Mark Burns, one of Donald Trump’s top evangelical boosters during his presidential campaign and now a member of his evangelical advisory board, announced yesterday that he is running for the South Carolina congressional seat being vacated by Rep. Trey Gowdy.
A video from Burns’ campaign committee announcing his run leans heavily on his relationship with Trump, showing photographs of him with the president, boasting of his role on the faith advisory board, and showing excerpts of his speech to the 2016 Republican National Convention, where he led a chant of “all lives matter”:
During the 2016 campaign, Burns enthusiastically pushed the narrative that Trump’s campaign was divinely inspired, saying that Trump was driven by the Holy Spirit. At one campaign rally, Burns said that Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, “gotta get saved, he gotta meet Jesus.”
In addition to his speech to the RNC, Burns gave a benediction where he called on God to help Trump defeat the “enemy” that was “Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.”
“Father God, in the name of Jesus, Lord, we’re so thankful for the life of Donald Trump,” he said. “We’re thankful that you are guiding him, that you are giving him the words to unite this party, this country, that we together can defeat the liberal Democratic Party, to keep us divided and not united. Because we are the United States of America, and we are the conservative party under God.”
Shortly before the election, Burns was found to have falsified biographical claims on his website, which he first tried to explain away by claiming that he had been hacked.
In reaction to this week’s mass shooting at a Florida high school, Burns suggested bringing “prayer back into the public schools” and federalizing school security, kind of like the TSA.
