MAGA Pastor's Bizarre Explanation After Getting Jim Jordan Prophecy Wrong

Pastor Shane Vaughn, a supporter of former President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, recently offered a strange explanation for failing to correctly predict the new Republican House speaker.

Republicans elected Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana as the new House speaker on Wednesday following several failed attempts to fill the role after ousting Representative Kevin McCarthy from the speakership earlier this month. Attempts to elect Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who was the previous GOP speaker-designate and was endorsed by Trump, failed three consecutive times before Johnson was elected.

Vaughn of First Harvest Ministries in Waveland, Mississippi, prophesied last week that Jordan would become speaker because it was "Yahweh's plan" for Trump to control the House with Jordan as his "proxy." When Johnson was elected instead this week, Vaughn insisted that his prophecy had not failed, bizarrely claiming that "Mike Johnson IS Jim Jordan."

In a video clip shared Thursday to X, formerly Twitter, by Right Wing Watch—a project of liberal advocacy group People for the American Way—Vaughn argues that the close relationship between the two Republican congressmen had caused Johnson to become a "duplicate" of Jordan, referring to the new House speaker as "Mike Jordan" at one point.

"Mike Johnson is Jim Jordan because he is Jim Jordan's protégé," Vaughn explains. "The difference in Mike and Jim is that Jim has a lot of haters...only because Jim Jordan has been in the limelight...whereas Mike Jordan has not been."

"Mike Johnson IS Jim Jordan," he continues. "He tells everyone that Jim Jordan is his mentor. And any time someone's your mentor, then you become a duplicate of them."

Newsweek reached out for comment to the offices of Johnson and Jordan via email on Friday.

After Jordan was nominated for speaker last week, Vaughn quickly declared victory. The pastor celebrated by boasting that he could "see the news behind the news" and repeatedly sang, "I told you so!" He also suggested that what he assumed was Jordan's imminent speakership meant that "literally Donald Trump is the speaker of the House."

Last year, Vaughn suggested that God had moved Trump out of the White House as part of a "brilliant" plan to allow President Joe Biden to "bear the curse" in his absence. He predicted that Trump would win the 2024 presidential election and "fix the damage" before hand-picking a successor who would help to usher in "12 years of Trump-ism to fix this nation."

In 2021, Vaughn argued that Facebook's decision to suspend Trump's account was "the same mistake that Satan made when he killed Jesus Christ," claiming that the social media company had "created a world full of little Christians that echo the message of Christ" by suspending the ex-president. Meta, meanwhile, restored Trump's account earlier this year.

In addition to preaching about Trump, Vaughn claimed earlier this year that Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania had been "used" by Satan to keep control of the Senate, saying that Fetterman's in-patient treatment for depression meant that "Satan's done with him" and had decided to "send him to the mental nuthouse" after the 2022 midterm election.