The televangelist tapped by President Donald Trump to lead a new White House religious office once claimed “demonic confederacies” were determined to steal the 2020 election from him during a fervent prayer in which she spoke in tongues.
On a November 2020 YouTube livestream, Paula White, 58, also claimed “angels are being dispatched from Africa right now” as she heralded an election “victory” that she said could be heard in the “quarters of heaven.“
That victory would not come, as Trump lost to former President Joe Biden that year.
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Her emphatic prayer recirculated online after Trump announced White, who has been his religious advisor for years, would lead his administration’s Faith Office, a unit that he also convened during his first term in office.
During her 2020 prayer for Trump, White began speaking in rapid, meaningless speech using unknown words, which believers of some Christian evangelical sects hold are actually part of a divine language.
The practice is known as glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, and features prominently in some forms of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christian worship.
During White’s 2020 prayer she also decried obstacles against a Trump victory as “every strategy of hell,” casting the Republican as a figure backed by the heavenly and his opponents agents of the satanic.
She later joined Trump at the rally before the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, telling attendees that their enemies would “be overturned right now in the name of Jesus.”
It is unclear what the faith office’s responsibilities will entail: an executive order signed by Trump said it will be asked to “empower faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship to serve families and communities.”
Trump announced, in an address to the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, that he wanted to “bring religion back” to the United States.
He announced the new Presidential Commission on Religious Liberty, and a task force that will probe purported “anti-Christian bias” in the country.
White, meanwhile, claimed during Trump’s first term—when she was appointed to a Faith and Opportunity Initiative in the Office of Public Liaison in late 2019—that her mere presence at the White House made it “holy ground.”
Presidents from both parties have historically made overtures to religious leaders, both to boost their perceived moral bonafides and woo voters.
White is somewhat unique for how aggressive her political posturing—which frequently includes invoking Trump as being supported by divine forces—and her controversial history of preaching prosperity gospel, holds that God will reward those who give money to ministers like her.
Many Christians, including evangelical sects, consider the prosperity gospel to be blasphemous and in direct conflict with Jesus' teachings of humility and service to the poor.
White was previously the senior pastor of the nondenominational New Destiny Christian Center, a Florida megachurch, from 2014 to 2019.
Before that, she was co-pastor of Tampa-based Without Walls International Church, which she cofounded with her ex-husband in the early 1990s.
An audit released in 2011 by the Senate Finance Committee as part of an investigation into White and other televangelists showed Without Walls had $150 million in income from 2004 to 2006.
The committee report noted that White and her ex-husband used tax-exempt funds from their church to one year spend $900,000 on a waterfront mansion, while over a million dollars was paid out in salary to members of their family.
