South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Miami church to host Trump event
The Trump campaign announced that the Evangelicals for Trump rollout will be at megachurch.
An Apostolic megachurch in a Miami suburb led by a pastor known for speaking in tongues and performing what he says are “miracles” will host President Donald Trump next week when the president is expected to issue a fullthroated retort to calls from some in the Christian community for his removal from office.
The Trump campaign announced Friday — a week after a prominent Christian magazine called for his ouster — that the president’s planned Jan. 3 Evangelicals for Trump rollout will take place at King Jesus International Ministry.
The West Kendall church is believed to be one of the largest Hispanic congregations in the country and regularly draws thousands to its dramatic services. Led in English and Spanish by founder Guillermo Maldonado — who goes by the title of apostle — it is the flagship of a chain of 10 affiliated campuses from Chicago to Homestead and has its own broadcasting network, university and an outdoor pool for full-immersion baptisms.
“El Rey Jesús was a natural fit to launch our Evangelicals for Trump coalition,” Kayleigh McEnany, national press secretary for Trump Victory, said in a statement to the Miami Herald. “Apostle Maldonado is a staunch supporter of the president, reflecting the great and overwhelming support President Trump has among the evangelical community at large.”
The church, also called El Rey Jesús, has long been a popular stop for political candidates courting Hispanic votes. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott spoke there in
2010 on the Sunday before Election Day during the Republican primary for Florida governor, and congressional candidates in Florida’s 26th district regularly appear there during campaign season.
“It’s a massive congregation, with thousands of people,” said Carlos Curbelo, a Republican former congressman who represented the the Kendall area from
2015 until 2019. “And it’s a lot of swing voters.”
While Trump maintains considerable support among the predominately conservative and Catholic Cuban-American voters who have dominated Miami politics for decades, the congregation that often fills the roughly 7,000-seat sanctuary at El Rey Jesús hails from all over Central and South America — a community that makes up a key swing constituency in South Florida.
“The typical swing voter in Miami-Dade County is a non-Cuban Hispanic voter,” said Curbelo. An event drawing a crowd that is not only evangelical but also Hispanic, he said, amounts to “a political two-fer” for Trump.
Maldonado — a Honduran immigrant whose Colombian wife, Ana Maldonado, carries the title of prophet — has been close with Trump. But he has also been a somewhat controversial figure in Miami politics and religion.
In 2013, WPLG, the Miami ABC affiliate, ran a segment questioning miracles claimed by Maldonado, including a story about a woman whose daughter was revived after spending an hour in the morgue and another who said her multiple sclerosis disappeared on stage at the church. In some services, Maldonado describes the opening of a “portal” from which the holy spirit heals the faithful.
But Maldonado’s church has grown exponentially since he founded it in the mid-’90s with a dozen parishioners after he says he was visited by God.
“I was called by God
20-some years ago with a visitation,” Maldonado told Publishers Weekly during a
2013 interview. “As I prayed, the presence of God filled my room. His presence fell on me, and I started weeping and crying. I heard his voice say, ‘I have called you to bring my supernatural power to this generation.’ I was on the floor for two hours, then I heard the voice again but this time inside me telling me the same thing.”
Services at the church focus on Maldonado’s lengthy sermons, with swelling music from a live band as he engages the crowd, switching from English to Spanish and back again Sometimes, Maldonado will call parishioners to the front of the room and gesture forcefully toward them, appearing to knock them over with an invisible force.
Attempts to reach Maldonado directly and through his son, Bryan, who also preaches at the church, were not successful. The church, a purple and beige compound at 14100 SW
144th Ave., was closed when a reporter visited Friday.
Maldonado, who often declines interviews with the press, told the Miami Herald in 2006 that he was “told by God directly” that his congregation would grow to
10% of Miami’s population. Since then, he has continued to develop his own line of books and a TV network, and has evangelized in dozens of countries on behalf of the International Coalition of Apostles — a group of Christian leaders dedicated to a global Christian revival.
Maldonado has said he believes the church should become more involved in politics. And he has practiced what he’s preached.
He supported Republican presidential nominee John McCain in 2008, and campaigned that same year on behalf of a failed ballot question that sought to cement Florida’s then-ban on same-sex marriage in the state constitution. He has given the invocation before the U.S. House of Representatives, visited the White House in 2017 to see Trump sign an executive order on free speech and religious liberty, and was among a group of ministers who prayed with Trump in the White House in October.
“What a privilege to have been at the White House this weekend praying for our president and our beautiful nation!” Maldonado wrote on Instagram along with a picture that showed him with his hand on Trump’s left shoulder.
Trump’s campaign announced plans to hold a campaign event for evangelicals last week after the magazine Christianity Today published a scathing editorial calling Trump’s pressure campaign to convince the government of Ukraine to investigate the family of former Vice President Joe Biden “profoundly immoral.” The magazine backed articles of impeachment passed last week by House Democrats and called for the U.S. Senate to remove Trump from office.
Since then, dozens of prominent figures on the religious right have backed Trump and blasted Christianity Today, including the son of the late Rev. Billy Graham, who founded the magazine.
Trump is planning to visit Miami while on a holiday vacation at his permanent residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. On Christmas Eve, Trump skipped his regular appearance at the liberal Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Palm Beach — where he and Melania Trump were married in 2005 and their son, Barron, was baptized — and instead went with the First Lady to the Family Church-Downtown in West Palm Beach, a more conservative, Baptist-affiliated congregation.
Bethesda-by-the-Sea has at times championed progressive issues and criticized some of the Trump administration’s policies.