by Doug Wead
Avenatti’s claims were soon contradicted by his own witnesses, and the bitterly personal, unproven attacks on the nominee began to backfire politically. Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice on October 6, 2018.
A few days later, Avenatti’s claims were beginning to crumble. NBC, seen by many as a leading media opponent to Donald Trump’s administration, ran a story entitled “New Questions Raised about Avenatti Claims Regarding Kavanaugh.”7 Avenatti’s star witness was now saying that it hadn’t been Kavanaugh at the party.
By 2019, Michael Avenatti, the man who had become a darling of the national media, had been indicted in two jurisdictions. Federal prosecutors in New York were saying that he had “concocted a scheme to extort over $20 million from sports giant Nike.”8 One news report stated that “the combined maximum for all charged crimes is 97 years in prison.”9
The Supreme Court nomination process had been a brutal, bloody business. But it was something that Donald Trump had to do. It had been a political promise. He had promised to bring balance back to the courts. He was achieving the appointments and that balance at a rate that the great Ronald Reagan could not match. He had made his promise to conservative Catholics and to white evangelical Christians and, surprisingly, to a small but critical percentage of black evangelical Christians who had swung back to the Republican column in 2016. It was a promise that revealed a side of Donald Trump that very few ever saw or knew existed. In a sense, he had fulfilled a promise to himself.
There was more to Donald Trump than met the eye.
TRUMP’S SECRET SOURCE OF VOTES
Donald Trump’s more savvy political friends must have wondered at his luck. Given the same set of circumstances, they may have imagined that they, too, could have won the Republican nomination and ultimately the presidency. They would have told themselves that, during the process, they certainly would have been less self-destructive than Donald Trump. His success had all been a question of timing. Oh, the whimsical vagaries of fate.
The fact is, there was much more than luck behind Donald Trump’s mystical rise to the presidency. He was playing with cards that few even knew he had.
One of his most important political cards was his unseen, underreported, long-standing relationship with white evangelical Christians. On Election Day 2016, they would be the largest, most cohesive sociocultural group captured by exit polling data. And yet the Democrats would give them to Trump without a challenge. He would be staked the evangelical vote. “Here, you can have them.” Of the final tally in 2016, 1 percent of the voters would be Muslim, 12.9 percent would be African American, 17.6 percent would be Hispanic, 23 percent would be Catholic, and 26 percent would be white evangelicals.10 The latter was gift wrapped by the Clinton campaign and handed to Donald Trump on a silver platter.
The problem with winning the white evangelicals was that for every vote they gave you, they took one away. Hollywood, academia, and the national media all held very deep and strident antipathy toward Christians. ABC had once proposed a sitcom with the title “Good Christian Bitches.”11 One can imagine the reaction if the word “Christian” had been substituted with any other religious or social group. The week before the 2016 election, celebrities supporting Hillary Clinton in California gathered in a recording studio and produced a musical video that ended with the words, “Jesus f— Christ, please vote.”12 The video is still online; as of this writing, it has more than a million views. While YouTube would later be criticized for censoring conservative commentary, this anti-Christian profanity on behalf of Hillary Clinton is still, apparently, perfectly acceptable. Once again, one can imagine the reaction if activist members of a major American political party had used the name of the prophet Mohammed as a curse word to motivate their voters.
Strategically, the solution for a Republican candidate was to get to evangelicals early and with strength, when the media was less observant, so that the candidate could reach out to other, more media-acceptable and media-approved voter groups during the home stretch. Historically, the Republican political landscape was littered with candidates who had waited too late to secure their evangelical base and had gotten caught in the media headlights during the actual election year. It had happened to both Senator John McCain in 2008 and to former governor Mitt Romney in 2012, the former having to take Sarah Palin onto his ticket to try to mitigate the problem.
Democratic candidates had it much easier. They didn’t have to win the evangelical vote; they merely had to make a token effort and they would automatically get a piece of it. Some evangelicals were “liberals” and predisposed to vote for a Democratic candidate. These voters believed in gun control. Or they worried about the environment. Some were even pro-choice. Every modern Democratic president since Jimmy Carter had made the effort to reach this bloc, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The latter appointed a young Assemblies of God pastor to head up what was called “the Joshua project,” an outreach to evangelicals.
After the 2016 election, Michael Wear, a former White House aide to President Barack Obama, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled “Why Did Obama Win More White Evangelical Votes than Clinton? He Asked for Them.”13
Donald Trump’s long, quiet relationship with evangelical Christians had allowed him time to fully understand the value of their numbers. It is something that numbers on a page cannot convey. It has to be personally experienced, especially for a resident of New York City who can live and die without ever meeting an evangelical in the flesh. But it had also allowed him the time to be burned by the deep animosity evangelicals provoked in other groups. With the right word dropped here or there, he could see their sheer numbers pad his book sales, his television audiences, and later his social media accounts. But throughout the 2016 GOP primary season, he always kept one eye on the coming general election, allowing another candidate to be closer to the evangelicals than himself, and thus attracting some of the more bitter media antireligious animus.
Donald Trump’s private connection to the evangelical Christian community protected him in the Iowa caucuses, where two other prominent, public, evangelical candidates, Senator Ted Cruz and the neurosurgeon Ben Carson, would split that vote. It allowed Trump to show well, coming in second place, with a respectable piece of the evangelicals himself. He would win the next week in New Hampshire, where evangelicals were scarce. Eventually, Trump’s personal link to the group would help him emerge as the frontrunner and sweep up other GOP delegates in the South.
It was in the general election that Donald Trump’s connection to evangelicals would be tested. When the Access Hollywood tape emerged, which contained the candidate using lewd and offensive language, his political support appeared to collapse. The Republican establishment openly broke with him. But as the voters absorbed the story and as his evangelical friends began to consider the alternative, Trump’s support began to slowly come back.
The national media was perplexed. How could evangelicals support a brash, egotistical New Yorker who used such offensive language? It was all about the Supreme Court, some said. It was the flawed candidate on the other side, others contended. Some felt it was a reaction to an insistent Hollywood and a perceived bias in the media. The more celebrities and the media pushed them to Hillary Clinton, the more they inclined toward Trump. Part of that, or even all of that, may have been true, but the fact was that unseen, unknown, Donald Trump had his own shared history with evangelical Christians. It was not a recent invention born out of political expediency. It had been born nineteen years before. And it was personal.
When I asked the president for names of friends whom I should talk to, people who could help tell his story, people who understood him, the following name came back in an email from the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Paula White.
PRAYING WITH PAULA
It turned out that the Reverend Paula White, a striking blonde, was a televangelist. She was the pastor of the twenty-thousand-member New Destiny Christ
ian Center in Apopka, Florida. And in fact, while this was her home church, she served as an overseer of multiple congregations all across the country.
My wife and I caught a plane to Florida in March 2019, where we sat down with Paula White and her husband, the rock musician Jonathan Cain, who just happened to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Journey. It turned out that Paula White offered a much more complicated side of Donald Trump than we had anticipated.
“This happened about eighteen years ago,” she said.14 “I was sitting in my home office and my executive director called and said, ‘Mr. Trump is on the line.’
“I said, ‘Yeah, sure, right.’
“He said, ‘Paula, this is for real. Mr. Trump is on the line.’
‘We were always having fun on staff and I was just sure he was pulling my leg a little bit but he said, ‘No pastor. This is real.’
“He comes on the line and he says, ‘You are fantastic. You have the it factor.’ He started to quote almost verbatim three of my sermons on the value of vision. So immediately I was quite impressed. I was still, I think, a little bit in shock and awe. When I say verbatim? I have pastored now for thirty-four years. This wasn’t someone just saying that you spoke on this message and it was meaningful. This was different. He really got into it. This was a three-part series, and he was telling me the details of my sermons, and that was pretty impressive. I was thinking, ‘None of the people in my congregation listen this well.’”
She laughed.
“He told me how he was confirmed as a Presbyterian and grew up in Norman Vincent Peale’s church. He talked about some of Norman Vincent Peale’s sermons. It was very detailed. Telling me how Peale had influenced his life.”
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale had been the pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church, also on Fifth Avenue, about thirty blocks south of Trump Tower. Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking was published in 1952 and dominated the New York Times best-seller list for three years, eventually selling fifteen million copies in forty languages.15 Long before Trump Tower ever existed, the Fred Trump family would often attend the church, along with Donald Trump, just a young man. It was in this church that he would later marry his first wife, Ivana, and it was there that he would meet his second wife, Marla Maples. Yes, that’s right. Donald Trump met Marla Maples at church.
According to Paula White, the powerful preacher Norman Vincent Peale, with his “positive Christianity,” had stirred something deep inside the young Donald Trump, and it had never been fully resolved. After the death of Dr. Peale, Trump had tried to attend other churches and listen to other pastors, but his increasing celebrity status made such visits bothersome. And none of the sermons touched him as had Dr. Peale’s. He would quickly become bored and the church service would become a drudgery. Donald Trump found it easier to hide in the privacy of his own home, tucked away in Trump Tower, where he could pick and choose among the television preachers. Over the years the questions and ideas about faith only accelerated. By the time he discovered Pastor Paula White, a televangelist whose positive message apparently resonated with him, his pent-up spirituality fairly erupted.
“This was our very first conversation,” Paula White remembers. “And he shared everything about his faith. He had seen Dr. Billy Graham as a young man and had been deeply moved. But he liked to watch many of the others, some you wouldn’t expect, like Jimmy Swaggart. It was so interesting to hear him describe their sermons. In some respects, deliverywise, Graham and Swaggart both had this fiery passion, this booming voice that Donald Trump apparently liked. But the messages were quite different. One was grace, the other hellfire and brimstone. And then Dr. Peale was such a contrast to both of them.”
Paula White was impressed with the relationship between Peale and Trump. “I think a lot of people underestimate the role that Norman Vincent Peale played in American faith. They underestimate the depth of his message. It was the right time and the right place. New York City, coming out of a period of depression and hopelessness. It impacted people who were struggling to hold on to something. The proof of that is the influence it had on Donald Trump. Norman Vincent Peale is now gone, but his messages took root in that young life, and the youth who was listening would become president of the United States.
“Donald Trump had watched hours of Christian television,” Paula said. “And not just watched it, but really listened to the messages. He had retained what he had heard. He could bring it back and repeat it to me. He would say what it meant to him. So that first conversation was very much about the impact that his faith had had on his life.”
MOVING INTO TRUMP TOWER
Trump asked Paula White if she ever visited New York.
“I told him that actually I was doing a Bible study for the New York Yankees with George Steinbrenner. He said he would love to meet with me and my family. So on my next trip up to the city I ended up in his office, meeting Rhona Graff and Keith Schiller and many of his staff. The very next time after that, we had lunch at Jean-Georges.”
It was a Donald Trump ritual. Special friends were hosted at the four-star restaurant on the lobby level of the Trump International Hotel at One Central Park West. In his book, Let Me Finish, Governor Chris Christie described a dinner at Jean-Georges with Donald Trump at which the businessman grew impatient with a fan wanting a picture. Paula White’s experience was different.
“You know, in all the years I have been with Donald Trump, I have never seen that. Now, it’s true that when he walks into a room he owns it. But it’s not arrogant. In fact, it is quite charismatic and humble. Everybody knows who he is.
“Actually, I have seen him wait patiently for pictures and autographs, at great inconvenience. Even that afternoon I noticed he went in through the lobby of the hotel, just to make sure he had shaken hands and said hello to everyone on staff. He would look every one of them in the eye.
“I was just getting to know him. He showed me the wine list but I declined, not knowing at the time how deeply he felt about alcohol. Throughout the afternoon he talked about his children, about Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and Tiffany. And he talked about his deep faith.
“Right from the beginning he started introducing me to others as ‘his pastor.’ So, as in any other case, with a pastor, he started asking me to pray for things. He would talk and share his heart. I have always protected that. I will never betray that. But I can say that it became very clear how deeply he loved his children; his admiration for them, his concern for them, was always at the forefront of his prayers. Like any other parent. That was usually what he wanted me to pray about.”
During this time, the Reverend Paula White’s regular trips to New York City centered on intensive Bible studies for the Yankees baseball team. She became the unofficial, unpaid chaplain for the franchise.
“Christina Steinbrenner had started attending my church in Tampa. She was married to Hal Steinbrenner at the time, and so one thing led to another. Yankees outfielder Gary Sheffield started coming to the Bible studies. Later Alex Rodriguez would become involved. Darrell Strawberry began attending my church in Florida. He and George Steinbrenner were very close.”
Eventually, some of the relationships became quite close and intertwined. Both Paula White and Alex Rodriguez would have homes in Trump Tower. And over the years, the Reverend Paula White would become a bit of a celebrity herself. In 2003, Michael Jackson would invite her to his ranch in California “for spiritual support.”16 In 2010, Kid Rock would invite her to a party on Second Avenue that became a national story.17 Rival religious leaders criticized Paula White for attending the event, at which the booze flowed, even though she quietly sipped on a Pepsi.
GOD AND MONEY
Money was never a part of the relationship between Donald Trump and Paula White. But on one occasion she brought in a Christian woman leader who was working with young ladies caught up in human trafficking. The victims were trying to break free from drugs and find a way out.
Trump was amazed, and then
he suddenly switched into high gear. “Now, this is really helping people,” he said. “This is the real deal.”18 He immediately sat down and wrote a check out for the woman’s ministry. He then proceeded to strongarm a group of businessmen who happened to be in his office. “Come on, write her a check, right now. Get out your checkbook. This is really helping. Let’s go. Give her some money.”
A Southern Baptist pastor in Florida remembers Donald Trump and his entourage showing up late for a church service and sitting near the back. Later people in the congregation told the pastor what had happened, laughing as they told the story. When it came time for the offering, Trump had pulled out a stack of twenty-dollar bills and started passing them out to nearby parishioners. “Here, put this in the offering. You too. Everybody should be giving something.”
On every visit Paula made to the city, Trump’s office would call, and he would say, “Please stop by, come by.” Sometimes he would ask her to come by to pray for his staff.
“On one occasion he asked me to stop by for the production of The Apprentice, his popular television show. He said, ‘Come in and pray over everyone.’ So he walked me through, and it was a lot of people; I mean, he had a total of three hundred and fifty people working on the show, and probably a hundred were actually there. I was mesmerized. Remember, I have my own television program, but he had a tech, for the tech, for the engineer. My own faith was increasing, my own vision was increasing. This man was a big thinker with a meticulous knack for boring in on the details when that really mattered.
“Anyway, he asked me to come in and pray for them. All of them. He called them together. He said, ‘Paula, I want you to pray for each one. So, I just started praying over people. I’ve always had a boldness to lay hands on people. I pray in the name of Jesus. I pray the way I am and the way I know. He always had a respect for that and understood.”