Dallas-based pastor Robert Jeffress, who has been one of Donald Trump’s most energetic cheerleaders, told readers of his Daily Devotions this week that God hates lying. He also told readers to avoid abusive speech, which includes bullying and belittling. Those words would not be particularly surprising coming from a pastor, except that Jeffress is such a relentless Trump cheerleader.
Let’s face it: lying, bullying, and belittling people pretty much sum up Donald Trump’s communication style—a kind of gleeful cruelty and brazen lying that are the hallmark of Team Trump and the broader MAGA movement.
It’s especially jarring to read Jeffress’s words after witnessing Trump’s shamelessly dishonest performance at his Thursday press conference. As The New Republic noted, “Trump’s list of lies on Thursday was almost the length of the speech.” His falsehoods included a made-up story about sharing a helicopter with former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown and almost dying in a crash.
The disconnect brought to mind a book Jeffress published in 2020, while he was campaigning hard for Trump’s reelection. In that book, Jeffress called for a commitment to truth and civil dialogue, denounced “fake news,” and told readers, “Ask God to silence those who strive to spread division and hatred and to bring any slanderers in the media to repentance.”
Jeffress has hosted Trump at First Baptist Church of Dallas. In last year’s “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” author Tim Alberta described the Trump “shrine” in Jeffress’s office:
The corner of Jeffress’s office was a shrine–his secretary used that specific word to describe it–to President Donald J. Trump. There was an eight-foot tall poster memorializing the “Celebrate Freedom” concert in D.C. (the one where the choir sang “Make America Great Again”). There were boxes of Trump cuff links and a golden Trump commemorative coin. There were dozens–dozens–of framed photos of Jeffress and Trump: praying over him, talking with him, shaking hands with him, giving thumbs-up with him…In the sweep of my reporting on the former president and his many sycophants, I had never seen such a temple to Trumpism.
Jeffress, who declares that America is a Christian nation, told an audience in 2019, “We have allowed the secularists, the atheists, the humanists to hijack our Constitution and pervert it into something our forefathers never intended.” He added, “Thank God we have a president like Donald J. Trump who understands that.”
That same year, Jeffress predicted that Trump’s impeachment would energize his base for “a massive landslide win in 2020,” a prediction that did not come to pass despite Jeffress’s best efforts, which included appearing in a pro-Trump propaganda film. Three weeks ago, Jeffress again predicted that his “friend” Trump will have “a landslide victory in 2024.”
When Trump was running for president in 2016, Jeffress was among the religious-right leaders who gave religious justifications for supporting Trump. One of Jeffress’s contributions was to claim that it was “biblical” to support a “strongman” and “the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what.” He also described that year’s election as “a battle between good and evil, righteousness and unrighteousness, light and darkness.”
Jeffress was among the religious-right leaders who said Trump survived the recent assassination attempt due to “divine intervention.”
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