Dear friend,
I want to tell you something I have been sitting with for a long time.
Not a theological argument. Not a political position. A personal assessment. The kind that comes from fifty years of sitting with human beings at their best and their worst and learning, slowly and at some cost, what the difference actually looks like up close.
I have been watching Donald Trump for ten years.
Not casually. Carefully. The way a man who has spent fifty years reading Scripture and fifty years reading people watches someone he believes may be significant. Paying attention not to what the cameras capture but to what the cameras miss. Not to the speeches but to the moments between them. Not to the performance but to the person underneath it.
And I have decided some things. Tonight I want to tell you what they are.
I am not endorsing him politically. I have never done that and I never will. That is not my role and it is not what this letter is about.
This letter is about character. About what I have observed in this specific man across ten years of watching everything happen to him. And about what I believe it says.
The first thing I have decided.
He is not performing toughness. He actually has it.
There is a difference between the man who acts tough because the cameras are on and the man who is tough when the cameras are off. I have spent fifty years learning to tell the difference. It is not always easy. But it is always visible eventually.
The things that have happened to this man would have broken most people. Not eventually. Quickly. The investigations that went on for years. The public humiliations. The people who called themselves his friends until it cost them something and then disappeared. The charges. The conviction. The bullet that missed by one inch.
I have watched how he responds to each of these things when the immediate pressure of the moment has passed. Not the rally speeches. The quieter moments. The interviews where the question catches him off guard. The press conferences where the hostility is undisguised. The moments where a man who was performing toughness would slip into something smaller and more human.
He does not slip.
Not because he feels nothing. I do not believe that. I believe he feels a great deal. But somewhere in the construction of this particular man there is something that does not bend under pressure the way most people bend. That stands straighter when the weight increases rather than hunching under it.
I have seen that quality in very few people across fifty years. It is not common. And it is not something you can fake for ten years.
The second thing I have decided.
He remembers the people nobody is watching him remember.
This is the one that surprised me most. Because it does not fit the portrait his enemies have painted of him.
I have watched how he talks about the people who supported him before it was safe to support him. The ones who were with him when being with him cost something. He remembers them. Specifically. By name. In rooms where there is no political benefit to remembering them.
I have watched how he talks about the military. Not at rallies where the cameras are on and the applause is guaranteed. In the smaller moments. The specific, named soldiers and families he references in passing. The details that you only know if you actually paid attention to the person rather than the constituency they represent.
I have watched how he responds to ordinary people in unscripted moments. The worker at the job site. The server at the restaurant. The person who approaches him in an airport. The people nobody is watching him treat.
Luke chapter 16 verse 10. Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.
The way a man treats people when nothing is at stake is the truest thing about him. I have been watching that for ten years. What I have seen does not match what his enemies describe.
The third thing I have decided.
He does not know how to quit. And I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
I have sat with enough dying people to know something about what it looks like when a human being reaches the end of what they can endure. The specific moment when the will gives out. When the body and the mind and the spirit have simply nothing left to offer and the person makes their peace with stopping.
I have never seen that moment in this man.
And I have been watching for it. Honestly. Not because I wanted to see it. Because I wanted to understand whether what I was watching was genuine or performed. Whether the resilience was real or whether there was a private breaking point that the public version was concealing.
I have not found it.
After everything that has been thrown at him across ten years — the things that would have ended any other career, the things that would have sent any other man into a quiet and permanent retirement — he keeps going. Not reluctantly. Not because he has no other option. With a specific, visible energy that I can only describe as the energy of a person who believes they have not finished what they started.
In Galatians chapter 6 verse 9 Paul wrote let us not become weary in doing good for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
If we do not give up.
I have watched this man not give up for ten years. In circumstances that would have broken the will of almost anyone I have ever observed. And I have decided that whatever you believe about his policies or his personality or his fitness for office — the refusal to quit is real. And it is rare. And it is worth acknowledging plainly.
Before I go further I want to place something in your hands.
I wrote a guide called They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. It traces the Biblical pattern behind what I have been describing tonight — the survival, the opposition, the refusal to yield — through Scripture and maps it onto what you have been watching happen. I wrote it because I believe what I am observing in this man has a name in the Book I have been reading every morning for fifty years. You can find it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Now let me tell you the last two things I have decided.
The fourth thing I have decided.
He loves this country in a way that is not strategic.
I have watched enough politicians across fifty years to know the difference between a man who loves his country and a man who loves the votes his country produces. The difference is visible. Not immediately. Over time. In the moments when the country costs him something rather than giving him something.
I have watched this man lose things for this country. Things that a purely strategic man would not have lost. Relationships. Business. Peace. Health most likely. The specific things that a man who was performing patriotism rather than feeling it would have protected.
He did not protect them.
And I have watched him in the moments when the country he loves is not loving him back. When the polls are bad and the allies are distant and the people who were cheering last month have gone quiet. In those moments the strategic man recalculates. He pivots. He finds the position that costs less.
I have not watched this man pivot.
I am not saying his judgment is always right. It is not always right. I am not saying his methods are always wise. They are not always wise. I am saying that underneath the judgment and the methods there is something that is not calculated. Something that was there before the cameras and will be there after them.
That is rare in any man. It is almost unheard of in a politician.
The fifth thing I have decided.
He has been changed by what he has been through. And the change has gone in a direction I did not expect.
I have watched this man across ten years and I have watched the specific way that suffering either hardens a person or opens them. It always does one or the other. There is no third option. The things that break against a person either make them smaller and more defended or larger and more aware of something beyond themselves.
I have watched this man become more openly aware of something beyond himself.
The references to God have become more specific. More personal. Less political. The prayer at the rallies that used to feel like a political gesture has shifted into something that feels different. I cannot prove this. I am not claiming certainty. But I have spent fifty years watching people move toward God and I know what the early stages of that movement look like from the outside.
I am not saying he is a saint. Scripture does not require saints. It requires availability. The willingness to be used for something larger than yourself regardless of your imperfections.
Moses was a murderer. David was an adulterer. Paul was a persecutor of Christians. God used all of them. Not despite their flaws. Sometimes through them.
I have watched this man for ten years. I have decided that what I am watching is not a performance. It is a person. Imperfect. Complicated. Difficult in ways that are real and documented. And also — genuinely, visibly, increasingly — aware that what is happening to him and through him is larger than him.
I want to close with a question. Not about him. About you.
What does watching this man do to your own sense of what is possible?
Because I have been watching him for ten years and the thing that strikes me most is not the survival. It is what the survival says about the human capacity to keep going when every reasonable argument says stop.
You have things in your own life that you have been thinking about stopping. Not dramatic things necessarily. The prayer that has gone unanswered long enough that continuing to pray it feels like stubbornness rather than faith. The conviction you have been carrying that has cost you relationships and you are starting to wonder if the cost is worth it. The thing you believe about this country and about God and about what is worth fighting for that you have been keeping quieter lately because the quietness is easier.
What would it look like to not stop?
Not recklessly. Not without wisdom. But with the specific, settled, unperformable refusal to yield that I have been watching in this man for ten years.
I believe that quality is available to you. I believe Scripture describes it as the inheritance of every person who has been given the Spirit of the God who raised Jesus from the dead.
The same power that kept that man standing through everything you have watched him endure is available to the people reading this letter tonight.
Use it, friend. The moment requires it.
God bless you. More than I can say.
With you in prayer always,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do three things:
One. Read Galatians chapter 6 verses 7 through 10 this week. Pay particular attention to verse 9. Let us not become weary in doing good. Ask yourself honestly what you have become weary of. Name it. Then ask God for what you need to keep going.
Two. Think of one specific thing you have been considering stopping — a prayer, a conviction, a fight — that you have not stopped yet. Decide this week not to stop it. Not forever. Just this week. And then next week decide again.
Three. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump. The five things I described tonight about this man are the human expression of a Biblical pattern that guide traces in detail. Read it and see if what you have been watching for ten years starts to make a different kind of sense.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything I have written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here, which maps today's headlines directly against the specific passages that described them, and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection, which many of you have told me you return to every morning. Take a look when you have a moment.