In early August, Spokane felt on the verge of apocalypse. A hundred-and-six-degree wind buffeted the valley. The air was choked with ash and smoke from two duelling forest fires. Yet, in the windowless hotel conference room where I was to meet the controversial pastor Franklin Graham, the frigid air made it possible to ignore impending calamity. Graham is the eldest son of Billy Graham, the most influential evangelical leader in twentieth-century America, who died this past February. He leads a seven-hundred-and-sixty-five-million-dollar evangelical empire, which includes the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and also his international Christian relief effort, Samaritan’s Purse. But, since 2016, Graham has become known, above all, as the most vociferous evangelical ally of Donald Trump. This summer, in response to Walmart’s sale of “IMPEACH 45” T-shirts, Graham manufactured his own merch: a hundred-per-cent-cotton “PRAY FOR 45” T-shirt, which sells at the Billy Graham bookstore for $15.99.

When I met with Graham in Spokane, he was on the West Coast leg of his “Decision America” tour, which has taken him to all fifty states since 2016. Graham casts the events as “prayer and evangelism,” in the tradition of his father’s crusades. But the tour is, in fact, much more akin to a political rally than a religious revival, and Graham benefits from blending the two in order to turn out like-minded crowds of hard-line conservatives. To the initiated, the word “decision” is a double-entendre: it means both to make a decision to follow Christ, or to be born again, and also to make a decision at the ballot box. Graham is careful to stress that he tells people only to “vote Biblically,” but this is a code his followers understand. “He didn’t say who to vote for,” Tom Phillips, a senior member of Graham’s staff, said in Spokane. “He didn’t have to.” (A spokesperson for Graham stressed that “Franklin never endorsed any candidate and said often during the tour that he didn’t have faith in the Republicans or Democrats, and that only God could save our country.”)

Billy Graham, a lifelong Democrat who supported both Democratic and Republican Presidents, promoted a message of religious and political unity. As far back as the nineteen-fifties, he attempted to desegregate his crusades, inviting Martin Luther King, Jr., to stand onstage alongside him. “Billy Graham’s style was openhanded invitation,” Robert P. Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, said. “He didn’t shy away from talking about sin, but it didn’t feel like an assault.” Franklin Graham, by contrast, possesses little of his father’s charisma. Personally and politically, he is far more divisive. After September 11th, he famously called Islam “a very evil and very wicked religion,” a position that put him on a public trajectory toward the hard-right wing of the Republican Party. “This was the key political turning point that set the stage for his prominence with Fox News and with Donald Trump,” Thomas Kidd, a professor at Baylor University, told me. Since 2012, the Trump Foundation has donated at least a hundred thousand dollars to Graham’s organizations, contributing to hurricane-relief efforts and to his 2015 campaign in support of “Biblical candidates.” That year, Graham supported Trump’s bid for a total ban on Muslim immigration to the United States. Graham is planning a trip to Blackpool, England, which, like Trump’s recent trip to the U.K., has faced public opposition from critics who argue that his preaching constitutes hate speech.

I first met Graham in 2003, when I travelled with him to Sudan. Samaritan’s Purse had been working in the south of the country for decades, but Graham had never been to the north, where he was going to meet the Sudanese dictator, Omar al-Bashir, who was waging war against his own people in Darfur and in southern Sudan. When the two men sat down in Bashir’s marble palace, Graham mentioned the hospital he ran in the south. Bashir turned to his aide and asked, in English, “Isn’t that the hospital we bombed?” To which Graham replied, “Twice, and you missed.” Graham then handed Bashir a George W. Bush reëlection campaign button that he’d taken from the desk of Karl Rove’s secretary.

After I returned from the trip, which I wrote about in my book “The Tenth Parallel,” Graham sent me a red-letter Bible, in which Jesus’s words are printed in red ink. That same year, he invited me to visit him in Boone, North Carolina, where we had dinner with his daughter, Cissie, and his wife, Jane Austin Cunningham, who scolded Graham for sneaking food to the dog under the table. Afterward, he gently warned me about the dangers of practicing yoga: its chants were demonic. Graham allowed me to poke around his home and office, which included a garage full of Harley-Davidsons and a gun safe. The walls of his office were decorated with a nail from ancient Rome—like the one used to nail Jesus to the cross, a caption said—and letters from Presidents. One, from George W. Bush, read, “We are doing all the right things in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

I next saw Graham on TV at Trump’s Inauguration. “Mr. President,” Graham said, turning to Trump, “in the Bible, rain is a sign of God’s blessing. And it started to rain, Mr. President, when you came to the platform. And it’s my prayer that God will bless you, your family, your Administration, and may He bless America.” He continued with a prayer from I Timothy: “For kings and for all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.”

In Spokane, Graham’s frailty startled me. At sixty-six, he looked much older and more worn than he had even two years ago. He took a seat in a ballroom chair, his large frame bent slightly forward in order to hear. I wondered if his tour was wearing him down. He’d returned to the Pacific Northwest “to penetrate the blue wall, ” as he’d said at one event. “Let’s go penetrate that blue wall, not for politics but for Jesus!”

Salvation, Graham stressed repeatedly, was his core message. “I speak about this issue of politics for five minutes, maybe four,” he assured me. Graham is well aware of the critique often levelled against him: that he’s more politically and spiritually partisan than his father. Billy Graham met every President from Truman to Trump, but he was particularly close to Richard Nixon, an intimacy he came to regret when the Watergate tapes became public and Nixon was heard repeating anti-Semitic remarks that Billy had made to him. In 2011, Billy Graham admitted that this closeness was an error. “Looking back I know I sometimes crossed the line, and I wouldn’t do that now,” he told the magazine Christianity Today.

When I asked Graham if there was a lesson in his father’s regrets, he brushed off the question, and told me the story of his dad’s reaction to Nixon instead. “He was hurt by President Nixon, and things that Nixon said, when, like the Watergate tapes, he never heard President Nixon cuss, use profanity—so that was a shock to him, and he felt a little bit betrayed by that.”