The Pentecostal media platform Charisma has been all-in for President Donald Trump since 2016, with CEO Stephen Strang publishing several pro-Trump books and promoting numerous prophecies that Trump would win a second term. Since Election Day this year, Charisma has doubled-down on its support for Trump, promoting oices pushing the Trump campaign’s bogus claims that Democrats are trying to steal the election.
On Thursday, Strang published an interview with dominionist Dutch Sheets about what Strang called “the massive voter fraud that seems to have taken place.” Sheets said God told him before the election “that there was coming a great war in the Spirit—and for the soul of our nation—after the vote.” Sheets said that as long as God’s prayer warriors keep up the spiritual warfare, Trump will end up back in the White House.
“This is going to be overturned,” Sheets said. “And President Trump is going to be put back in office for four years. God has begun a turnaround in this nation. He's not going to stop it now. He has promised us that he's recalibrating this nation. He's resetting this nation; a third Great Awakening is coming. We're moving back into our destiny as a nation."
Also on Thursday, Charisma published a story about a 24-hour prayer vigil being set up at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., “to engage in onsite spiritual warfare to protect the president’s overwhelming victory.” Lafayette Park, which sits between Black Lives Matter Plaza and the north side of the White House, is currently blocked off by a large fence, preventing people from getting near the White House.
On Sunday night, Strang wrote, “Every charismatic Christian leader I respect has said Donald Trump will win a second term, even though the national news media on Saturday declared Joe Biden as the winner of Tuesday's election and the 46th president of the United States.” In that post, he promoted a discussion he had Sunday with anti-abortion activist Janet Porter and Oklahoma pastor Curt Landry.
Porter, who made her own video on Saturday, used Strang’s platform to make a number of unsubstantiated allegations, including one claim that “you’ve got thousands of dead people in Michigan that have voted.” She said efforts in Georgia to “cure” votes were “not legal.” And she said “there are 16 states that have voter machines that are directly tied to George Soros.”
Porter predicted that the case will end up at the Supreme Court, where “there are now five justices on the court who swore to uphold the Constitution and actually meant that.”
Porter said the need to fight “this deep-seated systematic voter corruption” is not just out of love for Trump but about “whether or not we’re gonna have fair and free elections moving forward ever again.” She prayed that God would silence the voices of the “swamp creatures” that are encouraging Trump to give up.
Porter described herself as “part of the recount team” in Florida during vote counting in the contested 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
"What I'm telling people is do not listen to the naysayers; we have been here before," Porter told Strang. "God will do it again. I have not one ounce out of doubt, not one. This is the time for high-octane prayer. We need fasting, and we need mountain-moving prayer. If you ever thought about fasting, this is the moment to do that."
Porter’s political prophesying has not always come to pass; back in 2007, she declared after a religious-right-sponsored debate that God had revealed Mike Huckabee to be “the David among Jesse’s sons.”
The same could be said for Landry, who predicted on a Charisma podcast in March that “on April 8, starting the week of Passover all the way through Easter on April 12, you’re going to see miraculous healing and miraculous deliverance in Israel and the United States of America in regards to a turnaround with this virus.”
Here’s how Strang summarized Landry’s comments for his readers Sunday:
Landry told me that God is "completely in control" and that God is going to "give Donald Trump this election." He prophesied in 2015 that Trump would be a two-term president and says that today he preached from Chronicles 20:20b, which says, "Believe in the Lord your God, and you will be supported. Believe His prophets, and you will succeed."
"This is a word from the Lord for 2020," Landry says. "The Lord is saying that if you believe in the Word of God, you will be established. I've been operating as a prophet for 30 years, and I have never in my experience as a prophet seen every prophet I know and respect—and some I respect and don't know—all on the same sheet of music. They are all saying Donald Trump is going to serve two terms.
"Basically, the prophets were right," he says. "If everything would have been stopped legally on election night, Nov. 3, like it was supposed to be, Donald Trump technically would have won and [Republicans] would have won the House, too. Now, you have all this corruption taking place. The key is, as the anointed ones and the prophets of God, we have to come into agreement in prayer and intercession to take back what the enemy has stolen."
To be clear, in modern history vote-counting has always continued after Election Day.
Landry described how he had prayed that morning at the “North Georgia Revival” where he’d been preaching:
And we went into the courts of heaven, and we lifted up every single vote that was done honestly, and every single vote that was in line with God's word that had been stolen, either or thrown away. And we called on those votes that have been watermarks, and that they would be found, we called on those votes that have that have been manipulated through, you know, corruption.
Landry prayed that when God enacts the “miracle” of giving Trump four more years, it will lead to a “harvest of souls.”
On Saturday, Charisma republished a Christian Broadcasting Network story about media outlets calling the election for Biden. The article quoted extensively from a Trump statement accusing Biden of “rushing to falsely pose as the winner” with the help of his “media allies.”