I am not a theist and do not believe in the supernatural in in capacity.
But if I were a theist, and specifically of a certain flavor of christian, I think that I’d have to seriously evaluate if Donald Trump wasn’t the antichrist. (Or, ‘the beast’).
“On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem as king. They call me king now, do you believe it?”
On Easter Sunday Trump skipped church and made a profane post to threaten Iran, stating on Truth Social that “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day” for Iran, accompanied by a, “Praise be to Allah” remark.
I can’t imagine how many GOP heads would have exploded if Obama had posted, ‘Praise be to Allah’ at anytime, let alone on Easter…
On April 6th, during the White House Easter Egg Roll, Trump made more rambling threats and allusions to war with the Easter Bunny standing at his side. (Supplemented with a litany of divisive and antidemocratic political speech including, leading chants of “4 more years” and telling children, “Biden would use the autopen. He didn’t sign. He was incapable of signing his name so they followed him around with a big machine.“)
It should be noted that this came a week after his April 7th rant when he posted of his tirade threatening to kill an entire civilization.
On Orthodox Easter (April 13) Trump tried picking a fight with the Pope for his remarks about peace and then posted am image of himself as a Jesus figure.
Comically, in a rare occasion that Trump didn’t double-down on his gaff, apparently the backlash was bad enough that he told reporters outside of the Oval Office:
“I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with the Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support. Only the fake news could come up with that one, I just heard about it, and I said how did they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better and I do make people better.”
And even if we were to believe this fantastical ‘explanation’, the idea of Trump as a doctor is itself a pitiful delusion.
And the cherry on top of this irony sundae: Trump significantly reduced funding (17%) for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), contributing to major budgetary cuts and nearly 3,000 job cuts within the organization.
Geeky addendum:
Most modern “Antichrist” imagery comes from medieval literature and modern films rather than the New Testament.
In the Bible, the word “Antichrist”appears in only four verses, all within the Epistles of John. Notably, the word is never used in The Book of Revelation (aka the Revelation to John).
John suggests there isn’t just one; he writes, “even now many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18).
The Bible never describes the figure as the literal offspring of a demon. In 2 Thessalonians 2:9, it says his coming is “in accord with the activity of Satan,” suggesting empowerment or imitation, not biological lineage.
In 2 John 1:7: Connects the term to “the deceiver.” (Seems superbly fitting for Trump) and 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 says, ‘the man of lawlessness[a] is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. 4 He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.‘
(Footnote within a footnote: “The temple” in a biblical context is specifically the Temple in Jerusalem. The authors weren’t writing about a “spiritual temple” (the heart or the church); they were using a well-known political trauma—the desecration of the physical building in Jerusalem—as a metaphor for the ultimate enemy of their faith. Many modern readers think “the temple” is a metaphor for a person’s body or a future third temple, but the original 1st-century audience would have immediately pictured the stone-and-gold building sitting in Jerusalem at that very moment…
(Footnote within a footnote: “The temple” in a biblical context is specifically the Temple in Jerusalem. The authors weren’t writing about a “spiritual temple” (the heart or the church); they were using a well-known political trauma—the desecration of the physical building in Jerusalem—as a metaphor for the ultimate enemy of their faith. Many modern readers think “the temple” is a metaphor for a person’s body or a future third temple, but the original 1st-century audience would have immediately pictured the stone-and-gold building sitting in Jerusalem at that very moment…
The ‘beast’ is what is mentioned in Revelations 13. One of the beast’s heads appears to have been fatally wounded but was healed, causing the world to marvel and follow it.
I could go on but reviewing iron age, desert mythology gets to be wearisome and is ultimately pointless. I just couldn’t resist the compulsion to add a bit of a footnote to the common concepts of ‘the antichrist’.
“Men are so simple and yield so much to immediate necessity that the deceiver will never lack those who let themselves be deceived.”
~ Niccolò Machiavelli
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