WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson answered a reporter’s question in January 2024 by stating his belief as a “Bible-believing Christian” that the election of President Joe Biden “must have been God’s will.”
Steve Bannon attacked Johnson’s position during his War Room podcast later the same day. “Have you lost your freaking mind?” asked Bannon, after playing a clip from Johnson’s press conference and calling the 2020 election stolen.
“I don’t need a theologian,” Bannon said. “Joe Biden is not a legitimate president of the United States. God did not raise him up.”
Bannon’s speech at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Kansas City last month, however, suggested his views have evolved.
He said it was “divine providence that saw Trump to victory in 16, saw Trump sent to Mar-a-Lago in 20, and saw Trump come back. Divine providence, the hand of God, is working here.”
A key strategist for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and a top adviser early in his first term, Bannon still insisted his former boss got the most legally cast votes in the 2020 election. “It’s no question he won it, but divine providence works in mysterious ways,” he told the Hillsdale audience on April 24.
“We weren’t ready” to serve a second consecutive term, according to Bannon. “We didn’t have the policies. We didn’t have the bench. We didn’t have the depth.”
Trump also would have faced a tough Congress had he stayed in office following the 2020 contest. The Senate ended up split 50-50, while the Democratic Party retained control of the House of Representatives. That would have complicated Trump’s cabinet appointments and likely led to additional impeachments.
Many officials in a second consecutive Trump administration would have remained loyal mainly to the Washington uniparty, undermining his agenda and leaking to the media. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies would have intensified the deep-state opposition to Trump that began before he was even elected in 2016.
The stunning achievements of President Trump’s interrupted second term support the theory of heavenly intercession, or at least voter self-interest and the principle of cause and effect. Today’s conservative counterrevolution against woke liberalism would have been impossible without the disastrous presidency of Joe Biden.
“Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” the first of more than 150 executive orders signed by Trump this year, stemmed from personal experience. “The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process,” it stated.
Biden’s “actions appear oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives,” according to the EO. It recalled that the “Department of Justice has ruthlessly prosecuted more than 1,500 individuals associated with January 6, and simultaneously dropped nearly all cases against BLM rioters.”
Trump’s second EO, “Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions,” noted that Biden “embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government.”
DEI-related executive orders highlight the reactionary nature of the Great Reversal. “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” signed in January 2021 on Biden’s first day in office, laid out his “ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”
Trump countered last January on his first day back in office with “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” That EO derided his predecessor’s equity obsession and the resulting “immense public waste and shameful discrimination. That ends today.”
“Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” called out the transgender insanity of the Biden era for its “corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
“Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” recounted how “the previous Administration engaged in an egregious pattern of targeting peaceful Christians, while ignoring violent, anti-Christian offenses. The Biden Department of Justice sought to squelch faith in the public square” by prosecuting pro-life activists and moving to investigate traditional Catholics. Hundreds of attacks on Catholic churches and crisis pregnancy centers got a free pass.
Biden’s open borders were a central reason for Trump’s return to the White House. “Millions of illegal aliens crossed our borders or were permitted to fly directly into the United States on commercial flights and allowed to settle in American communities,” read the “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” executive order.
Less weighty EOs like “Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws” and “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads” reflected discontent with the bureaucratic overreach that has helped wreck the Democratic Party brand.
Implementing these policy turnarounds will require committed, competent personnel. The bumbling autocrats who ran the country under Biden were a necessary precondition for the formidable team Trump has assembled thanks to Republican control of the Senate.
Replacing Alejandro Mayorkas with Kristi Noem as the Secretary of Homeland Security represents a major upgrade. So does the appointment as “border czar” of Tom Homan, who promptly closed the southern border and has already deported hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.
Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray oversaw lawfare campaigns against Trump and other conservatives, while ensuring Hunter Biden dodged prosecution for real felonies. Swapping out that non-crime-fighting duo with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel is serving to restore the credibility of federal law enforcement.
Patel’s rise to the FBI’s top post is remarkable given the title of his 2023 book, Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy. Other outsiders are today leading the agencies they previously disparaged.
Formerly a lifelong Democrat, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president as an independent last year after being blocked from challenging Biden for the party’s nomination. His book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, came out in 2021.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free in 2024. Whereas his predecessor prioritized DEI and reducing the military’s carbon footprint, Hegseth is focused on warfighting and enlistments are booming amid a surge of patriotism.
Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 but turned Republican in 2022. After Gabbard criticized then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris in July 2024, TSA put her on its Quiet Skies watch list and she was surveilled by federal air marshals during domestic flights. She wrote For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind last year.
The transition from the incompetent Karine Jean-Pierre to Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary underscores how the legacy media colluded with Biden’s puppeteers to hide his unfitness to be the nation’s chief executive. Such discrediting of establishment institutions continues to work in Trump’s favor.
There would have been no DOGE had Trump been reelected in 2020. USAID and similar front operations for government grift would still be funneling taxpayer money to global projects that sabotage the national interest.
The worst presidency of modern times produced the electoral realignment that returned Donald Trump to power. He is far better positioned to bring about an American golden age as 47 than he would have been as 46. It took Joe Biden, God bless him, to make that happen.
Robert Jenkins is a pseudonym for a Catholic writer living in Sacramento, California.
