He was one of the evangelicals who set the foundation for the MAGA-tization of a Christian movement, but today the Guardian reports that Donald Trump’s most influential Christian nationalist backer is quiet about rallying supporters for the Republican Party before the midterms. Instead, he’s urging them to find a successor to Charlie Kirk and “focusing on their own diets.”
“At the ‘As One’ weekend for paying ‘partners’ in the Dallas-Fort Worth area earlier this month, Lance Wallnau, one of the first prominent rightwing evangelicals to back Trump in 2015, spoke across three sessions about the virtues of El Salvador’s prison system, school boards and the movement’s future. The midterms, then little more than three weeks away, were not mentioned once,” reports the Guardian.
Wallnau, 70, is a captain in evangelical circles. He co-authored the book Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate, urging Christians to commandeer society, government, media, education and business. He was one of Trump’s earliest champions. He has a thing for hard-right dictators, like El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele. He also approves of Eastern European nations Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, all of which have endured hard-right political surges in recent years.
But the Guardian reports Wallnau has recently hit a more subdued tone as midterms threaten to shake the Republican Party to its foundation. Much of his new message now pertains to coping with failure.
“We all have a certain responsibility … but you can’t be responsible for the whole nation,” he recently said at an event, while referring to the elections. “You’ve done your job. Your conscience is clear, and whatever comes out in the midterms is going to be. We’ll sort that out when it happens.”
Now Wallnau urges followers to avoid politics and focus on themselves: “When you’re dealing with something you don’t like, something that isn’t working, something that isn’t clear, there’s some seed of a greater benefit that can come out of that … maybe it’s going to be lifestyle, or maybe it’s going to be diet.”
Behind closed doors, the Guardian reports Wallnau also admits the MAGA movement is struggling to appeal to young people, and he urged supporters to think about “building a post-Trump infrastructure, with leaders who will outlast the president.”
Concordia University professor André Gagné, who has studied Wallnau, said the spiritual leader’s sudden silence on the midterms reflected strains in Trump’s coalition, even from some of his earliest, and most victorious, backers.
“There’s fractures in the movement,” said Gagné. “My sense is that Wallnau feels he has to tread very carefully with what he’s going to say in overly defending Trump or overly talking about the midterms.”
He added that Wallnau’s growing distance between himself and Trump is strategic, that he must “think of who is coming next,” and it explains why he is eager to point to the successful collapse of democracies in other nations helmed by Bukele in El Salvador —collapses that appear to be stalling in the U.S.
But breaking things is rather Wallnau’s point, reports the Guardian. At the gala, for example, Wallnau closed out the evening by asking attendees to stand up with him and participate in a karate chop together.
“Here’s the problem,” he said. “[If] you don’t break a board, you break your hand.”