Lance Wallnau, the author and motivational speaker who “prophesied” before the 2016 election that Donald Trump had been anointed by God, participated in a mutual love-fest with author and radio host Eric Metaxas on Monday. Wallnau, a promoter of Seven Mountains dominionism, published his own book, “God’s Chaos Candidate,” in the weeks before the election. He’s part of a circle of Religious Right leaders allied with the Trump administration; last week he and other right-wing religious leaders met in the White House with the president’s special envoy for the Middle East.
Wallnau bragged about having been the first person to publicly declare that God was using Trump like a modern-day King Cyrus, an ancient Persian king said in the Bible to have been used by God to free the Israelites from captivity. Wallnau jokingly complained that when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Trump to Cyrus after the administration moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, neither Right Wing Watch nor other media outlets Wallnau implied had mocked his predictions stepped up with an apology.
Wallnau told Metaxas a story about being in Jerusalem just as his pro-Trump book came out and hearing about the release of the “Access Hollywood” recording on which Trump bragged about getting away with sexually assaulting women. Wallnau says that he started complaining about God having allowed his book, which he says he wrote “as an act of obedience,” to be published when this was about to become public. But, he said, God told him, “You better say something.” He said God assured him, “Open your mouth, I’ll fill it.”
So Wallnau got out his iPhone and did a Facebook live broadcast in which he portrayed the release of that video as God’s way of humbling Trump, so that “now he’ll know if he gets elected, it was an act of God.” Wallnau called this public humbling of Trump “the circumcision he never got.” “Wow!” said Metaxas, “It sounds like the Lord did fill your mouth.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Metaxas and Wallnau wallowed in their admiration for Trump as a kind of “wrecking ball” to the media and political establishment. Metaxas said the president is a “maniac” in the same way Martin Luther was. Metaxas, author of a Luther biography, said the reformer was also a “maniac” who had friends telling him to tone it down. They chuckled at the notion of the cheating-on-his-third-wife-with-a-porn-star Trump beating all those “card-carrying evangelicals” in the Republican primary. In the end, said Wallnau, God chose “the one barbarian in the group”—one who actually had the guts to do things like the embassy move, which others may not have done. A Hillary Clinton presidency, said Metaxas, would have been “the end of America.”
Metaxas said he finds Trump’s biblical ignorance “hilarious” because that’s how most people in the secular New York environment think.
Metaxas and Wallnau portrayed the intense opposition to Trump as a kind of spiritual warfare. “I know this is a spiritual thing because it doesn’t make any human sense, what we’re seeing right now,” said Metaxas. “You know, it’s a little bit like the French Revolution. A kind of madness takes over.”
Metaxas said Trump’s opponents are making him look “more sane” and predicted that “tons of people who didn’t vote for Trump will vote for him in 2020 because they see how he has been treated.”
That goes for the media, too. Metaxas is furious about the way the media treats Trump:
The New York Times is dead. I declare it. They died. They’re dead. They’re gone. Because there was a time when there was a flicker of life and you could read them for some measure of objectivity – maybe you had to read between the lines a little bit. But the reality is that they are now no longer even trying. They have headlines, every single day, that when I read the headline, I say that is not journalism. That is an editorial. They have spun it in a way to make Trump look bad.
Metaxas praised Trump for telling religious leaders during his campaign that he would do away with the Johnson Amendment. Metaxas praised Trump’s recent order denying federal funds to universities that don’t meet his standards for free speech. He called it “one of the greatest acts of leadership,” right up there with Ronald Reagan’s 1981 mass firing of striking air traffic controllers. As an example of his claim that that universities “have no values” and “don’t believe in truth or reason,” Metaxas used the perpetrator of an assault on the University of California Berkeley campus, who punched a conservative activist in the face (and was later arrested for it).
Added Wallnau, “Honestly, when you reject Christianity as the moral glue that holds things together, you lose civilization, and with civilization, you lose civility.”
Metaxas also brought up the subject of Brexit, which gave him a chance to mention one of his other books, a biography of German anti-Nazi activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lived in a time when a kind of hyper-nationalism was the “devil’s vessel.” But that’s not true today, he said:
We are living in a time now when it is not nationalism that is the devil’s vessel, but a kind of anti-nationalist globalism, a globalist bureaucratic elite that are saying to the common man, ‘shut up, we’ll make the decisions.’
Wallnau said that globalists “have the money, the power, the bank systems”—“and the media,” said Metaxas. According to Wallnau, globalists push policies that eradicate the definition of things like marriage, gender and borders because they love to create chaos as a means of empowering an elite to come in and clean up after it. (Chaos is apparently only good when Trump is causing it.)
So, said Metaxas, “open borders is like the Reichstag fire.”
“Precisely,” responded Wallnau.
Wallnau said Brexit was a sign that something was going to happen in the U.S. They praised the rise of European populists, like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who Wallnau also called a Cyrus type. Populism, he said, “scares the daylights out of people on the left,” but it is a “healthy response” to globalism and things like European immigration by Muslims who he said do not assimilate.
Metaxas jumped in on that point:
The problem is that if you’re a Muslim in America who believes in American values, does not believe in Sharia law, does not bup-bup-bup-bup, then we don’t have a problem with that kind of a candidate. But when you have people coming in, not just candidates, but to live in this country, who say, ‘We don’t value your values,’ that person can’t be an American.
Metaxas absolutely gushed over Wallnau, saying at one point, “I feel like I’m sitting here with my soul brother.” Wallnau returned the favor at the end of the interview, saying, “And thank God for what you do. You’re the only man I know that crosses over into every one of those seven mountains, engages conversation, and brings a clear revelation of truth into every one of them.”
Metaxas became a Religious Right folk hero when he publicly questioned then-President Barack Obama’s faith at a National Prayer Breakfast; last year he was honored by Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, which has been designated an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. In January, Metaxas hosted conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi and agreed with him that if people like the prosecutors who are working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller had their way, they’d ban the teaching of the Bible.
