A press release distributed Wednesday morning on behalf of author and Charisma CEO Steve Strang gushes over President Donald Trump while promoting Strang’s book, “God and Donald Trump,” which depicts Trump’s election as a miracle.
Charisma is a Pentecostal media operation that strongly promoted Trump’s candidacy and has been part of the conservative Christian media cheerleading that has kept Trump’s support among white evangelicals high. Strang, for example, said in February that Trump, like Winston Churchill, was called by God to save western civilization.
“Trump’s Global Grit” is the headline on the release, which praises Trump’s “strong global presence” on issues like China, Syria and North Korea, and says Trump “is a popular draw when he visits other countries.” But don’t worry: “Trump remains committed to the United States of America—not other nations.”
Strang, who was in New York for Trump’s victory party in November 2016, is quoted in the press release saying that Trump’s policies at home and abroad are a “working out of President Trump’s belief that he has been put here at this time for a special purpose.”
The release quotes from Strang’s book, which was published last fall: “Our founders never hesitated to affirm their belief that God brought us to this continent for a reason, and I believe that’s why this president made the spiritual interests of the American people such a major focus of his campaign.”
The public relations firm promoting Trump via Charisma and Steve Strang is Hamilton Strategies, a Christian public relations and media firm that says “we push the limits of what public relations can do” on behalf of its conservative faith-based clients. Among the clients it touts, in addition to Charisma, are the Center for Security Policy, run by the vehemently anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney; the anti-LGBTQ American Family Association; and the American Pastors Network, whose leader Sam Rohrer says that opponents of Trump’s immigration policies are on the side of the Antichrist and that Right Wing Watch might be starting a civil war by “furthering the removal and rewriting of history as it would relate to our Judeo-Christian heritage.”
The pinned tweet at the top of Hamilton Strategies’ Twitter feed as of Wednesday was a January photo of Trump at Davos, holding a copy of Strang’s “God and Donald Trump” in the air.
