While pitching his survivalist food buckets yesterday, televangelist Jim Bakker lashed out at comedian Stephen Colbert over a crude joke he made about President Trump and Vladimir Putin, which Joyner said was inciting violence and bloodshed.
“This isn’t normal comedian happy funny stuff,” he said. “This is, ‘Hate Trump. Kill Trump. Kill the president of the United States.’”
Bakker then praised the president for issuing an executive order, mistakenly referring to it as a bill, that limits the ability of the IRS to enforce rules that prohibit tax-exempt nonprofits, such as houses of worship, from explicitly endorsing or opposing candidates for political office.
He said that this act freed the church from horrible government attacks—despite the fact that only one church ever lost its tax-exempt status for engaging in partisan politics after it took out an ad opposing Bill Clinton during the 1992 presidential election—and falsely claimed that because of the rule, pastors “couldn’t even talk about political things.”
“He signed the bill today that told the IRS, ‘You cannot come for Jim Bakker again, you cannot come and take him away because they’re preaching what they believe,” Bakker said.
The government did once come after Bakker…because he engaged in a massive financial fraud scandal involving church properties and a cover-up of payments to a former assistant who said that Bakker assaulted her. He reportedly still owes the IRS $6 million.
