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I’d always thought of the Antichrist as belonging to the realm of pop entertainment alongside Batman, Santa Claus, and the Little Green Men from Mars. Then came the election of 2016. It didn’t surprise me that America would elect a dunce, a bigot, or even a fascist… but Donald Trump? Why would blue-collar workers vote for a billionaire who manufactured his products overseas? Why would prudish Evangelicals support an adulterer who bragged about grabbing women’s “pussies?” Why would titans of Wall Street back a conman notorious for stiffing contractors and serial bankruptcies? It all seemed unlikely to the point of (cue eerie music) supernatural. Had the president won with diabolical assistance? Was he, perhaps, the Antichrist? I’m a dedicated skeptic and nonbeliever, but decided to investigate just for the Hell of it.
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The Beast from The Sea aka The Antichrist
(aka Donald J. Trump?) |
From watching “The Omen” I vaguely recalled that the Antichrist is supposed to be the exact inverse of Jesus sent Earthwards to wreak havoc on humanity. To see if that had scriptural basis I turned to the Bible where, as it turns out, only five passages mention the word Antichrist. They’re in the Epistles of John, and they don’t say much. The Antichrist is called a “Man of Lawlessness” and a “False Prophet,” descriptions that could apply to any number of world leaders. That said, Thessalonians refers to the “Man of Lawlessness” as exalting himself “over everything that is called God or worshipped,” which does rather sound like The Donald. Thessalonians also predicts this he’ll display power through “signs and wonders,” and conclude a seven-year covenant involving Israel then break it halfway through to crown himself God at the Temple in Jerusalem. Trump provokes wonder almost daily, a Mideast treaty involving Israel is on his agenda, and it’s disturbingly easy to imagine him crowning himself God, or some equivalent thereof. The only catch is that the Romans destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. (Emperor Julian tried to rebuild it a few centuries later but was stopped by mysterious fireballs and earthquakes.)
Many theologians and Hollywood scriptwriters, however, posit that the Antichrist is also “the Beast” from the Book of Revelation. Notoriously bizarre, terrifying, and virtually unintelligible due to garbled syntax, Revelation tells the story of an End Times showdown between God and the Devil full of wars, prophets, angels, dragons, plagues, and locusts with human faces. About midway through we encounter the Beast rising from “The Abyss” with seven heads crowned with ten horns and the name of blasphemy written on each. One head is afflicted with a fatal wound that gets miraculously healed (doesn’t say by whom), causing everyone to worship it. (Remind anyone of Trump’s ear getting nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet and his followers showing fealty by wearing bandages on their own ears?)
The Beast is also supremely powerful, and its power comes from “The Dragon,” aka the Devil. (True fact: rapper Kanye West once tweeted that he admires President Trump’s “dragon energy.”) I don’t have to tell you that its number is 666. There’s also a second Beast who speaks like a dragon and wants everyone to worship the first Beast. (Paging J.D. Vance!) Followers of the Beast wear his mark on their foreheads. Put on one of Trump’s red Make America Great Again baseball hat and guess where the slogan winds up?
At the story’s climax the first Beast goes to war with “the Lamb” and loses (because hello The Lamb is Jesus) and gets cast into the Lake of Fire for eternal torment. This part of the story clearly hasn’t happened yet, but I suspect I’m not the only one who’s more than ready for it.
Matching up Trump with such a bizarre vision was beyond me, so I started googling and found a webpage with scores of Trump/666 associations. Aside from the facts that the Trump family owns 666 5th Ave. and the budget deficit swelled to 666 billion dollars in the first fiscal year of Trump’s presidency, the connections were all rather farfetched. It surprised me to see the same page also meticulously documents Trump’s lying, bigotry, misogyny, hypocrisy, sleaze, and name-calling. I’d mistakenly believed people obsessed with numerology would be too mystical to follow current events.
Google next directed me to YouTube, home to several hundred Trump/Antichrist videos. The people who post them fall into roughly three categories: folks who dreamed Trump is the Antichrist, conspiracy theorists, and Evangelical Christians. Since “spectral evidence” hasn’t been deemed valid since the Salem Witch Trials I skipped the dreamers and went right to the conspiracists. Posted by such mysterious entities as “The No Face Movement,” “Angel White,” and “The Truth Show,” they mostly followed a set formula. Visuals switch rapidly between clips from TV news and religious imagery while a voiceover confidently reels off brain-scramblingly complex “proof” of Trump’s secret identity backed up by “facts” of which the public is unaware, such as:
The world is controlled by a secret cult worshipping the Egyptian snake god Apep; the Nazis (controlled by the Bavarian Illuminati) won WWII; the “Crown Royal Empire” in London controls the world’s money; the Virgin Mary was actually the Whore of Babylon and Lucifer was Jesus’ real dad; there are actually two Donald Trumps; and in 2011 there were unexplained trumpet-like noises heard around the world (get it, Trump, trumpet?).
Unable to make head or tails of all that, I turned to the Evangelicals. Pastor Jason Kelty predicts the “Satanic Illuminati” will try to assassinate Trump for wresting the presidency from their preferred candidate, Hillary, but he’ll only be wounded and his miraculous healing will correspond to the Beast’s miraculous healing from Revelation. Kelty also asserts that in recognizing Israel’s capital as Jerusalem, Trump is laying the groundwork for rebuilding the Temple in which the Antichrist will crown himself God. Currently, that’s impossible as a pair of Islamic holy sites currently occupy the space. Kelty (and apparently many Evangelicals with close ties to the Trump administration) believe Trump’s vigorous support of Israel will embolden that nation’s government to brush aside Muslim sensibilities and tear down the holy sites so the Temple can be rebuilt. One might imagine Evangelicals would oppose this since it ushers in the apocalypse, but no. They’re looking forward to it, believing they’ll get raptured up to Heaven while everyone else endures unspeakable tortures and/or gets killed by The Beast.
Kelty’s videos have garnered a lot of comments. Some supportive, some not. When challenged, Kelty always responds snippily, saying things like: “Well, maybe, just maybe, I have a little more wisdom and foresight based on Scripture. I read it everyday and have since 2004 (as opposed to having read it only once like it sounds like with you).” Commenters also chime in with their own theories, such as:
Mike Pence is the Antichrist; Michael Jackson is alive and in hiding while a new body is built for him; Obama is gay; “The Simpsons” is a product of the Globalist Illuminati; Emmanuel Macron is the Antichrist; Jewish millionaires backing communism will try and take over the U.S. through armed revolution and Hollywood; The Pope is the Antichrist; Obama funded Isis; The Antichrist will come from Turkey; Justin Trudeau is the Antichrist; Trump was chosen by God to lead America; Barack Obama is a “decoy” Antichrist; The Antichrist was cloned from blood taken from the Shroud of Turin in the 1970s; Prince Harry is the Antichrist; John McCain is the Antichrist; The world wide web = 666; and (my favorite) the descendants of extraterrestrial giants rule the world from the shadows. Possibly because he seems like such a weenie, nobody is claiming J.D. Vance is The Antichrist. To my mind that should make him a prime suspect. It's always the one you least suspect!
Brother James Key, a nondescript middle-aged white guy in a plaid shirt, has posted nearly 200 of himself sitting on his living room sofa and delivering Trump/Antichrist sermons in an un-mellifluous drawl. The bulk of his case rests on matching up current affairs with Bible prophecy, but he also spends a lot of time raging against Trump’s pride, ignorance, loutishness, boasting, lust for power, and vulgar displays of wealth. Unusually, for an Evangelical, he’s also disgusted by Trump’s military belligerence and support for the NRA. One shouldn’t mistake Key for a liberal, though. He’s outraged when non-Christian religious leaders are received at the White House, believes earthquakes are admonitory messages from God, and reviles yoga, abortion, and gay rights. Curiously, the comments on Key’s videos are almost uniformly positive.
Finishing with YouTube, I returned to Google, where I learned of two self-published books on Trump as Antichrist. The Fourth Beast, Is Donald Trump the Antichrist? by Lawrence Moelhauser alternates between Bible quotes and the sort of annoyingly calm critiques of Trump favored by “moderate” pundits. Moelhauser makes much of the fact that the Bible claims boastfulness is an attribute of the Beast, and Trump is certainly the world’s boastiest leader. He’s also appalled that Trump has admitted he never asks God for forgiveness, which he sees as Trump implying he’s perfect and on par with Jesus, a terrible blasphemy. Alas, Moelhauser doesn’t believe Trump is aware he’s the Antichrist, denying readers the pleasure of imagining Trump laughing fiendishly mwa ha ha as he arranges his comb-over to hide a pair of horns.
I finished my investigations by reading (well, skimming) Rise of The Little Horn by Jonathan Dane, another Evangelical. His best bit of evidence is that the name Donald means “great chief” ins Scottish and that the word trump means “to deceive” and “to triumph over,” which does make the president’s moniker rather incriminatingly apt for the Antichrist. Like Moelhauser, Dane spends a lot of time quoting the Bible and railing against Trump’s sins and predations. Unlike Dane, though, he gets really worked up, sometimes sounding almost like deliciously overwrought horror writer, H.P Lovecraft: “An awful reality dawned on me. This entity was not political; it was a thing unto itself that had now…awakened. A dark wind was blowing over our nation; a change in the unseen world, with politics as its cover–its Trojan horse. This thing recently risen among us has actually been journeying towards us for some time — from ages past. Having risen from the cold darkness of the deep, this great Leviathan was now swimming just below the surface of our political waters.”
Dane believes Trump is a pathological liar, a sociopath, a demagogue, and a supernatural entity spawned by Satan, but he still blames “the Left” for his rise. Misconstruing leftist opposition to bigotry as opposition to all judgment, he asserts, “We became a thoughtless nation, tolerant of anything. We lost our radar. And underneath that radar crept in something evil.” Since Dane surely knows the supposedly nonjudgmental “Left” unequivocally judges Trump a despicable fraud, one can’t help but wonder at his inability to correlate facts. When not blaming “the Left,” Dane attributes Trump’s rise to a nationwide failure of character, suggesting Trump is an expression of “our collective id,” the “our” conveniently implicating all of America rather than just the people who actually supported him.
Dane finishes with an appendix trying to explain away his co-religionists’ support for Trump (which he’d already attributed to diabolic influence). Evangelical Trump supporters, he suggests, are either not real Evangelicals, or else they were confused by Trump’s similarity to Ronald Reagan, or they had to vote for the Antichrist because the Democrats are so darn gay-friendly, or Trump provides them a vicarious outlet for their repressed sinful desires, or they’re just very, very pro-capitalist and patriotic. Sadly, Dane fails to question whether something intrinsic to Evangelicals’ faith might predispose them to support narcissistic tyrants (like, perhaps, worshipping a god who casts people into the eternal flames of Hell for failing to worship him?). Likewise, he fails to notice that what he sees as Trump’s “sins” are simply small-scale manifestations of Republican Party values, that Trump is not a subversion of right-wing ideals, but rather their apotheosis.
Since I don’t really believe in the Antichrist, I wasn’t really surprised to find none of the evidence against him convincing. It did occur to me, however, that a rational case can be made that Trump is the functional equivalent of the Antichrist. For decades scientists have warned that global warming will render Earth uninhabitable unless we cut greenhouse gas emissions. Tentative, albeit inadequate, measures to address the crisis have begun, but Trump is quashing them; rolling back environmental regulations, pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement to fight climate change, and cutting funds for clean energy. Unless stopped, he will surely — without diabolical assistance — condemn the Earth to a fiery apocalypse.
Many theologians and Hollywood scriptwriters, however, posit that the Antichrist is also “the Beast” from the Book of Revelation. Notoriously bizarre, terrifying, and virtually unintelligible due to garbled syntax, Revelation tells the story of an End Times showdown between God and the Devil full of wars, prophets, angels, dragons, plagues, and locusts with human faces. About midway through we encounter the Beast rising from “The Abyss” with seven heads crowned with ten horns and the name of blasphemy written on each. One head is afflicted with a fatal wound that gets miraculously healed (doesn’t say by whom), causing everyone to worship it. (Remind anyone of Trump’s ear getting nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet and his followers showing fealty by wearing bandages on their own ears?)
The Beast is also supremely powerful, and its power comes from “The Dragon,” aka the Devil. (True fact: rapper Kanye West once tweeted that he admires President Trump’s “dragon energy.”) I don’t have to tell you that its number is 666. There’s also a second Beast who speaks like a dragon and wants everyone to worship the first Beast. (Paging J.D. Vance!) Followers of the Beast wear his mark on their foreheads. Put on one of Trump’s red Make America Great Again baseball hat and guess where the slogan winds up?
At the story’s climax the first Beast goes to war with “the Lamb” and loses (because hello The Lamb is Jesus) and gets cast into the Lake of Fire for eternal torment. This part of the story clearly hasn’t happened yet, but I suspect I’m not the only one who’s more than ready for it.
Matching up Trump with such a bizarre vision was beyond me, so I started googling and found a webpage with scores of Trump/666 associations. Aside from the facts that the Trump family owns 666 5th Ave. and the budget deficit swelled to 666 billion dollars in the first fiscal year of Trump’s presidency, the connections were all rather farfetched. It surprised me to see the same page also meticulously documents Trump’s lying, bigotry, misogyny, hypocrisy, sleaze, and name-calling. I’d mistakenly believed people obsessed with numerology would be too mystical to follow current events.
Google next directed me to YouTube, home to several hundred Trump/Antichrist videos. The people who post them fall into roughly three categories: folks who dreamed Trump is the Antichrist, conspiracy theorists, and Evangelical Christians. Since “spectral evidence” hasn’t been deemed valid since the Salem Witch Trials I skipped the dreamers and went right to the conspiracists. Posted by such mysterious entities as “The No Face Movement,” “Angel White,” and “The Truth Show,” they mostly followed a set formula. Visuals switch rapidly between clips from TV news and religious imagery while a voiceover confidently reels off brain-scramblingly complex “proof” of Trump’s secret identity backed up by “facts” of which the public is unaware, such as:
The world is controlled by a secret cult worshipping the Egyptian snake god Apep; the Nazis (controlled by the Bavarian Illuminati) won WWII; the “Crown Royal Empire” in London controls the world’s money; the Virgin Mary was actually the Whore of Babylon and Lucifer was Jesus’ real dad; there are actually two Donald Trumps; and in 2011 there were unexplained trumpet-like noises heard around the world (get it, Trump, trumpet?).
Unable to make head or tails of all that, I turned to the Evangelicals. Pastor Jason Kelty predicts the “Satanic Illuminati” will try to assassinate Trump for wresting the presidency from their preferred candidate, Hillary, but he’ll only be wounded and his miraculous healing will correspond to the Beast’s miraculous healing from Revelation. Kelty also asserts that in recognizing Israel’s capital as Jerusalem, Trump is laying the groundwork for rebuilding the Temple in which the Antichrist will crown himself God. Currently, that’s impossible as a pair of Islamic holy sites currently occupy the space. Kelty (and apparently many Evangelicals with close ties to the Trump administration) believe Trump’s vigorous support of Israel will embolden that nation’s government to brush aside Muslim sensibilities and tear down the holy sites so the Temple can be rebuilt. One might imagine Evangelicals would oppose this since it ushers in the apocalypse, but no. They’re looking forward to it, believing they’ll get raptured up to Heaven while everyone else endures unspeakable tortures and/or gets killed by The Beast.
Kelty’s videos have garnered a lot of comments. Some supportive, some not. When challenged, Kelty always responds snippily, saying things like: “Well, maybe, just maybe, I have a little more wisdom and foresight based on Scripture. I read it everyday and have since 2004 (as opposed to having read it only once like it sounds like with you).” Commenters also chime in with their own theories, such as:
Mike Pence is the Antichrist; Michael Jackson is alive and in hiding while a new body is built for him; Obama is gay; “The Simpsons” is a product of the Globalist Illuminati; Emmanuel Macron is the Antichrist; Jewish millionaires backing communism will try and take over the U.S. through armed revolution and Hollywood; The Pope is the Antichrist; Obama funded Isis; The Antichrist will come from Turkey; Justin Trudeau is the Antichrist; Trump was chosen by God to lead America; Barack Obama is a “decoy” Antichrist; The Antichrist was cloned from blood taken from the Shroud of Turin in the 1970s; Prince Harry is the Antichrist; John McCain is the Antichrist; The world wide web = 666; and (my favorite) the descendants of extraterrestrial giants rule the world from the shadows. Possibly because he seems like such a weenie, nobody is claiming J.D. Vance is The Antichrist. To my mind that should make him a prime suspect. It's always the one you least suspect!
Brother James Key, a nondescript middle-aged white guy in a plaid shirt, has posted nearly 200 of himself sitting on his living room sofa and delivering Trump/Antichrist sermons in an un-mellifluous drawl. The bulk of his case rests on matching up current affairs with Bible prophecy, but he also spends a lot of time raging against Trump’s pride, ignorance, loutishness, boasting, lust for power, and vulgar displays of wealth. Unusually, for an Evangelical, he’s also disgusted by Trump’s military belligerence and support for the NRA. One shouldn’t mistake Key for a liberal, though. He’s outraged when non-Christian religious leaders are received at the White House, believes earthquakes are admonitory messages from God, and reviles yoga, abortion, and gay rights. Curiously, the comments on Key’s videos are almost uniformly positive.
Finishing with YouTube, I returned to Google, where I learned of two self-published books on Trump as Antichrist. The Fourth Beast, Is Donald Trump the Antichrist? by Lawrence Moelhauser alternates between Bible quotes and the sort of annoyingly calm critiques of Trump favored by “moderate” pundits. Moelhauser makes much of the fact that the Bible claims boastfulness is an attribute of the Beast, and Trump is certainly the world’s boastiest leader. He’s also appalled that Trump has admitted he never asks God for forgiveness, which he sees as Trump implying he’s perfect and on par with Jesus, a terrible blasphemy. Alas, Moelhauser doesn’t believe Trump is aware he’s the Antichrist, denying readers the pleasure of imagining Trump laughing fiendishly mwa ha ha as he arranges his comb-over to hide a pair of horns.
I finished my investigations by reading (well, skimming) Rise of The Little Horn by Jonathan Dane, another Evangelical. His best bit of evidence is that the name Donald means “great chief” ins Scottish and that the word trump means “to deceive” and “to triumph over,” which does make the president’s moniker rather incriminatingly apt for the Antichrist. Like Moelhauser, Dane spends a lot of time quoting the Bible and railing against Trump’s sins and predations. Unlike Dane, though, he gets really worked up, sometimes sounding almost like deliciously overwrought horror writer, H.P Lovecraft: “An awful reality dawned on me. This entity was not political; it was a thing unto itself that had now…awakened. A dark wind was blowing over our nation; a change in the unseen world, with politics as its cover–its Trojan horse. This thing recently risen among us has actually been journeying towards us for some time — from ages past. Having risen from the cold darkness of the deep, this great Leviathan was now swimming just below the surface of our political waters.”
Dane believes Trump is a pathological liar, a sociopath, a demagogue, and a supernatural entity spawned by Satan, but he still blames “the Left” for his rise. Misconstruing leftist opposition to bigotry as opposition to all judgment, he asserts, “We became a thoughtless nation, tolerant of anything. We lost our radar. And underneath that radar crept in something evil.” Since Dane surely knows the supposedly nonjudgmental “Left” unequivocally judges Trump a despicable fraud, one can’t help but wonder at his inability to correlate facts. When not blaming “the Left,” Dane attributes Trump’s rise to a nationwide failure of character, suggesting Trump is an expression of “our collective id,” the “our” conveniently implicating all of America rather than just the people who actually supported him.
Dane finishes with an appendix trying to explain away his co-religionists’ support for Trump (which he’d already attributed to diabolic influence). Evangelical Trump supporters, he suggests, are either not real Evangelicals, or else they were confused by Trump’s similarity to Ronald Reagan, or they had to vote for the Antichrist because the Democrats are so darn gay-friendly, or Trump provides them a vicarious outlet for their repressed sinful desires, or they’re just very, very pro-capitalist and patriotic. Sadly, Dane fails to question whether something intrinsic to Evangelicals’ faith might predispose them to support narcissistic tyrants (like, perhaps, worshipping a god who casts people into the eternal flames of Hell for failing to worship him?). Likewise, he fails to notice that what he sees as Trump’s “sins” are simply small-scale manifestations of Republican Party values, that Trump is not a subversion of right-wing ideals, but rather their apotheosis.
Since I don’t really believe in the Antichrist, I wasn’t really surprised to find none of the evidence against him convincing. It did occur to me, however, that a rational case can be made that Trump is the functional equivalent of the Antichrist. For decades scientists have warned that global warming will render Earth uninhabitable unless we cut greenhouse gas emissions. Tentative, albeit inadequate, measures to address the crisis have begun, but Trump is quashing them; rolling back environmental regulations, pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement to fight climate change, and cutting funds for clean energy. Unless stopped, he will surely — without diabolical assistance — condemn the Earth to a fiery apocalypse.