Who knew that Trump had a “spiritual adviser”? Let alone more than one, so that one among them is the chief. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a more of the earth earthy human. This is a guy who talks about “beautiful chocolate cake” in the same breath with missile strikes. But apparently he does.

Televangelist and pastor Paula White has known Donald Trump since the early 2000s, and she is thought to be the president’s closest spiritual adviser. She prayed at his inauguration, appeared with him when he signed his executive order easing restrictions on pastors engaging in politics, and told evangelical TV host Jim Bakker she is in the White House at least weekly these days. This week, as Trump faced sustained criticism over his response to the violent white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, she proved her loyalty once more, appearing on the Jim Bakker Show to defend Trump’s presidency and his spiritual bona fides in apocalyptic terms. While White has condemned white supremacy as evil and has a racially mixed fan base, she didn’t mention Trump’s equivocations that have roiled the nation.

I suppose that’s because she’s so spiritual. In the spirit there is no color, so it doesn’t matter how racist white people are, yeah?

Instead, she made an extended comparison of the president to the biblical figure Esther on Bakker’s show Monday, in an interview that at times sounded more like an impassioned sermon. Like Esther, White said, Trump is a come-from-nowhere figure elevated to leadership against all odds in order to do God’s will. She described Trump as a generous, humble man of “character and integrity” and vouched repeatedly for the state of his soul. “He surrounds himself with Christians, and he is a Christian,” she told Bakker, about a man who’s been widely reported as being irreligious for most of his life, prompting applause from the studio audience. “He loves prayer.”

Nope. He’s not generous, he’s not humble, he has the character of a mean, vengeful, petty, selfish, greedy, reckless, angry bully. He has zero integrity. He’s a terrible person on every dimension we can observe, and it’s morally perverse to say otherwise.

[In] A damning investigative piece written for the now-shuttered conservative site Heat Street, Jillian Melchior reported this spring on her dubious record as a televangelist and pastor. White’s church outside Orlando attracts an almost exclusively black audience, many of whom have low incomes and little savings. That doesn’t stop White from asking for what they have. White asked congregants to donate up to a month’s salary as a one-time special offering to mark the beginning of the year.

Is that squalid and ruthless enough for a “spiritual adviser”?