God is protecting Donald Trump from his critics, and is using Trump to protect the U.S. from the “evil” Democratic Party, according to California evangelist Mario Murillo, who will appear later this month at a spiritual warfare event being hosted by Seven Mountains Dominionist Lance Wallnau at Trump International Hotel in D.C. The event is pricey, but you might get a bit of a free preview by watching Murillo’s recent Facebook Live chat with Wallnau, who believes Trump was anointed by God and says the spiritual “battle lines are drawn for 2020.”

In Friday’s interview, Wallnau and Murillo commiserate about their disdain for pastors who don’t want to preach about politics for fear of dividing their congregation or losing members. Murillo didn’t mince words about his belief that “the Democrat Party is not a viable alternative for any Christian at the point.” Here’s why, according to Murillo:

It’s the fact that we’ve been asked to leave. We have been clinically, culturally, socially, emotionally, intellectually, asked, shown the door by the Democratic Party. ‘You believe in the Bible, you believe in marriage, you believe in Christ, you are not welcome here.’ And for the church to act, sadly, like a battered wife, like, ‘Oh, well, I said something that made the Democrats treat us this way.’ This is the wake-up call for every believer. There is no option here. The next election that we’re in, there is one choice, and it’s the natural extension of reading the word of God – it’s an inescapable conclusion.

Wallnau is one of the “prophetic” speakers who have declared that God is using Donald Trump the way the used Cyrus, a Persian king mentioned in the Bible who was not a believer but was used by God to achieve his purposes. In the conversation with Murillo, Wallnau extended the Cyrus analogy beyond Trump to other authoritarian leaders admired by the Religious Right, referring to “the secular leadership being raised up around the world right now” and mentioning Hungary and Brazil. Wallnau said that the “sovereign nation-state is in a battle with globalists and Marxist communists.”

Murillo responded by saying, “I believe that Satan cannot introduce the tyranny globally so long as America exists as a free state. We are a firewall. Our military is a firewall.”

Murillo compared Trump to Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, and Wallnau added Abraham Lincoln to the list of “unlikely leaders” that God raises up, as he did with Trump. Said Wallnau: “This is the part that I try to get Christians to see—that your intercession doesn’t mean you’re going to get a born-again Pentecostal in the White House who’s going to straighten the thing out. It means God will find the instrument suitable to the arresting of darkness so that the church can advance.”

Wallnau also repeated his charge that “the media actually is becoming the false prophet,” citing a biblical passage about people in the end times deceiving and being deceived:

There’s a spirit of Antichrist and a spirit of false prophet…I hate waking up in Asia, or in the Philippines, or in Europe, and having CNN literally lying to me about what’s happening in the United States, and I know what’s different. But what happens is, I believe, in the lust for power, or in the ideologic hostility to Donald Trump’s existence, the news networks start by manipulating news in order to be an oppositional party, but then they become deluded by the very game they’re playing, and the judgment of God in a very real sense is they believe a lie.

Murillo agreed, saying that CNN thought that attacking Trump would bring them ratings, but that they’re now “self-destructing,” almost as if “there’s something behind them saying, ‘I’m going to run you into the ground, and I’m going to use your own evil against you.’”

The end-of-August gathering at Trump International will be the first time Wallnau and Murillo have appeared together. But Wallnau said that he’s been reading Murillo’s blog and told him, “you’re probably one of my favorite thinking Christians right now.”

Murillo declared after former special counsel Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony last week that it was, with a little help from God, a big win for Trump:

Why does Trump keep winning? Why do all the attempts to topple him by those who make it their career to destroy him, always crumble and fall? It is not about the righteousness of Trump…it is about the hand of God protecting a nation from the party of evil. And, thank God, He is!

Two days earlier, Murillo had written that a Trump loss in 2020 would be “too terrible to imagine.”