Voting for the Devil
As a student of history and political philosophy, I've always known that America's role as the global good guy would, like all things, eventually come to an end. When it did occur, I envisioned an America that had fallen into the clutches of a super-villain, a Julian Felsenburgh-type character: intelligent, accomplished, charismatic, and, of course, a satanic evil secreted beneath those virtues. What I did not imagine was that America, in fact, would fall to the complete opposite: a man whose evil was a bragging point and whose virtues were nonexistent. Of course, I am referring to Donald Trump, a man who has infamously bragged about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it, who is a convicted felon for bribing a porn star to keep quiet about their extra-marital affair, and a man who led a televised violent insurrection against the US government so he could steal an election. Oh, and who was also best friends with the world's most notorious pedophile, to name just a few highlights of a lifetime of despicable actions.
I am not very good at predicting election outcomes because I often see politics the way I want it to be, which is to say, a practice determined by rational thought and not animal emotion. This flaw hamstrung me in my ability to anticipate the outcome of Donald Trump's 2024 re-election. Once again, I failed to accept that half the country was not governed by intellect but by irrationality. I had forgotten that we were a nation where 43 million adults are functionally illiterate, over half read below a sixth‑grade level, and 40% don’t read a single book a year. What is more, we had become a land dominated by a rubbish culture that primed it to accept the worst as the best, to sneer at anything that suggests intellectual refinement, and to obsess over what Plato referred to as our "mad masters," that is, our appetite for vice. In short, I had forgotten that we were no longer Benjamin Franklin's America but Benny Hill's.
And, so, Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024 by roughly the same percentage of people who read below a 6th-grade level, and America slipped into shadow.
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The reason why I bring this up is that there is real concern that Trump may be the Antichrist, well, at least amongst those ever-wacky evangelicals who are ever consumed with otherworldly conspiracy theories, and are always looking under their bed for Mr. Scratch. This all started when Trump, out of frustration from his failing war against Iran, started making genocidal threats against the Persian civilization:
The transparently evil nature of such a threat immediately set off warning alarms for many, and especially in Trump's MAGA base, where many treat prepping for an apocalypse as a national sport only rivalled by NASCAR (or is it now UFC bouts?). Here, their concern was not off the mark because it is not normal for an American president to threaten the genocide of over 90 million people. As MS NOW reported:
“This is evil and madness.” “He is a genocidal lunatic.” “Vile on every level.”
These aren’t quotes from Democrats; they’re some of Trump’s most loyal adherents, who are both fed up with what they see as the president’s abandonment of his “America First” platform and alarmed by the destruction he has promised to unleash as his deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday, looms.
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On a Monday-night episode of his podcast, Tucker Carlson lambasted Trump for his Easter morning message, calling it “vile on every level.”
“How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country? Who do you think you are?” Carlson said. “You’re tweeting out the f-word on Easter morning?”
“This is a mockery not just of Islam,” he added, “it’s a mockery of Christianity.”
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If that was bad, things only became more blasphemous when Trump then posted this image:
Your eyes are not deceiving you: that is Trump as Jesus healing the sick. With MAGA's evangelical base already sore from Trump threatening genocide, the blowback was even fiercer:
The post came on Orthodox Easter, exactly one week after other Christians in the U.S. and around the world celebrated Christ's resurrection on Easter Sunday.
"Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he'd post this," responded Riley Gaines, the conservative activist who has been the administration's voice on the topic of transgender athletes in women's sports. "Is he looking for a response? Does he actually think this? Either way, two things are true. 1) a little humility would serve him well 2) God shall not be mocked."
"Blasphemy from the Oval Office is not a funny troll," conservative media figure Cam Higby posted to X.
"I assume someone has already told him, but it behooves the president both spiritually and politically to delete the picture, no matter the intent," wrote conservative author and podcaster Michael Knowles.
"I know he's trying to be funny, but it was a foolish post," said GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, who has been a critic of some of the president's policies. "I saw a lot of Republicans commenting in it last night. Some saying he's just trolling, and others saying it's anti-Christian. When you divide your own party it is self destructive. To me it was a gaudy and juvenile post."
Despite his usual bout of juvenile stubbornness, Trump would soon delete the post and later claim that he believed it was an image of himself as a doctor healing people. As one pundit pointed out, that is such a ridiculous explanation that Trump's enraged MAGA base would be hard-pressed to determine what was more enraging: Trump surplanting Jesus or Trump believing his base was so stupid as to think that explanation made any sense to them.
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As much as I despise Trump and those "losers" that he surrounds himself with (as Trump once openly referred to his cabinet), even I was not yet ready to make the leap to characterizing Trump as openly in league with Satan. But then things got even more bizarre when Trump decided to denigrate the Pope.
After his now-infamous post declaring his intent to genocide the Iranian people, Pope Leo naturally denounced such reckless rhetoric as "totally unacceptable." This sent the Toddler-in-Chief on a rampage, declaring that Pope Leo was only elected because of the influence of Trump! What is more, he then attempted to smear the pope by saying that the Vatican wanted Iran to have nuclear weapons and that the pope was "weak on crime"...whatever that means??? To add insult to injury, Vice President J.P. Mandell...er, J.D. Vance...
...this guy couldn't restrain himself and began lecturing the pope on theology and the concept of just war during an interview, comments which only added more fuel to the fire for uncannily resembling Darth Vader's comment to Obi-Wan that he was no longer a learner but the master. Relations between the Trump administration and the Holy See have now become so poor that Pope Leo XIV has shelved plans for a visit to the U.S. for the country's 250th-anniversary celebrations in July 2026, and has chosen instead to visit Lampedusa to highlight migrant issues.
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There is an old saying in the intelligence business that goes: "Once is a coincidence. Twice is happenstance. Three times is enemy action." If you haven't been counting, we are now at the fourth instance in which something blasphemous has occurred involving Trump. Behold a latter-day "golden calf" right out of the Old Testament:
Exodus 32:7-8: The Lord said to Moses, “Leave, go down, because your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt, have become perverse. 8 They have quickly departed from the way that I have commanded them. They have made a molten calf for themselves, and have bowed down before it. They have offered sacrifices and said, ‘Behold your God, Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.’ ”
The comparison must have stung because Pastor Mark Burns, a member of Pastors for Trump, was quick with some damage control that betrayed more than it deflected:
“Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf. [Emphasis added] This statue is a celebration of life. It is a symbol of resilience, freedom, patriotism, strength, and the will power to keep fighting for the future of America.”
If this were an isolated incident, perhaps one could look past the obvious idolatry on display. But in light of the previous incidents? Not so easy, is it?
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All of these anti-Christian incidents firing off so quickly in rapid succession have many in Trump's base now openly musing that Trump might be the literal Antichrist. Perhaps most prominent of all has been former Trump sycophant Tucker Carlson:
"So, to a lot of Christians or people who know the Bible well and believe in it, these predictions in both the Old and the New Testament and others seem to fit what we were watching,” he continued. “Here’s a leader who’s mocking the gods of his ancestors, mocking the God of gods and exalting himself above them. Could this be the Antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion: Who knows?”
It is important to keep in mind that this is not the first time Carlson has expressed such beliefs. In an email exchange revealed by court documents in the Dominion defamation case against Fox News, Carlson referred to Trump as "demonic." Of course, he would later champion Trump's re-election bid in 2024, which says much about the evil nature of Carlson as well.
But there are many others, too:
Trump’s Jesus post did not go down well with his MAGA fans. For example, former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said on X that he is trying to “replace” Jesus. “I completely denounce this, and I’m praying against it!” she said via her @FmrRepMTG account. “It’s more than blasphemy,” she then added in a follow-up post. “It’s an Antichrist spirit.”
Meanwhile, other people on social media were confused about the point of Trump’s post.
“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” said author and journalist Megan Basham via her @megbasham account. “He needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”
“God, we might have made a mistake and accidentally elected the Antichrist,” wrote @mandyarthur. “Send help.”
“He is likely the Antichrist,” added @MrSausageGet. “He’s led this nation straight to hell.”
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Is Donald Trump the Antichrist here to usher in Armageddon? In my opinion...no. I still cling to my Julian Felsenburgh expectations of an evil overlord who has more in common with Sauron than he does with Dark Helmet. Trump is all Dark Helmet.
Don't take a sigh of relief, though. If Trump is not the Antichrist, he is at least the sort of figure the old theologians warned would prepare the ground. In his four sermons concerning the Antichrist, theologian John Henry Newman quotes from the Book of Daniel to describe the type of people who are prepared to accept the Antichrist:
"'In the last days perilous times shall come, for men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof':' 'scoffers walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of His coming' ?' 'despising government, presumptuous . . . self-willed, not afraid to speak evil of dignities .... promising men liberty, while themselves the servants of corruption:' and the like."
Newman then elaborates with his own commentary:
"...With our thoughts wandering (if that be possible then), wandering after vanities; with thoughts which rise no higher than the consideration of our own comforts, or our gains; with a haughty contempt for the Church, her ministers, her lowly people; a love of rank and station, an admiration of the splendour and the fashions of the world, an affectation of refinement, a dependence upon our powers of reason, an habitual self-esteem, and an utter ignorance of the number and the heinousness of the sins which lie against us."
Except for his mentioning of over-reliance on "our powers of reason", a critique obliquely referencing the abuses of the militantly atheistic French Revolution and quite absent from the MAGA movement, his litany of the traits of a corrupt people, along with the prophecying of the Book of Daniel, is eerily reminiscent of 21st-century America. Of course, Newman wrote this nearly two hundred years ago, suggesting that the coming of the Antichrist is a process to be measured in the slow decline of society and not a rapid descent. Newman makes a similar observation when he considers the apocalyptic prophecies of the bible that have not yet come to pass. Nonetheless, Newman believes there is an ongoing process, even if it is glacial in its pacing.
Be that as it may, with the land thus poisoned by such moral failings, the people are primed to accept the eventual arrival of a dark lord, one who will sing the song of populist sirens:
"He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform. This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him...He prompts you on what to say, and then listens to you, praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become a god. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."
And so MAGA was born and slouched its way to Washington.
But again, while Donald Trump is certainly in the mould of the Antichrist, he is not it. Rather, he is more of a herald for one to come later, not a voice crying out from the wilderness, but one shrieking from Wall Street; not a fisher of men but rather a catcher of rats. He is an indicator of moral decay, of the inevitable entropic collapse of the world. Again, Newman:
"...That the coming of Christ will be immediately preceded by a very awful and unparalleled outbreak of evil, called in the text an apostasy, a falling away, in the midst of which a certain terrible man of sin and child of perdition, the special and singular enemy of Christ, or Antichrist, will appear; that this will be when revolutions prevail, and the present framework of society breaks to pieces...."
Is Trump the Antichrist? No. But we might not be far off from that moment of ultimate apostasy when primordial evil arrives to claim its throne. Sadly, we now know that half of America will reflexively vote for it and only think to ask questions when the bill for their soul comes due.
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