One year after President Trump’s 80-minute speech to Road to Majority attendees, the 2025 edition of the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual summit struck a markedly different tone—serious, global, and at times deeply personal.

Following my 10-minute regional strategy recap (watch here), there was a brief light moment when Speaker Mike Johnson—just 10 feet behind me at the head table—broke into the best Donald Trump impersonation I’ve ever heard. For a second, I truly spun around, thinking Trump might have returned to the same stage. Our State Director Spencer LaVerde texted me: “He’s gotta be backstage.”

But that moment of levity quickly gave way to the event’s sobering heart. Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Yechiel Leiter, took the stage just before Speaker Johnson. With poise and heartbreak, he recounted losing his own son to Hamas, followed by testimony from a freed hostage whose brother remains in captivity. One of the Ambassador’s most biting moments came when referencing the mainstream media’s attempt to undermine Trump’s order to bomb the Iranian nuclear sites. “The media,” he quipped, “taught us etymology—debating the difference between obliteration and elimination.”

That warning—that evil must be named and confronted—set the tone for the entire weekend, though with uplifting moments such as by a Pastor we want to bring to Milwaukee, Lorenzo Sewell..

The Road to Majority 2025 conference delivered a powerful blend of domestic grassroots strategy and bold international themes—underscoring how faith and freedom are at stake not just in America, but across the globe.

At the main stage, Dr. Yechiel Leiter’s address drew an audience of thousands including on stage in the front row, Kurt Kelly (FL FFC), Curtis Workman (WV), Betsy Sheehy (SC), John Pudner (WI), and the ever-present Madgie Nicolas, the “Godmother of Coalitions.” In our other top row photos above, Dr. Sebastian Lezcano (External Affairs Director) and Mary Thomas (CEO) represented national leadership, joined by WIFFC’s Holly Klucarich and Pudner in the top middle photo, with the final top photo being WIFFC Board Member Camille Solberg and Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, who offered the invocation at Trump’s 2017 inauguration.

The middle photos include the crowd at the speeches on the four regions by Mack Parnell (GA), credited with delivering a record 92% evangelical vote for Trump; Chad Schnitger (CA); Chris Merola (PA); and Pudner, reflecting Wisconsin’s unique coalition work across rural, suburban, and—as National Chair Ralph Reed pointed out at the prayer breakfast—WI FFC built a road map on how to reach Latino communities.

Our Wisconsin team shown in the middle photo broke down into non-Spanish speakers outfitted with translation headsets—but those who helped translate our Trump vs. Harris candidate comparisons into Spanish of course did not need headsets—Solberg, Krista Lewie-Cepero, and in the next photo Nilsa Alvarez, who later introduced the most sobering keynote of the weekend: Agustin Laje, who warned of a coordinated effort to dismantle Latin American faith culture, including violence against traditional leaders and attempted political assassinations, just as the attempt on President Trump. As Pudner and LaVerde travel from the DC Swamp to Minnesota today, the day after the wake for the legislator who was assassinated along with her husband, we join all civilized people in condemning political violence and language that leads to it, no matter the source.

Laje’s speech tied in directly with a broader theme: the internal threat to the Judeo-Christian tradition on which democracy was built, not just from terrorism, but from a cultural regime trying to replace truth and belief with ideology and coercion.

The Supreme Court’s decision announced while we met affirmed parents’ rights to opt out of radical gender curricula—and yet even this was framed by the left as “a threat to democracy.” But to the thousands gathered in D.C., it was a defense of one of democracy’s core pillars: religious liberty. This tension—between freedom of conscience and those who would use the government to eliminate even parental rights—was made vivid by the final speaker: Eric Metaxas, whose Letter to the American Church: Part 2 draws striking parallels between Nazi Germany’s state suppression of religion and modern secularism’s crusade to erase faith from the public square.

Metaxas’ central point: freedom of religion is the final line of defense against tyranny. And yet, those who sound the alarm are dismissed—even as more than half of the world’s 8 billion people believe in the God of Abraham, whether as Christians, Jews, or Muslims. After talking with him, we left with his new book, Religionless Christianity.

Which brings us back to a prescient voice from 2017. In this speech delivered in English in Riyadh, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, Foreign Minister of the UAE, warned that Europe’s “political correctness” and superficial understanding of Islam would make it a fertile ground for extremism. Western nations unwilling to confront the ideological roots of jihadist terror, he said, might soon be seen as “incubators of terrorism.”

At the time, many brushed aside the warning.

In the ensuing years, 12 of the 17 deadliest jihadist attacks in Europe occurred in France or the United Kingdom. Law enforcement investigations also revealed that individuals involved in terrorism sometimes funded their activities through unrelated criminal acts. These incidents included the Manchester Arena bombing, the London Bridge van and knife attacks, and a series of police killings and beheadings, including one inside a Paris church.

Of course, these terrorists represent only a tiny fraction of the global Muslim population, just as only a small minority of undocumented immigrants have ties to violent gangs like MS-13. But political correctness should never be used to downplay the threat posed by extremist ideologies, including Hamas or chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” or to ignore signs that someone may have become radicalized after entering a new country.

What once sounded like hyperbole in the Sheikh’s remarks now appears remarkably prescient. His warning about the danger of Western leaders believing they understand Islam better than those in the Middle East dovetails with the fact that MSNBC had to admit Arab leaders did not condemn Trump for partnering with Israel to neutralize Iranian nuclear threats.