of those registered,
only 50 percent (twenty million) actually do vote. And when 75 percent of the evangelical community fails to vote, the nation will inevitably suffer at the hands of the non-Christian Left. The Pastors and Pews event I went to in Orlando in August 2016 was attended by about five hundred pastors and ministry leaders and their spouses. It was a grand affair with a delicious meal, Disney-quality patriotic music, and some great lead-in speakers, including Gov. Mike Huckabee, who introduced Trump. Lane learned how to put on a great show and connect with people when he worked for several years with Jerry Falwell in the mid-1990s. Earlier he had learned fundrais- ing while working in Washington during the Reagan years. Then he worked as a grassroots organizer in Texas with Dr. Steven F. Hotze, who Lane says is the best precinct-level grassroots organizer in the country. He proved his Pastors and Pews format worked in Texas by helping George W. Bush beat the Democratic governor Ann Richards and by defeating a proposal to make same-sex marriage legal. A wealthy Republican donor gave Lane the money for his first Pastors and Pews event in Austin in 2005. Lane hoped he could get fifty pastors to meet with the
governor. His benefactor said he wanted five hundred to attend the event at the Hilton hotel downtown. In less than four weeks he got five hundred confir- mations and had three hundred on a waiting list. “The Lord showed up,” he said. “Everything exploded. The hand of God was moving.” When that happened, Lane told me, he knew he had found his niche. His preparation for the work was not what you’d expect, he said. His early life was “wine, women, and song,” but he became a Christian at a Bill Gothard sem- inar he attended at Zig Ziglar’s brother’s invitation, thinking it was a motivational seminar. “I deserved judgment but was given mercy,” he says. Lane was men- tored spiritually by retired Texas Court of Appeals judge Paul Pressler of Hous- ton, and his long resume includes a stint as a registered agent for the Nicaraguan resistance in Miami in the 1980s. But his organizational skills clearly come from a higher authority. I first met Lane when I was involved with Mike Huckabee’s campaign in 2008. The former Arkansas governor was a featured speaker, along with other evan- gelical-friend- Republican candidates, at some of Lane’s events. Candidates eager to get ahead of the pack looked forward to speaking at Pastors and Pews events
because they were scheduled before the state primaries, and the candidates al- ways wanted the pastors’ support. In January 2015 Lane helped sponsor a prayer rally at Louisiana State University in which Gov. Bobby Jindal played a key part. I was invited to attend the dinner later that evening at the governor’s mansion, along with a few other evangelical leaders. Jindal talked about whether or not he would run for president, and he asked for prayer. He did announce his bid for the race on June 24, 2015, but dropped out less than five months later, partly because of all the heat being di- rected his way by the Trump campaign. After the Indiana primary, which made Trump the presumptive nominee, some- one asked Lane what Trump would do as president. Lane replied, “I don’t know, but I know what Hillary will do.” Then, making reference to the recent incident in Kentucky when county clerk Kim Davis came under attack for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Lane said a Clinton presidency would be bad for the country. “If she wins,” he said, “what happened to the clerk in Ken- tucky is just the warm-up act for what’s going to happen to you and your kids.” Two things followed the Orlando event I attended that Lane says were miracles.
A week later Lane received an e-mail from Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign director at the time, who invited him to come up to New York to discuss mobi- lizing the evangelical vote. So Lane flew to New York, and as he was getting dressed in his hotel room for the appointment with Manafort, he got a call from a billionaire friend who had supported Lane’s previous campaigns. The caller asked him, “How are you doing on that eighteen million dollars?” A year earlier Lane had come up with a plan to mobilize voters and projected it would cost approx- imately eighteen million dollars. For the moment, Lane told him, that plan was on the shelf, and he admitted he hadn’t raised anything so far. “Well,” the caller said, “put me down for five million dollars.” Lane thought that was amazing. He hadn’t talked to the caller for eight months, and this call came out of the blue. But he thanked the man profusely then went on to his appointment, where he laid out his idea for a way to mobilize evan- gelical voters. After listening to his idea, Manafort told him there was no money to fund a plan like that. At that moment Lane understood why he had been con- tacted by his billionaire caller. He said, “I have five million dollars. If you can find four million dollars, I believe we can be competitive in six key states. If the money
doesn’t come in, then we’ll work in three states.” Manafort was clearly surprised by Lane’s quick response, but he asked Lane to give him a couple of days to see if he could come up with the money. Lane left the meeting exhilarated but uncertain whether or not Manafort could actually per- suade his donors to produce the cash. Manafort never called him back. He re- signed the next day as Trump’s campaign manager. But this was the Lord’s deal, and that same day, Lane’s billionaire friend called again and said, “Put me down for another four million dollars.” And twenty-four hours later he wired Lane the full nine million dollars. By this time they were just ten weeks away from the election, and Lane began to worry, how on earth could he mobilize millions of voters in such a short time? That’s when the second miracle happened. He got a call from Murphy Nasica, a highly respected campaign firm in Dallas, Texas, that had spent $150,000 training what it called “generals” for the political ground game. It had brought in cam- paign workers, trained them, and prepared the marching orders when suddenly the funding fell through and Murphy Nasica realized it would have to drop the plan.
Lane couldn’t believe his ears. This was exactly what he had been praying for, so he told the folks at Murphy Nasica he would give them five million dollars so that all the people they had trained could get to work. Beginning on August 22, 2016, an army of “generals” orchestrated a million phone calls and door knocks in six key states: Florida, Ohio, Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina, and Iowa. Trump won all but Virginia on Election Day. His victory in the southern states, capped with the unexpected victory in Pennsylvania, gave Trump the win. On the night of the election Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner tweeted: “Huge: ABC reporting largest turnout of evangelical vote in history. Congrats @GDavidLane.”⁹ I came across that tweet several weeks later and captured a screenshot as a reminder of the emotions we all felt. I had been standing in the large crowd of Trump supporters gathered at the New York Hilton when we got word that our prayers had been answered. The ground troops had done their job. David Lane and his generals had spread the word. And God had given them the means and the manpower to make it happen. It was amazing, and Bedard’s tweet served as a great reminder of what happened that night, when providence, prayer, and persistence made a way where there was no way.