At the annual Values Voter Summit (VVS) in Washington this weekend, former congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who serves on Donald Trump’s evangelical advisory board, said in an interview with me on SiriusXM Progress that Trump is now a “committed believer” of Jesus Christ and a “man of faith” who has “asked God for help and wisdom.”
Bachmann’s assessment, following up on remarks she made in her speech at the summit Friday, mostly comes from a discussion she and other social conservatives had with Vice President Mike Pence.
″[We know] because of what the vice president told us,” she said.
We were in a meeting with the vice president and the president, about 25 of us. I know the vice president. I served with him in Congress, and he is a vocal, committed believer of Jesus Christ himself. And he said, ‘I want all of you to know that the president is a committed believer. He is a man of faith.’
“I think that should give us a lot of hope,” Bachmann went on to say, explaining that it means Trump is acting without his own authority.
“There’s nothing better than a man under authority,” she explained.
We don’t want anyone, especially a president, to think they are a man under their own authority. They need to be under authority. Whether it’s the authority of the Constitution and the laws of the land but even more importantly under the authority of faith. And I think that helps to regulate our behavior, when we know that we’re accountable to something.
Bachmann also said that Trump “understands who put him into the White House, and that is people of faith,” and that “he’s asked God for help and for wisdom” and wants prayer.
“He knows that he needs prayer,” she said. “We’ve been in the Oval Office with him. We asked him if he wants prayer and he said, ‘Sure.’ We put our hands around him respectfully and we prayed for him.”
Bachmann’s sentiments were echoed by many attendees who gathered from around the country at VVS, hosted annually by the Family Research Council, which has been designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Attendee Joel Brind, a college biology professor from New Hamburg, New York, explained that Jesus would have tweeted like Trump.
“If there were Twitter then, [Jesus] would have used it in a similar way, I think,” Brind said.
I wouldn’t restrict it to just [Trump’s] tweets. His communications in general are tactically [emulating Christ]. I don’t want to be misinterpreted to say that everything he says is equivalent to gospel. I mean, he’s on the right side, and his tactics are more reminiscent of Christ, of the tactics that Christ used when he walked the earth and which he admonished his followers to use also.
Trump is the first sitting president to speak at the anti-LGBTQ Values Voter Summit, where a pamphlet titled “The Hazards of Homosexuality” was included in promotional materials given to all attendees. Trump, in his speech on Friday, lectured Americans on values and morality little over a year after the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he bragged about sexual assault, had gone public.
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