By Nick White, Dailymail.Com
Updated June 22, 2024 at 15:26 and June 22, 2024 at 17:13
One of Donald Trump’s spiritual advisers claims that God told him he wants him to run for president, but that there would be a “price” to pay.
Televangelist Paula White has known the former president for 22 years, ever since he saw her on television, called her and brought her to Atlantic City for a private Bible study.
She is one of several faith advisers to President Trump that includes Robert Morris, who resigned as pastor of his megachurch this week after admitting to sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl in the 1980s.
White was full of praise for Trump during a speech Friday at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Path to the Majority” conference at the Washington Hilton.
She said Trump told her in 2011 that he “didn’t like the direction this country was going” and asked her how she felt about running for president.
“Then he turned around and said, ‘So what does God say?'” she recalled.
“You’ll be president one day,” White said, after praying with friends who are all in their 30s.
“And tears were rolling down my eyes and I told him, ‘I hate the price you’re going to have to pay.’
“None of us could have imagined the price that this man and his family paid, and so many of you, so many of us.”
But White said he believes it was “worth it” because Trump enacted laws that favored religion during his four years in office.
“I’m going to be president, and you’re going to be a faith leader,” she said Trump told her in 2014 when he decided to run in the 2016 election.
“I don’t know if either of us knew what we were doing, but I know God was with us.”
White led Trump’s evangelical advisory council during his campaign and delivered the invocation at his inauguration.
She later took a formal position in the White House as counsel to the Center for Faith and Opportunity Initiative.
White argued Friday that religious freedom is under attack “like never before” during President Joe Biden’s term, which he said is frightening because religious freedom is “the foundation of all other freedoms.”
She then listed various cases that she claimed amounted to attacks on religious freedom.
“Something is wrong and we have to stop it. We will make our voices heard in November,” she said of the upcoming election.
White added that people in the room would say, “Satan, we’ve had enough…This is an idea that is against God, that is against our faith, that is against our rights.”
White, senior pastor of City of Destiny Church in Apopka, Florida, has consistently supported Trump throughout his legal woes.
She called his conviction on 34 felony counts “a sad day for all Americans as we witnessed firsthand the justice system being weaponized to attack President Trump for political gain.”
During her reelection campaign, she argued that Christians who do not support President Trump are accountable to God.
After Trump lost the election, she repeatedly called for “angel reinforcements” to help overturn his defeat.
A few weeks later, she delivered the opening prayer at the Trump rally that sparked the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
In early 2020, she declared: “We command that any satanic pregnancies be aborted now!”
“We declare that what is conceived in the devil’s womb will miscarry and that he will be unable to carry out any plans of destruction or harm.”
White has been a controversial figure among other religious conservatives for some of his beliefs and has faced legal scrutiny over one of his churches.
Between 2007 and 2011, the Senate Finance Committee investigated her former megachurch, Without Walls International, for alleged financial irregularities.
The investigative report said the church raised $150 million in donations between 2004 and 2006 and spent about $900,000 in tax-exempt funds to build White’s seaside mansion.
Without Walls also used the tax-free cash to pay his family’s salaries and buy a private jet.
The church, which she founded with her then-husband Randy White, boasted 20,000 members at its peak but has been struggling since 2008.
Due to financial difficulties, Without Walls put both its buildings in Tampa and Lakeland, Florida, up for sale, but managed to stay afloat by selling some of the land instead.
In 2011, both buildings were again at risk of foreclosure and had their power cut off after service was cut off due to unpaid utility bills of more than $50,000.
White allegedly left the church in January 2012 and moved to City of Destiny Church, taking church equipment.
Without Walls filed for bankruptcy in 2014, with Evangelical Christian Credit Union claiming the company owed it $29 million.
White denied responsibility for the church’s bankruptcy in 2017 because he had already left the church by that point.
“I’ve been called a heretic, an apostate, an adulterer, a cheater and an addict,” she said in an interview with CNN.
“It has been erroneously reported that I once filed for bankruptcy and that I reject the Trinity. While my life and the decisions I make have by no means been perfect, they are not as has been recently misrepresented.”
