Jim Bakker’s legacy of hucksterism lives on in Donald Trump

Televangelist Jim Bakker, who died Monday at 86, is the subject of an MS NOW opinion essay by Anthea Butler, a professor emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. She argues that his career of fear-driven fundraising offers a template for Donald Trump's commercial ventures and political appeal.

Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye LaValley Bakker, built the PTL Club into a vast television operation that earned them millions of dollars weekly in the 1980s. Money raised for Heritage USA, a Christian waterpark and resort in South Carolina, fed a lavish lifestyle that unraveled amid ministry debt, his affair with church secretary Jessica Hahn, and a financial crisis that drew in Jerry Falwell. Bakker was convicted in 1989 of mail fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 45 years, then paroled in 1994. He later founded Morningside in Missouri and sold survival food to end-times believers.

Butler notes his loyalty to Trump, including a $45 Trump coin pitched as a spiritual link. In 2021 Bakker paid $156,000 in restitution to settle a Missouri suit over a supplement marketed as a Covid treatment, while denying wrongdoing. She concludes that Trump's election despite his record shows the same gullible consumerism endures.

Summarized by PolitiKool from MS NOW’s reporting. Read the full story at MS NOW →