No Apologies

The Christian Prophets who predicted Donald Trump would be reinstated as President in 2021 aren't ready to admit defeat yet

- By Julia Duin. Photographs by Chad Batka, Bloomberg, Samuel Corum, The Fire School of Ministry, Jim Watson, Kraig Pruett, Chip Somodevilla, Maria Khrenova, Christopher Luk and Tass. Illustration by Britt Spencer

Whatever happened to the “trump prophets,” those charismatic/Pentecostal Christians who said God told them that President Donald Trump would win a second term? There were hundreds of prophets—famous and obscure—whose predictions about Trump being restored to his rightful place in the White House provided a theological framework for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol last year.

The smoke had barely cleared when a few of the prophets repented for being wrong. Their websites and Facebook feeds were inundated with vulgarities, recriminations and even death threats. Jeremiah Johnson, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based prophet who said Trump would win in 2020, admitted on January 7 that he was wrong and said he got “multiple death threats” and “thousands” of angry emails. He added that he “never dreamed” that such a barrage of “satanic attack and witchcraft” would come from charismatic/Pentecostal people.

He also said in a Facebook post, “To my great heartache, I’m convinced parts of the prophetic/ charismatic movement are far SICKER than I could have ever dreamed of. I truthfully never realized how absolutely triggered and ballistic thousands and thousands of saints get about Donald Trump.”

Michael Brown, a leader in a 1990s movement known as the Brownsville Revival and a Charlotte-based scholar with a decades-long history of prophetic involvement, said it “was the largest-scale deception I’ve seen in 49 years of following Jesus.”