“In the mountains of Syria, the valleys of Lebanon, on the plains of Nineveh, the plateaus of Armenia, on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the delta of the Nile, the fathers and mothers of our faith planted the seeds of belief… but now that garden of faith is under threat.” During the fourth annual advocacy summit hosted by In Defense of Christians on October 27, 2017, Keynote Speaker Vice President Mike Pence evoked the sacred landscape of the Middle East to underscore the urgency of protecting the region’s beleaguered Christians under attack from ‘Islamic terrorists.’ Pence’s exhortation was couched in the language of Christian kinship and obligation to aid the global persecuted church. He assured attendees that the Trump administration would make the protection of Middle Eastern Christians a top foreign policy priority. Yet during Pence’s first trip to the Middle East in January 2018, several church leaders-- including Coptic Pope Tawadros II-- cancelled their meetings with the Vice President on the basis of conflicting policy priorities. This presentation examines the Trump administration’s statecraft in the Middle East through its politicalization of the conditions faced by Middle Eastern Christians. It locates the administration’s position within a broader historical genealogy of saving Christians from malevolent ‘others’ and attends to the political shifts that enabled US policymakers’ interest in the plight of Middle Eastern Christians. By drawing from US government sources and religious publications, this paper assesses the influential role of Trump’s evangelical advisers and their advocacy networks to forge religious-based solidarity for new initiatives such as the US State Department’s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom and an ambassadorial appointment for International Religious Freedom. It also explores how these strategies align or diverge from the interests of the region’s Christian communities on issues such as the refugee crisis, regional counter-terrorism measures, and US-Israeli relations. By interrogating how the Trump administration developed a vanguard role over the region’s Christians, this paper argues that persecution has become a central feature of US policy discourse in the Middle East.