‘The Trump Prophecy’ Is an Unsettling Window On American Evangelicalism
By: Emily Pothast
Tags: The Trump Prophecy, Politics, Evangelicals, Conspiracy Theories, Donald Trump

A new movie makes a retired firefighter out to be a prophet. In reality, he’s a radical conspiracy theorist who thinks Democrats control the weather.

Chris Nelson as firefighter turned “prophet” Mark Taylor in ‘The Trump Prophecy’

On Tuesday morning, a post about a movie called The Trump Prophecy happened to cross my social media feed. The film, which was produced in cooperation with the film department at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and made with the help of a small army of Christian film students, tells the “true story” of a retired firefighter from Florida named Mark Taylor who claims to have dreamed that Donald Trump would one day be the president of the United States back in 2011. There was a screening that night in Seattle, so I went and checked it out.

On the surface, there’s not much distinguishing The Trump Prophecy from other films in its schlocky genre. Early on, Taylor is established as a hero when he rescues a girl from a house fire started by a woman using heroin. The girl’s little brother is still inside, so Taylor dives back into the fire to save him, only to find him non-responsive. For some reason, no attempt is made to resuscitate the boy, and he is declared dead by the firefighters.

After this event, Taylor starts having PTSD-induced nightmares and decides to go see a therapist. He also decides to retire from the fire department, even though waiting to receive his 25-year pension would leave him significantly better off than taking the 20-year pension he is entitled to.

At this point, it bears mentioning that The Trump Prophecy is, quite ironically, something of an accidental advertisement for a quasi-socialist utopia. Mark Taylor and his doting wife Mary Jo live in a world where civil servants with public sector jobs get to retire after 20 years with hefty pensions and access to mental health care. PTSD is not stigmatized, but treated like a serious condition, and traumatized men are encouraged to seek therapy. But therapy alone is not enough to stop Taylor’s dreams, which increasingly involve CGI demons with bodies of fire and devil horns. During one such dream, he has the flash of inspiration that leads him to write his “Commander-In-Chief Prophecy” in his dream journal. This takes place in 2011.

Mark Taylor visits Dr. Don Colbert and his shelf of fad diet books in ‘The Trump Prophecy’

Time passes; Taylor’s PTSD symptoms fade. Now it’s 2015, and Donald Trump has just announced his candidacy, which reminds Taylor of his dream diary. He shows it to Dr. Don Colbert, a character based on a real-life doctor who is both an evangelical Christian and author of several fad diet books. The scenes in Dr. Colbert’s office charge headlong into self parody as the camera lingers on a shelf filled with his various books and diet products. Dr. Colbert refers Taylor to his wife Mary, who starts an international prayer chain encouraging evangelicals to not only vote for Donald Trump but pray for the success of his White House bid. (Along with Mark Taylor, Mary Colbert co-wrote the book on which The Trump Prophecy is based.)

Many of the people Mary reaches with her prayer calls express skepticism. “You know, I’ve never really been a Donald Trump fan,” several people tell her, including her own son. Since the election, much has been made of the disconnect between Trump, who hardly even pretends at being Christian, and the evangelicals who have claimed him as their own. The Trump Prophecy lays this mechanism bare: It doesn’t matter to these believers whether Trump is a man of God or not. What matters is how they believe God is using him, likening his role to that of Cyrus the Great, a Persian king who conquered Babylon in the 6th century BCE, allowing the Israelites to return to Jerusalem. Trump’s support of Israel is a recurring theme in the film, particularly his role in moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — an action that evangelicals believe is a necessary bit of staging for the immanent apocalypse.

The last half hour of the film is a documentary designed to rally the Republicans’ evangelical base: a tear-jerking montage of veterans and their family members holding old photographs and folded flags, followed by talking head interviews with prominent conservatives including former US Representative Michele Bachmann and Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, who served as the United States Deputy Undersecretary of Defense under George W. Bush. During this part of the film, “liberty” and free market capitalism are discreetly substituted for evangelical Christianity. Faith is the hook, but we all know that the free market is the real reason we’re here.

The Trump Prophecy is a piece of political propaganda disguised as a film about faith, and not a very interesting one at that. I was honestly expecting something weird and unhinged, and left the theater feeling shortchanged by a movie that somehow managed to make wrestling with a CGI demon seem boring. But when I got home and googled Mark Taylor, I got all the weirdness I was expecting from the film and then some.

In the movie, Taylor is a mild-mannered former firefighter who just happens to wrestle demons in his dreams. In real life, he is a radical conspiracy theorist who thinks Democrats can control the weather and that God talks to him through racehorses.

In a recent interview with YouTube host Christopher McDonald which drew the attention of Right Wing Watch, Taylor claims that Trump’s political enemies have the ability to “geoengineer” hurricanes, which they use to “weaponize weather” to achieve political goals. According to Taylor, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma were created by Trump’s enemies to punish Trump for pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which he says delegitimized their “climate control” strategy.

“Climate control is their global slush fund,” says Taylor. “It’s their global tax that funds the New World Order. Period.” Similarly, Taylor claims that Hurricane Florence was created by humans in order to wash away evidence of voter fraud in North Carolina.

Even more disturbingly, earlier in this same interview Taylor describes how God has been speaking to him through racehorses, reading the euthanization of a racehorse named after Barack Obama as a sign that Democrats are about to start being executed.

“This has nothing to do with Roe vs Wade right now,” says Taylor of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. “This has everything to do with military tribunals, them being charged with treason, and going to prison for the rest of their life and some being executed.” He continues:

The racehorse named Barack Obama was euthanized. That is probably the biggest prophetic sign that you could have of God saying this man is going to go down. Period. That’s the bottom line. You can get mad at me all you want to, but God’s the messenger here, he is the one sending the message. People don’t think that this stuff is real or it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. This is real. Justice is not coming, it’s here, period, and it is taking place on the earth. This whole thing with Kavanaugh is about trying to stop the military tribunals … This is all about rounding these people up, charging them with treason, and they know that, basically, their head is going to be in a noose, literally.

Taylor’s beliefs are extreme even for Christian fundamentalists. But by co-producing a motion picture about his life, Liberty University—one of the largest, most organized institutions of American evangelicalism—has effectively endorsed Taylor’s status as a prophet.

That The Trump Prophecy aims to establish the legitimacy of a “prophet” whose latest “prophecy” predicts the state-sanctioned murdering of Trump’s political enemies is a fact that the film’s most prominent reviewers haven’t even touched on. Harriet Sherwood, writing for The Guardian, ends her coverage of the film with a feel-good quote from producer Rick Eldridge, who says “every American who loves his country should appreciate the movie and be inspired by it.”

I’ll end mine with this: Every American who values democracy should be alarmed by the fact that this film exists at all.