Do You Pray for President Trump? I Do

DECADES AGO AND an ocean away, there lived a dictator who called himself a president. From 1997 to 2003, Charles Taylor served a chaotic term in Liberia’s highest office, presiding over a civil war that killed tens of thousands of his own people and inflicted traumas like rape and child soldiering on many more. Taylor was later found guilty of “some of the most heinous and brutal crimes recorded in human history” by an international criminal court at The Hague.

We weren’t there to make a scene. We were there to do business with God.

Taylor’s regime was ended, in part, by the prayers of ordinary Liberian women. In 2002, a 30-year-old single mother and social worker named Leymah Gbowee awoke from a sleeping dream in which she believed she heard the voice of God say, “Gather the women to pray for peace!” Gbowee founded a series of public prayer meetings that eventually included thousands of women. Over the next few years, as the women demanded peace from God and from their leaders, Taylor was arrested, violence ceased, and Liberia elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as president, Africa’s first female head of state.

I first heard about the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement on the last Friday night of the Biden administration. Over dinner, a friend recalled hearing a talk about Liberia’s peace movement. “These women just stood outside the presidential palace,” she recounted, “and prayed until he was removed from office.”

The following week, as Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time and his executive orders began to reverberate around us like so many gunshots, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Liberian women who prayed. What might it look like, I wondered, to do something like that here in America?

The situation was different, of course. The U.S. was not at war with itself. I had tasted nothing of the terror Gbowee and her friends had known as they and their children ran for their lives. But I had seen enough of Trump’s policies to make me afraid.

Set against the backdrop of my own nation, the story of the praying Liberian women served at first simply to remind me of the power of prayer. I thought about the Lord’s Prayer: “your will be done, on earth.” What are we asking for when we pray that prayer? I searched for Bible passages that reveal God’s will for flourishing human societies — verses that show God’s heart for the poor, the refugee, and the prisoner. I made lists in my prayer journal, sketching out what I wanted to ask God to do in my place and time.

Then, about a week after I first heard about Gbowee, I realized with a jolt that I too could pray outside my own country’s presidential palace. My family had recently moved to Baltimore. The White House was a one-hour train ride away.

I had no idea what I was doing, and I was a little scared. So, before I could change my mind, I emailed some friends my intention to pray outside the White House on the first Saturday of every month. I invited them to join me. Responses poured back. Friends, family members, churches I knew — people from all corners of the country would join me in person or from afar asking for God’s will to be done here on earth, here in the United States, here at the White House.

On our first trip, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would we stand still and pray loudly? Would we attract a crowd? Would someone get upset? “If we get arrested,” I told a law-student companion, “it’s a good thing you’re studying public defense.”

“I don’t think we’re going to get arrested,” she replied.

We didn’t. Instead of standing in one place, we decided to walk around the building, voicing our concerns aloud to God in conversational tones. We didn’t look different from anyone else walking and talking on the sidewalk that day. We weren’t there to make a scene. We were there to do business with God.

As we completed that first circuit of the White House, I found myself thinking about the biblical fall of Jericho, when God instructed the Israelite army to march around their enemy’s city once a day for six days. Just then, I received an email from a friend across the country who had joined us in prayer while walking around her local ICE facility.

“I felt like I was walking around the walls of Jericho waiting for God to work,” my friend wrote. “As with Jericho, it will take time to dismantle an unjust system, so I plan to do that prayer walk regularly.”

On the Israelites’ seventh day circling Jericho, God made the city’s defensive walls fall down. I don’t expect anything that dramatic to happen. Sometimes I wonder if it even makes sense to spend hours monthly circling this building. Couldn’t I pray from home? I asked this of a nutritionist friend who accompanied me in June. “I think you’re doing this because you’re human,” she replied. “Our bodies matter. Physical space matters.”

It does feel like a pilgrimage. When I pray at the White House, I have a sense of solidarity with faith leaders arrested for praying in the U.S. Capitol, and with Robert Turner, the Baltimore pastor who walks 43 miles to Washington, D.C., each month to pray for slavery reparations. Once, we found ourselves joining with a group of missionaries to the U.S. from Trinidad and Tobago. Another time, a young man introduced himself as “a Black and queer Christian,” and asked to join our prayers. The day after Trump’s tumultuous February meeting with Ukrainian president Zelensky in the Oval Office, our prayer walk wound through a group of Ukrainian protesters. All kinds of people want to be in that physical space, near, as they sing in Hamilton, “the room where it happens.” Maybe my companions and I are simply acknowledging that God is there, too.

As Gbowee learned in Liberia, one way God responds to our cries is by shaping us to become the answer to each other’s prayers. Ultimately, I pray because I need God’s help, especially in figuring out how to pray for the president himself.

I admit I’ve found a certain satisfaction in praying the imprecatory psalms. I relished reading Psalm 37 aloud in view of the White House: “I have seen a wicked and ruthless man flourishing like a luxuriant native tree, but he soon passed away and was no more.”

But I have also been shaped by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit as expressed through the words of my friends’ prayers. Recently, while listening to a friend pray about how racism springs from fear, I found myself wanting to ask God’s perfect love to cast out all the fear that permeated the building in front of me. “Rain your love down on every person in this building,” I prayed aloud. How is God going to answer all these prayers? One thing I can say for certain is “Let it rain.”