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Christian Leaders Pray Over Trump Following White House Round Table |
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Thursday, March 20, 2025 |
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Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (Mar 20, 2025)
“I said that it is important that we continue to defend marriage in this country, and to encourage that and to uphold that, and particularly within marriage, we need to be encouraging people to have more children.” -William Wolfe, founder and executive director of the Center for Baptist Leaders
President Donald Trump’s White House Faith Office held a meeting with several pastors to discuss the priorities of American Christians and hear their recommendations. The head of the White House Faith Office, Paula White, indicated that she would share the pastors’ recommendations with Trump, the White House confirmed. Roundtable participant William Wolfe, founder and executive director of the Center for Baptist Leaders, said the establishment of the Faith Office marks a “180-degree difference” from previous Democrat presidential administrations, during which Christians were persecuted for their faith. “It’s not just that Christians were not welcome in the Biden administration or the Obama administration,” Wolfe told The Daily Signal, “but those administrations were actively hostile against them, particularly using government agencies like the IRS to target and to harass Christians.” After the roundtable, pastors had the opportunity to meet Trump and pray over him. Trump signed an executive order establishing the White House Faith Office on Feb. 7. Wolfe told The Daily Signal that when it was his turn to share the priorities of Baptists, he urged Trump to “push aggressively” for pro-life policies. Wolfe praised Trump’s executive orders enforcing the Hyde Amendment, which bars taxpayer funding to promote abortion, and reinstating the Mexico City Policy, which prohibits US funding for foreign abortions. He urged the Trump administration to work next on repealing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which was weaponized by the Biden Department of Justice to prosecute pro-lifers for praying outside abortion clinics. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, have introduced bills in the House and Senate to repeal the FACE Act. Baptists also would like Trump to implement pro-family policies that encourage marriage and the birth of children, said Wolfe, a former Trump appointee to the State Department and Department of Defense. “I said that it is important that we continue to defend marriage in this country, and to encourage that and to uphold that, and particularly within marriage, we need to be encouraging people to have more children,” he said, adding that he encouraged the White House to consider tax policies that incentivize having more children. While some religious people have outspokenly opposed Trump’s deportations of illegal immigrants, Wolfe said mass deportations are a Christian issue. “We actually believe it is directly related to the preservation of America as we know it,” he said. As the 250th birthday of the United States approaches next year, the leaders discussed incorporating America’s Christian heritage into the celebration, the White House confirmed to The Daily Signal. The roundtable also discussed addressing global Christian persecution in countries abroad, including Syria and Nigeria. “America should be a global champion in Christian religious living around the world without sending millions or billions of dollars around the world or importing millions of people here,” Wolfe said. Because of the White House Faith Office, “Christians across this country are sleeping a lot more soundly,” he added. Wolfe is grateful for the opportunity to represent conservative Baptists in the Southern Baptist Convention who appreciate Trump’s efforts to secure wins for Christians and churches, he said. “Baptists have had a real issue with faithful representation on politics from our leaders over the last decade,” Wolfe said. “A lot of our Baptist public and political leaders have been foolish and unhelpful in their opposition to Trump and their embrace of leftist political rhetoric and wokeness.” Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell is the White House Correspondent for “The Daily Signal.”
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Thomas Stevenson (Mar 20, 2025)
[ThePostMillennial.com] The FBI’s Deputy Director Dan Bongino has announced that the agency is working to investigate swatting incidents against conservative figures as well as violent attacks against Tesla. In a statement posted to X, Bongino wrote, “Communication and transparency are my priorities. We work for you, the American citizen. Our teams are actively working on the Tesla incidents and the swatting incidents, along with our other responsibilities to keep the Homeland safe. Thank you.”… Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here Click Here to read.
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(Image: Official Government Portrait)|
Craig Bannister-Blog (Mar 20, 2025)
“This is a major victory both for our law enforcement partners and for a safer America…” -FBI Director Kash Patel
On Tuesday, FBI Director Kash Patel reported the arrest Francisco Javier Roman-Bardales, a suspected leader of the Latin America criminal gang and terrorist organization, known as MS-13:
“For those counting at home: This is the third arrest of a fugitive on the ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list since January 20, 2025,” FBI Assistant Director for Public Affairs Ben Williamson noted, referencing Trump’s inauguration date. “Roman-Bardales was wanted ‘for his alleged role in ordering numerous acts of violence against civilians and rival gang members, as well as his role in drug distribution and extortion schemes in the United States and El Salvador,'” the White House website explains, detailing the three apprehensions: “The cold-blooded criminal is the third fugitive on the FBI’s ‘Ten Most Wanted’ list apprehended since President Trump took office.
Since its establishment, 496 of the 535 (93%) of the fugitives on the list have been apprehended.
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Simon Kent (Mar 20, 2025)
[Breitbart.com] President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Thursday that fulfills a key campaign promise of shutting down the Department of Education. According to a White House summary seen by Reuters, the move ensures the department— called “a big con job” by Trump—is no more. The plan is to shift much of the department’s duties to the states, where curricula is determined, as well as other agencies… Click Here to read.
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(Image: iStock-Greggory DiSalvo)|
Caitlin McFall (Mar 20, 2025)
[FoxNews.com] The Taliban on Thursday released American hostage George Glezmann after holding him for more than two years in Afghanistan following negotiations between the Trump administration and Qatari officials, a diplomatic source with knowledge of the release told Fox News Digital. … The release of the 65-year-old American, abducted while visiting Kabul as a tourist on Dec. 5, 2022, comes after Boehler met with officials from the Afghan foreign ministry alongside Qatari officials… Click Here to read.
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(Image: Pixabay)|
S.A. McCarthy-Commentary (Mar 20, 2025)
The Founding Fathers designed America’s federal government —and the crucial separation of powers—in such a way to ensure that no one state and, even worse, no one man could force his will on the entire nation. Yet that’s exactly what these unchecked activist judges are doing, defiling the very Constitution which they swore to uphold and corroding the nation they purport to safeguard.
As this writer previously noted, Trump was elected in order to carry out the agenda that he promised he would: gutting the swollen federal bureaucracy, eliminating the waste and fraud plaguing the American taxpayer, ending the woke stranglehold suffocating key federal institutions, and initiating the mass deportation of millions of illegal immigrants who have violated the laws and disregarded the sovereignty of the United States of America. However, a spate of unelected, largely-partisan federal judges— almost exclusively at the district court level—have issued sweeping restrictions against many of the president’s executive orders and actions. Some recent examples include a US district court judge halting the Trump administration’s virtual shutdown of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), another district court judge blocking the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from reclaiming roughly $20 billion hastily spent by the previous administration on climate hysterics, and yet another district court judge preventing the US military from barring transgender-identifying individuals from enlisting, citing the musical “Hamilton” in her order. One of the most egregious examples of this recent judicial overreach came when District Court Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order demanding that US planes deporting 250 members of the criminal terrorist organization Tren de Aragua return the violent gang members to the US in concert with his top immigration advisor, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Trump had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a war-time measure allowing the president to arrest and detain or deport any male over the age of 14 who comes from a foreign country which has been designated an enemy. The Alien Enemies Act has actually been used on several occasions throughout US history, including during the War of 1812 and both the First and Second World Wars. Miller and the White House have spent the past several days defending the president’s use of the Alien Enemies Act—which Trump pledged on several occasions to invoke while campaigning. In an interview this week, Miller took a particularly strong stance against Boasberg’s ruling, explaining, “The Alien Enemies Act, which was passed into law by the founding generation of this country—men like John Adams—was written explicitly to give the president the authority to repel an alien invasion of the United States.” He continued, “That is not something that a District Court judge has any authority whatsoever to interfere with, to enjoin, to restrict, or to restrain in any way. … There’s not one clause in that law that makes it subject to judicial review, let alone District Court review.” The Alien Enemies Act, which is part of Title 50 of the US Code, explicitly bars federal courts from curtailing the president’s use of the Act. In fact, Title 50 § 23 addresses the jurisdiction which federal courts do or do not have over the president’s exercise of Title 50: federal courts are allowed to detain or deport “any alien enemy resident” within their jurisdiction or district, even if the president’s terms for invoking the Alien Enemies Act does or would exempt that individual from detainment or deportation. What a federal court is most certainly not allowed to do, according to the clear terms established in Title 50, is prevent the president from invoking the Alien Enemies Act or rescind his proclamation of invocation. “Under the Constitution, who makes that determination? A district court judge elected by no one? Or the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy?” Miller asked regarding the Alien Enemies Act. He answered, “The president and the president alone makes the decision of what triggers that.” Since then, Miller has continued to warn of the dangers posed by an unchecked, unelected cabal of partisan judges who are empowered to effectively shape—via restrictive court order—the policy of the executive branch of the federal government and prevent the administration from enacting the policy that the American people overwhelmingly voted for. “There are nearly 700 unelected district court judges. If the most extremist of these judges on any given day decides he is in charge of the executive branch then Article II, democracy[,] and government itself cannot function,” Miller observed in a social media post. He added, in another post, “Currently, district court judges have assumed the mantle of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Secretary of Homeland Security[,] and Commander-in-Chief. Each day, they change the foreign policy, economic, staffing[,] and national security policies of the Administration.” He warned, “It is madness. It is lunacy. It is pure lawlessness. It is the gravest assault on democracy. It must and will end.” This is where the US Supreme Court comes in—or, rather, where it should come in but has so far refused to. As The Washington Stand previously reported, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene in a case where a district court judge forced the administration to pay $2 billion, erroneously labeling his order of compulsion as a temporary restraining order. The Supreme Court refused to intervene in the matter, accepting, as did the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the district court’s temporary restraining order “at face value,” as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito put it in a scathing dissent. “Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars?” Alito asked, in his dissenting opinion, with which Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh joined. He continued, “The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”
Following the district court judge’s order demanding that hundreds of already-deported terrorists be returned to the United States, Trump suggested that Boasberg should be impeached. “I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” the president declared over Truth Social. In a relatively rare public statement, Roberts replied, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” He added, “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.” This is, once again, not the first time that Roberts has seemingly been at odds with Trump, although his public statements on such subjects are a relative rarity. In 2018, after Trump disparaged a federal judge as an Obama appointee, Roberts told the media, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges, or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” Of course, the recent rash of overreaching temporary restraining orders and the years-long partisan lawfare campaign aggressively waged against Trump stand themselves as rebukes against Roberts’s 2018 claim. While “Bush judges” and even “Trump judges” may not see themselves as levers of power for one ideological faction over another, “Obama judges” and “Clinton judges”—and especially Biden judges—are largely blatant activists. Therein lies a crucial part of the problem: if the president is to do his job and carry out the agenda that the American people elected him to carry out, then he cannot be hampered by activist judges who are willing to bend, misconstrue, reinterpret, and misinterpret the very US Constitution which they were sworn to uphold. Trump has a very limited period of time in the White House, a very limited period of time in which to enact his agenda; he should not have to waste months or even years working his way through a federal court system at least partly run by the very activist judges erroneously and (in many cases) disingenuously thwarting his executive efforts in the first place. As, once again, Miller noted, “Unelected rogue judges are trying to steal years of time from a 4 year term. It’s the most egregious theft one can imagine: robbing the vote and voice of the American People.” Yet Roberts is unwilling to intervene. While his siding with left-leaning justices is par for the course and his public rebukes of the president are not thoroughly shocking, his refusal to intervene is something of a surprise. Despite numerous decisions Roberts has made (some of which he has himself authored) that have disappointed conservative Americans, he has long been a strong and clear proponent of the separation of powers. One of his most consequential rulings, in Trump v. United States, is typical of the Chief Justice’s bent for preserving not only the integrity and power of the federal judiciary but the integrity and power of the executive branch of the federal government too. In that case, Roberts penned a landmark opinion defending the core constitutional duties and powers of the presidency, clarifying that a president is entitled to absolute immunity for any of his actions which fall within the scope of his core constitutional duties and powers, as delineated in Article II of the Constitution, and is entitled to presumed immunity for all of his official acts. “Appreciating the ‘unique risks’ that arise when the President’s energies are diverted by proceedings that might render him ‘unduly cautious in the discharge of his official duties,’ the Court has recognized Presidential immunities and privileges ‘rooted in the constitutional tradition of the separation of powers and supported by our history,'” Roberts himself wrote in July. He continued, “Such an immunity is required to safeguard the independence and effective functioning of the Executive Branch, and to enable the President to carry out his constitutional duties without undue caution.” In other words—again, as Roberts himself noted—there is a fundamental urgency inherent in the office of the president and the president himself is empowered by Article II of the Constitution to make bold decisions for the good of the nation. When it comes to the exercise of his core constitutional duties and powers as established in Article II, the president should not be able to be enjoined nationwide by activist judges who are, frankly, acting outside their jurisdictions. This line of reasoning is one which Roberts should readily reach, particularly given his robust defense of the executive branch and the separation of powers over the course of his jurisprudential career. Yet he has still declined to intervene in these urgent cases wherein the Trump administration has sought the Supreme Court’s ruling. The very fact that Trump and his White House officers have repeatedly beseeched the Supreme Court for relief is demonstrative of the fact that the president will abide by the Supreme Court’s decision, as he has numerous times in the past. As recently as this week, Trump insisted that he does not, at present, intend to openly defy court orders. “You can’t do that,” he said, affirming that he expects the Supreme Court to make a just and reasonable decision, once his cases reach that level. That is, of course, if one of Trump’s numerous petitions is taken up by the Supreme Court. Thus far, the record reflects that Roberts and Barrett, at least, are not inclined to allow the president to make his case. But the refusal of the justices to act may precipitate a constitutional crisis on a scale not seen in the US in over 160 years. Should the Supreme Court refuse to examine the question of whether activist judges are maliciously—and, more than likely, unlawfully— stepping outside their jurisdictions to bombard the Trump administration with a bevy of temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions, court orders, and other such, the president will be faced with a gravely difficult decision. On the one hand, in the absence of Supreme Court intervention, the president could simply waste the next four years attempting to battle these multitudinous court orders, effectively allowing unelected activist judges to throttle the executive branch of the federal government. He may prevail in a Court of Appeals or even at the Supreme Court, but by the time the cases are litigated, argued, decided, and appealed over and over again, Trump will be on his way out of the White House, having achieved very little of what he was elected to achieve. In essence, national policy for the next several decades will be shaped not by elected officials, but by a judicial mafia appointed by agenda-driven Democrats in the first quarter of the 21st century. More crucially, the judicial branch will have managed to subdue the executive branch, shattering that barrier hailed as the “separation of powers” and choking the vitality and potency from the presidency. Such a situation would, clearly, be a constitutional crisis, and even the oft-assailed authority and legitimacy of the Supreme Court may not prove a strong enough force in such times to check the power-snatching of the district courts. On the other hand—again, in the absence of Supreme Court intervention—the president may choose to continue exercising the powers clearly granted to his office in Article II of the Constitution, even in seeming defiance of the lawless orders of activist judges. There is a dangerous sort of precedent for such a course of action, no doubt made all the more appealing to a man of Trump’s character by the “Great Man of History” theme associated with it. President Andrew Jackson’s infamous line, “The Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,” comes readily to mind, as does Napoleon Bonaparte’s maxim, “He who saves his country violates no law,” which Trump himself recently quoted. Following such a course of action, the president would be flagrantly violating the letter of the law, as contained in the host of court orders assailing his administration, but would still be able to present a strong case for upholding the law and saving his country. This, too, would be an obvious constitutional crisis and would certainly see a resurgence of wailing progressives crying, “Dictator!” and “Hitler!” The Founding Fathers designed America’s federal government—and the crucial separation of powers—in such a way to ensure that no one state and, even worse, no one man could force his will on the entire nation. Yet that’s exactly what these unchecked activist judges are doing, defiling the very Constitution which they swore to uphold and corroding the nation they purport to safeguard. If the Supreme Court and the Chief Justice continually refuse to intervene, a constitutional crisis of near-unrivaled magnitude will decimate the nation. If Roberts continues rejecting the president’s pleas for order and clarity, then Jackson’s quote may be amended to read, “The Chief Justice has made his decision. Now let him live with it.” S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.
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The justices’ majority in rejecting the Trump administration’s petition was comprised of Obama appointees Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, Biden appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by George W. Bush. The fact that Roberts sided with the Supreme Court’s left-leaning trio (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) is not much of a surprise, as the nominally conservative jurist has sided with the court’s more liberal wing on numerous occasions, seemingly in an effort to maintain some form of consensus. What was only slightly more surprising was that Roberts publicly |
Cassy Cooke (Mar 20, 2025)
Still covered are fertility-related procedures, including egg retrieval, sperm donation, intrauterine insemination (IUI), and in vitro fertilization (IVF).
In 2022, the Pentagon said it would pay for service members’ abortion-related travel. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated that the overturning of Roe v. Wade, along with pro-life laws in some states, would affect “readiness, recruiting, and retention implications” for the US military. Therefore, service members and their defendants would be reimbursed for expenses incurred when seeking induced abortions to intentionally end the lives of their preborn children. After President Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time in January, he issued an executive order reinforcing the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal dollars from funding most abortions. As a result, the DOD released a memo confirming it would no longer fund abortion-related travel. Earlier in March, the Navy announced it would halt abortion-related leave and funding for abortion travel, following the DOD directive. Now, in a memo, the, the Coast Guard has also confirmed that abortion travel expenses will not be reimbursed, and Coast Guardsmen will not be granted administrative leave for abortion. Still covered are fertility-related procedures, including egg retrieval, sperm donation, intrauterine insemination (IUI), and in vitro fertilization (IVF). Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran and current Secretary of Defense, had been a harsh critic of the Biden-era abortion policy. “When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade in the summer of 2022, the Biden administration frothed into a panic and took steps to work around the near forty-year moratorium on government-funded abortions at both the VA and the Department of Defense,” he said, adding, “The VA contends that female veterans with PTSD are more likely to have issue or complex pregnancies, higher rates of gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia. So you are probably better off just, you know, aborting them.”
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Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (Mar 20, 2025)
“My child completely freaked out. Was not having it. She called me, started crying, and ran out of the locker room as fast as she could.” -Nicole Georgas
“The president has made it incredibly clear that it is the policy of this administration that there are … only two sexes—rather, male and female—and that we are not going to tolerate such behavior by men pretending to be women,” Leavitt told The Daily Signal at Wednesday’s press briefing. Deerfield, Illinois, mother Nicole Georgas filed a complaint with the Department of Justice after she said the assistant principal and two other teachers forced her 13-year-old daughter to change in front of a male classmate who “identifies” as a transgender girl. Georgas says Shepard Middle School’s policy on transgender-identifying students using female private spaces violates President Donald Trump’s Feb. 5 executive order, which also prohibits male participation in women’s sports. “The president will continue to strongly stand for the rights of women and girls,” Leavitt told The Daily Signal, “not just in sports and on athletic fields, but also in private spaces like locker rooms and bathrooms.” The mother thanked Leavitt on X for her response to The Daily Signal’s question. The daughter was extremely traumatized by being forced to change in front of a male, despite expressing discomfort to school staff, her mother said. “My child completely freaked out,” Georgas said. “Was not having it. She called me, started crying, and ran out of the locker room as fast as she could.” Illinois state Rep. Bob Morgan, a Democrat, suggested the middle-school girls involved in the incident lied about it: “I’m really proud of my community who stood up for those who need to be defended and protected, making sure we have great schools—which we do, by the way. We have incredible, incredible schools, incredible families, an incredible community that has come together to deal with this situation,” Morgan said during an Illinois General Assembly session Tuesday. “Because it’s a lie!” Click Here to watch the video clip from Karoline Leavitt’s press conference. Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell is the White House Correspondent for “The Daily Signal.”
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Talia Wise (Mar 20, 2025)
“I pray this sparks a revival among our college campuses and Jesus will be made known!” -Christa Frost
Nearly 70 students from Baptist Campus Ministry (BCM), Cru, and Hilltoppers for Christ (HFC) spent last Monday night into Tuesday morning chalking all 879 verses of the Gospel of John. It took about two hours to illustrate and write all 21 chapters within a two mile stretch. After it was done, the volunteers prayed for WKU’s students and faculty at Centennial Mall. “People look for answers in a lot of different things, and I think it’s really good to have answers right in front of them,” said BCM Vice President Luke Alford. Alford, a senior mechanical engineering major at the school, told Kentucky Times the idea came from an BCM alumni who had seen a similar idea on social media. The idea was submitted to WKU Student Activities and then approved. Students woke up the next morning and could not ignore the message illustrated across their campus. “It’s my goal for the year, to get more connected with God,” said freshman Ryan Cantabeni. “It’s really nice to have some kind of sign showing me [to] keep doing this.” For others, the Scriptures may not hold a significant meaning just yet, but it has caught their attention. Junior Jenna Kittrell describes herself as non-religious and told the Kentucky Times that, “A lot of people probably don’t appreciate it enough, but I think it’s pretty, and it adds colors to the campus.” BCM has faced some criticism for spending their time chalking the campus. One student anonymously posted a message on the Yik Yak app writing, “You could have spent those hours at a soup kitchen or volunteering…Being an actual servant of the lord. Not just writing with chalk that’s gonna be washed away by Friday’s thunderstorm.” But for most, the campus ministries’ artwork is inspiring. Christa Frost shared the group’s photos on Facebook and told CBN News, “I pray this sparks a revival among our college campuses and Jesus will be made known!” As CBN News reported, a supernatural Christian revival has been stirring up once again on numerous American college campuses. Last month, UniteUS—an evangelistic movement marked by salvations, water baptisms, and worship—kicked off their first outreach of the year at the University of Kentucky which is just 30 minutes from Asbury University where the first sparks of a new spiritual awakening were seen among American students in February of 2023. This time, more than 8,000 students packed Rupp Arena to worship Jesus and to hear a powerful message on the Gospel and more than 2,000 students responded to the Gospel message of Jesus Christ and many took part in spontaneous baptisms. “It’s hard to believe. This keeps happening. It is insane,” said UniteUS speaker and founder of IF:Gathering Jennie Allen. UniteUS was birthed out of a desire to “lift the name of Jesus.” It all began at Auburn University’s Neville Arena in September 2023 where 5,000 students showed up to worship Jesus and 200 were spontaneously baptized in a nearby lake. And now, the organization hosts massive worship events making waves on college campuses across the country. Collectively, those events have brought in more than 70,000 college students. Alford says he wants to point students at his university, WKU, to Jesus and also help them find a church. “The Church Body is so important,” Alford said. “You have people from all different stages of life and walks of life united by one cause.” Elijah Vaughn, BCM’s serve team coordinator, told the Kentucky Times, “I want [the WKU community] to see Christ in all that we do.” Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here Talia Wise has served as a multi-media producer for CBNNews.com, CBN Newswatch, The Prayer Link, and CBN News social media outlets.
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