A listener called in to my program
recently and asked, “Is Donald Trump the Antichrist and, if so, will he reveal
himself at the debate?”
I passed on drawing a conclusion, but then the lines lit up with a steady stream of people over the next few hours offering their “proofs” that Trump was, in fact, the Evil One come to ravage the earth. That he’s a literal and iniquitous thaumaturge. My first caller clearly hit a nerve.
It’s a fascinating question, though, whether put literally or metaphorically.
Asking the question literally requires a belief in the actual reality of a son-of-God Christ figure and of an Antichrist opponent of nearly equal but opposite power. This sort of thing fills the Bible, and I’ll get to that in a moment.
But first consider the question from the secular perspective, which argues these two terms represent, at their core, metaphors for the embodiment of good and evil.
In this context, then, a more accurate question is: “Is Donald Trump evil, and thus an antichrist?”
In The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke in the plural when he predicted “false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves.”
After warning that grifters and con artists (in secular terms) would try to exploit His followers, He said, “By their fruits ye shall know them.”
Trump’s “fruits” are pretty obvious:
- More than 20 women have accused him of rape and sexual assault.
- Hundreds of contractors, customers, and employees have accused him of stealing from them or refusing to pay them (or both), as have members of his own family.
- Throughout his presidency, he lied over 30,000 times and continues to lie daily.
- He pits Americans against each other by race, religion, and region in an effort to tear our country apart and thus weaken opposition to his authoritarian rule.
- He openly encouraged violence against unarmed people at multiple rallies and encouraged state violence at a speech to chiefs of police; most recently he encouraged an assault on members of the press.
- He tried to overthrow and end our democracy.
- He embraced depraved, ungodly murderers, kleptocrats, and “strongman” rulers while ridiculing Western democracies and their elected leaders.
- He tried to damage or dismantle political and military systems designed to keep peace in the world, including the U.N., NATO, and the Iran nuclear deal.
- He reaches out to Jesus’s followers and then directs them toward bigotry, violence, and hatred.
- As an object of admiration and a role model, he’s replaced Jesus in many white evangelical congregations.
- He delighted in tearing children from their parents and putting them in cages.
- He tried to end Americans’ access to lifesaving medical care by killing Obamacare and privatizing Medicare.
- He watched on TV, like a delighted child, as his followers killed a police officer, sent 140 others to the hospital, and tried to murder the vice president and speaker of the House.
- He lied about Covid (after disclosing the truth to Bob Woodward), causing more disease and deaths in America than any other nation in the world except Peru.
The main reason many Christians freak out about an Antichrist is that following him will get you banned from heaven or even cast into hell.
But what did Jesus—the guy Trump’s white evangelical followers claim as their savior—say was necessary to get into heaven?
Back in 1998, I had a private audience with Pope John Paul II at his invitation; one of his personal secretaries had read one of my books. He gave Louise and me a private tour of many nonpublic parts of the Vatican and, the next day, we sat through an open-air concert with Pope John Paul II and about 30 VIPs, including the leader of Germany’s Bundestag, for more than an hour, surrounded by the splendor of Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer palace on the rim of an extinct volcano overlooking Lake Albano.
When we spoke privately after the concert, His Holiness’s forceful comments about the work we all must do reminded me of Jesus’s words in Matthew 25. It’s an amazing 2,000-year-old story that tells us everything we need to know about today’s “Christian” politics.
Jesus’s disciples had gathered around him in a private and intimate setting. Finally, they thought, they could ask him, straight up, the question that had been haunting them, particularly now that the Roman authorities were starting to talk about punishing or even executing them: How they could be sure to hang out with Him in the afterlife?
Jesus told them that at the end of days he’d be sitting on his throne separating the sheep from the goats “as a shepherd divideth.”
The nations of “sheep” would go with him to heaven, the “goats” to hell.
“For I was an hungered, and ye gave me food,” he told his disciples he would say to the sheep. “I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”
This is the only place in the Bible where Jesus explicitly tells His disciples what acts they must perform, in their entirety, to get into heaven.
Feed the hungry, care for refugees, house and clothe the homeless, heal the sick, have compassion for those in prison.
That’s it.
And it’s a list that is quite literally the opposite of everything that Donald Trump advocates, stands for, and has done in his careers, both business and political.
While biblical scholars are split about who the actual “Beast” was that John referenced in his Revelation, many consider it to have been a then–politically necessary cloaking of the identity of the Roman Emperor Nero.
It was clearly a political figure, who represented the antithesis of the values and works Jesus laid out in the Sermon on the Mount and in Matthew 25.
Caller after caller to my program offered their own proofs of Trump being the Beast or the Antichrist:
- “MAGA” means “magic” or “sorcerer” in Latin and multiple other languages.
- His grandfather’s name when he emigrated to America to start a whorehouse in the Pacific Northwest was “Drumpf,” which he changed to Trump. John in German is “Johann.” Therefore, his “actual” name is Donald Johann Drumpf—each name having six letters. (Weirdly, the same is true of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the guy who laid the foundation for MAGA.)
- He illegally armed the Saudis for their merciless bombing war against Yemen, which had five million people facing famine as the Saudi military blocked food arrivals.
- His family owns 666 Fifth Avenue.
- He fooled millions of evangelical followers of Jesus, just as the Beast is supposed to do.
- He put his own red-hat MAGA mark on their foreheads.
It was an interesting exercise and conversation, and I was surprised by how many people are actually religiously freaked out about Trump.
But for me, all the proof I need that Trump, if not the biblical Antichrist, is at least a political one, is what he says and does. And I’ll bet that tonight he will reveal himself, both as a disciple of the “Father of Lies” and through his anti-Christ-type policies. As Pope Francis today tells us, a man’s “fruits” show us all we need to know about who he really is.
