Pastor claims he felt 'demonic activity' at Trump rally in Florida

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop in Tampa, Florida, February 12, 2016. | Reuters/Mike Carlson

A pastor who attended President Donald Trump's rally in Florida last weekend claimed that he sensed "demonic activity" at the event, and it left him and his 11-year-old daughter traumatized.

Joel Tooley, a pastor of the First Church of the Nazarene in Melbourne, Florida, revealed in a Facebook post that he was not a Trump supporter, but he did not want to miss an opportunity to see the president in person.

The pastor wrote about the excitement of the crowd as the airplane hangar that was the venue of the event opened and Air Force One pulled up, but he said he started feeling sick as soon as First Lady Melania Trump recited the Lord's Prayer.

"I can't explain it, but I felt sick. This wasn't a prayer beseeching the presence of Almighty God, it felt theatrical and manipulative," Tooley wrote.

Tooley narrated that the people near him became enraged when two female protesters started chanting their opposition to Trump. He said that he was met with hostility when he tried protecting the protesters against the angry crowd. Two angry ladies yelled expletives at him and raised their middle fingers in his face after he positioned himself between the enraged mob and the protesters.

"I have been in places and experiences before where demonic activity was palpable. The power of the Holy Spirit of God was protecting me in those moments and was once again protecting me and my daughter in this moment," he recounted.

Tooley said that his daughter was already sobbing in fear by that time. "My kid was shaken - she had just seen some of the worst of humanity," he added.

The pastor acknowledged that not everyone who attended the rally was hostile or violent. However, he noted that his daughter would probably look back at the event remembering the hostility of the crowd instead of the sentiment that he had hoped that she would experience.

World Net Daily reported that Tooley served as an immigration specialist with World Relief, which is one of the nine agencies that get paid by the federal government to resettle refugees in the U.S.

Last week, World Relief announced that it will be closing five of its offices and will be laying off over 140 staff members because of Trump's executive order to reduce the number of refugees that will be resettled in the U.S. this year.