CHARLOTTE, N.C. – President Donald Trump bowed his head quietly as the Rev. Billy Graham was honored at his funeral Friday with prayers, stories, hymns and bagpipes.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump joined Vice President Mike Pence, wife Karen Pence and about 2,000 other people under a large tent, reminiscent of those in which Graham preached early in his long career.





Trump did not speak at the ceremony honoring Graham, who died Feb. 21 at 99. He had spoken briefly Wednesday at a ceremony for Graham at the Capitol, where the preacher’s body lay in honor. He told the story of his father taking him to hear Graham preach at Yankee Stadium in 1957.

“And it was something very special,” Trump said. “But Americans came in droves to hear that great young preacher. Fred Trump was a big fan. Fred Trump was my father.”

Trump and Pence do not often appear together outside the White House, and their decision to jointly honor the most influential American evangelical leader is partly a marker of the importance of evangelical political support for both men.

Exit polls showed that about 80 percent of white evangelical voters voted for the Trump-Pence ticket – the largest vote for a Republican presidential candidate since 2004, when such voters overwhelmingly chose President George W. Bush by a margin of 78 percent to 21 percent.

White evangelicals are the religious group that most identifies with the Republican Party, and they were a mainstay of Pence’s support as an Indiana politician. Pence’s selection as his running mate is credited with helping solidify evangelical support for Trump, a Christian who had not expressed strong religious views.

Graham’s sister Jean Ford, 85, eulogized her brother shortly after a private meeting with the Trumps and Pences at the Billy Graham Library, where Graham will be buried.

Ford said that Trump had told her, “‘Your family has good genes.’ “

“He didn’t know that my name was Jean,” she joked.

Trump met Graham four years ago at the 95th-birthday party for the spiritual leader. Graham’s son the Rev. Franklin Graham arranged the party. Franklin Graham did not formally endorse Trump during the 2016 election, but he has supported most of his policies.

Members of Billy Graham’s family had dinner with Trump and Pence in the White House after the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday.

Graham met or prayed with every president from Harry Truman forward. Ronald Reagan presented Graham with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. None of the five living former presidents accepted invitations to attend the funeral, although Bill Clinton and George W. Bush came to the Billy Graham Library to pay their respects.

In 2007, Clinton, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush attended the library’s dedication.

Among the statements issued by former presidents, one from George H.W. Bush noted Graham’s role as an adviser not only to presidents but also to their families.

“I was privileged to have him as a personal friend,” Bush wrote. “He was a mentor to several of my children, including the former president of the United States. We will miss our good friend forever.”

The younger Bush credited a talk with Graham with helping him quit drinking.

“God’s work within me began in earnest with Billy’s outreach,” Bush wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published two days after Graham’s death. “I couldn’t have given up alcohol on my own.”

“But in 1986, at 40, I finally found the strength to quit,” Bush wrote. “That strength came from love I had felt from my earliest days and from faith I didn’t fully discover until my later years.”

Graham was a lifelong registered Democrat, and although Franklin Graham said his father had voted in the 2016 presidential election, he declined to say for whom.

“It doesn’t matter,” because the election is over, Franklin Graham said in an interview earlier this week. “All of us need to try to support Trump the best we can in the areas we can,” he said.

“There’s nothing wrong with us supporting candidates that support religious freedom that support values that we hold very dear,” Franklin Graham said.

Billy Graham said later in his life that he should have steered clear of politics. After tapes came out in 2002 revealing he and President Richard M. Nixon had shared anti-Semitic views, Graham acknowledged weeping and vomiting.

The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey contributed to this report.

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