Is God’s Hand on Donald Trump?

As we approach the 2020 election, there are Christian leaders who have prophesied that Donald Trump is going to win. It is an untold story of prophecies and spiritual signs that is off the radar screen of the secular media, which would never cover it except to ridicule. Yet many Christians believe God still actively guides us not only through the Bible, but through the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts.

Many Christians believe in the existence of modern-day prophets—people with a spiritual gift enabling them to tell others what God is saying. Therefore, it’s no surprise that when various prophets have said God has raised up Donald Trump, many believe it’s true. So, what are these prophecies, and why should we even pay attention to them? Could God be speaking to us today, and does He still have plans and purposes for America?

One story in the epilogue to my first book, God and Donald Trump, took readers by surprise. I wrote about a Catholic “holy man” who made a prediction about Donald Trump in the 1980s. I was asked about the story many times by interviewers who wanted to know if it was true.

The Catholic holy man was Tom Zimmer, an American World War II vet who lived more than 30 years in Italy so he could pray and attend Mass many times a day, first at the Vatican and later at the Holy House of Loreto, where the home of Mary the mother of Jesus is believed to be enshrined. Zimmer wrote a bestselling book called The Pieta, and he was said to have taken Mass 100,000 times in his over 80 years of life. In 2008, he returned home to Florida and died a year later.

The only person who can verify the story is a respected doctor named Claude Curran from Boston, who was a medical student at the University of Turin and later at the University of Rome in the 1980s. A devout Catholic even as a young man, Curran met Tom Zimmer in St. Peter’s Square. Curran says Zimmer told him various prophecies, including one in 1988 that the Berlin Wall would come down, which it did a year later.

In the same period, Zimmer told him, “Claude, there’s a man in the United States right now who has the hand of God on him. He has a first-class education, a high IQ, and everything he addresses he attacks with a blinding efficiency. I’m telling you he has the hand of God on him.”

Of course the young doctor wanted to know who he was. Zimmer said, “His name is Donald Trump.” Curran had seen Trump television. He considered him to be a jetsetter who dated actresses. So he asked, “You mean the New York playboy?” Tom answered, “God is going to work through him in the future, and I am so convinced of it that I bought a brick in the Vatican Holy Door with his name on it so that he will benefit from all the prayers and masses at St. Peter’s.”

When Trump ran for office and won in 2016, Curran told this story to his priest, Fr. Giacomo Capoverdi from Rhode Island, who made a video after the inauguration telling this story and also how he had once visited Loreto on a trip to Italy and had a nice conversation with the old man, and that as a result, he believed this story. The video started making the rounds, which is how I found out about it. After interviewing Dr. Curran for an hour and a half, I also believe the story is true. All these years later, it’s obvious that God is working through Donald Trump, who has certainly reawakened the national conversation about faith, religious liberty and the dangers of moral decline.

“I follow Trump’s presidency as a spiritual journey for him and his family. I don’t know what God tells him directly. But he must be going through something supernatural,” Dr. Curran told me. “This is clearly a fight between good and evil.”