Former President Donald J. Trump has gruesome rhetorical devices he likes to deploy at his political rallies, including murderous sharks and bird-killing wind turbines. In the middle of the diatribe, a less morbid parenthesis tends to go unnoticed.
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“Those beautiful ladies from North Carolina are here again,” Trump observed at a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, on September 9, deviating from a rant about the 2020 election. He gestured to the top of the stands and to a row of a dozen impeccably coiffed women in brightly colored trouser suits. They waved and blew kisses to Trump, who speculated that the women had attended “249 or something” rallies. “That means they have money,” he said approvingly.
Trump has singled out the self-described “North Carolina Girls” at rallies this year from Georgia to Arizona. But they are unusual beyond their ubiquity.
They are all members of a charismatic evangelical Christian church in tiny Spindale, North Carolina. The church, Word of Faith Fellowship, has generated controversy for decades over its cult-like insularity and its treatment of children and adults who have been judged by church leaders as sinners.
As church leaders have acknowledged in legal proceedings, Word of Faith relies on a practice known as “loud” or “explosive” prayer. Former members of the church have described the entire congregation surrounding and yelling at a member for up to an hour in an effort to drive evil out of the person. Church officials say this characterization is exaggerated.
Beginning with a report in “Inside Edition,” a television news magazine, in 1995 and culminating in a series of investigative reports by The Associated Press that would become a book in 2020, former members of the church have described being physically attacked during such prayers.
In an interview, Matthew Fenner, a former congregant who told The Associated Press that he was 19 when five church members beat him in 2013 for being gay, said Word of Faith rationalized his brutal treatment. “In their opinion, they weren’t abusing me,” he said. “They were saving me.”
Word of Faith has disputed these claims. As Hannah Davies, one of the members who volunteers at Trump rallies, said in a testimonial on her website: “This sentence is not abusive, no one is hit, no one is hit, no one is hit. he shouts. This prayer is full of love and freedom.”
At Trump rallies, he has never mentioned the church to which the women belong.
The women serve as the volunteer arm of the campaign’s advance team. They arrive before a Trump event, set up chairs in the VIP section, man the media registration table, and take down the VIP section after the rally.
The church’s attorney, Joshua Farmer, emailed a statement from members explaining what motivated their volunteer work.
“God has spoken to our hearts that President Trump is the person who will lead this Country in the right direction,” the statement said. Church members did not further specify religious reasons for their support of the former President, but instead cited his “policies on important issues,” including “the economy, immigration, foreign policy and national security.” In the statement, Farmer said his wife, Andrea Farmer, was one of the volunteers. Others represent the church’s upper hierarchy, beginning with Jane and Sam Whaley, the church’s co-founders.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about church members, except to say that the former President and his team “often recognize these followers because their enthusiastic support is a motivation for us.”
Instead, Trump has kept things simple when describing the women, as he did at a rally in Columbia, South Carolina, earlier this year: “They look so rich and beautiful.”
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