Trump the Antichrist

Christ preached forgiveness, even for ones enemies. In the past 2 weeks, Trump has turned that message on its head. Will his evangelical followers EVER realize that they are worshipping a pretender?

Trump is an antichrist because he seeks to put himself in the place of Christ and because his words and actions are a grotesque and demonic travesty of the real Christ. But there is a further reason that he is an antichrist: There are people, including Reformed Christians, who embrace him as their supposed Messiah, even if they do not all seem to be fully aware that they are doing so. Without their support – their discipleship – Trump would only be an elderly former president who spends his time playing golf in Florida.

(Martin Deboer, “For this Reformed Christian, Trump is an antichrist. Let me tell you why,” Reformed Journal, September 9, 2024)

My husband Edward is Presbyterian; I’m Jewish. Neither of us is particularly “religious.” I don’t go to synagogue; he doesn’t go to church. We’re both critics of the abuses of religious institutions and ideologies. But over the past few years, we’ve each become much more invested in and protective of our attachments to Christianity and Judaism. That’s what happens when aspects of your identity or background are attacked; you discover how much you care about what you’ve taken for granted.

Edward is much more tolerant of my obsessions than I am about his—one of which is how un-Christian the so-called Christians have become in this country. I don’t disagree with him. Whether or not you view Jesus as the son of God or a version of a mythology that’s appears in many cultures—with our particular version inscribed in the Testaments of the Bible—it’s undeniable that the Jesus who appears in that text would be appalled as at the words and actions of many nowadays who claims to be working in his name.

I just haven’t cared about the “Christian/Not-Christian” issue the way Edward does, and I’ve gotten impatient hearing about it from him. I’ve been fascinated, though—fascinated and repelled—by Trump’s success at convincing evangelicals that he himself is a reborn God. In an earlier stack, I discussed Trump’s successful campaign to win over the evangelicals—perhaps the weirdest alliance American politics has spurned.

“What’s staggering/nightmarish,” I wrote, “is that not only did evangelicals vote for him, but in interviews before and at the caucus sites, they’ve spoken of Trump being God’s choice, compared him to David fighting Goliath, and described him as a martyr. Paul Figie, a pastor and a Trump caucus captain, declared Trump to be “ordained by God,” and is convinced that God himself will see to it that Trump gets back in office. “Trump is the guy to be in there, and amen.”

It didn’t stop with comparisons to Goliath. As Trump’s speeches became more and more biblical and his accusations of Biden “discriminating against people of faith” more fiery, evangelicals began to see Trump less as a disciple and more Christlike himself. A viral video, first posted to Truth Social and then played at rallies over the weekend, called “God Made Trump”(visual: baby Trump), describes Trump as the “vessel of a higher power sent to save the nation.”:

“God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump,” begins the video, which appears to use artificial intelligence to mimic the voice of Paul Harvey, a conservative radio broadcaster who died in 2009. Mr. Trump, it adds, “is a shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave nor forsake them.”

During his 2024 campaign, Trump dived right into the comparison with Christ, most strikingly during a speech at the “Faith and Freedom Coalition” in which Trump threatened to take off his shirt (thank goodness, he didn’t) to display not just his “beauty” but the wounds that he has suffered as God’s warrior.

“Together, we stood up to the communists, Marxists and fascists to defend religious liberty like no other president has ever done. And I have the wounds all over my body. If I took this shirt off you’d see a beautiful, beautiful person but you’d see wounds all over me. I’ve taken a lot of wounds, I can tell you. More than I suspect any president ever.”

At that point, Trump was speaking metaphorically, the “wounds” on his body representing the investigations, indictments, trials and conviction, the numbers of which gave credence, for his supporters, to his claim that it was all part of a highly orchestrated, purely political attack, a “weaponization” of Biden’s DOJ.. Ironically, then, his criminal activity itself strengthened the associations with the persecuted Christ. “They’ve crucified him worse than Jesus,” said Andriana Howard, 67, a restaurant food runner in Conway, South Carolina. “He’s definitely been chosen by God,” said Marie Zere, a commercial real estate broker from Long Island who attended the Conservative Political Action Conference in February outside Washington, D.C. “He’s still surviving even though all these people are coming after him, and I don’t know how else to explain that other than divine intervention.”

And then! A would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear (or perhaps it was a shard of glass; we’ll never know the extent of his injury because no hospital photos have been released and when he appeared at the RNC, a large white bandage covered his entire ear) and provided a historically potent visual. Trump immediately recognized the huge opportunity of his “wound“ having become literal. Always alert to PR possibilities, he raised his arm dramatically as the secret service carried him off the stage, caring for his body as Jesus’s followers had cared for him after taking him down from the cross.

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It was a moment Trump invoked over and over, most recently In his inaugural address, in which he declared that he was “saved by God to make America great again.”

Commentators, who began in 2016 dismissing and joking about Trump’s run, now warn us to take what he says very seriously. That, it appears, applies to the religious resonances and metaphors. To the liberal media, it might have seemed preposterously overblown and self-aggrandizing when, at the closing speech of the 2024 CPAC, he described himself as if on a biblical mission: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” But for evangelicals who already saw him as a quasi-Christ, the promise of retribution fit perfectly with the mythology that Trump had been chosen to restore the Kingdom of God.

What does Trump’s Kingdom look like? When I first wrote about Trump’s appeal to evangelicals I described it as “White America, cleansed of the “vermin” of the immigrants, the Blacks and the Browns, the invading armies of the not-Real Americans, and the women who don’t know their place. It was taken away from its rightful owners by a generation or two that lost its way. But under Trump’s stewardship, the “Libs” and other pretenders will be vanquished and God’s plan for America can be restored again.” Since the election, I would have to revise that to make room for the techno-bros he now surrounds himself with, who simply want to be set loose from governmental regulation and interference. It’s becoming a little crowded, and prone to internal squabbling.

But no problem—there will be plenty of room. For after his first two weeks in office, we now know that in speaking of “retribution” Trump was preparing—justifying and sanctifying—what has been an orgy of revenge against those who he sees as having been his persecutors, spread throughout all branches of government. “Retribution” has been a purge that has gone beyond what evangelicals voted for.

For those who haven’t been able to follow Trumps revenge campaign blow-by-blow, here’s a summary (as of two days ago) from the Guardian:

Federal government workers have been left “shell-shocked” by the upheaval wreaked by Donald Trump’s return to the presidency amid signs that he is bent on exacting revenge on a bureaucracy he considers to be a “deep state” that previously thwarted and persecuted him.

Since being restored to the White House on 20 January, the president has gone on a revenge spree against high-profile figures who previously served him but earned his enmity by slighting or criticising him in public.

He has cancelled Secret Service protection for three senior national security officials in his first presidency – John Bolton, the former national security adviser; Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director and secretary of state; and Brian Hook, a former assistant secretary of state – even though all are assassination targets on an Iranian government hit list.

The same treatment has been meted out to Anthony Fauci, the infectious diseases expert who angered Trump after joining the White House taskforce tackling Covid-19 and who has also faced death threats.

Trump has also fired high-profile figures from government roles on his social media site and stripped 51 former intelligence officials of their security clearances for doubting reports about Hunter Biden’s laptop as possible Russian disinformation.

Yet whereas Trump’s better-known adversaries were possibly expecting a measure of payback – and in some cases, like Fauci’s, were pardoned by Joe Biden to shield them from prosecution – more intense vengeance may have been felt by anonymous civil servants who were less prepared.

….‘I knew it was going to be bad but I didn’t think it was going to be this bad,’” said Mark Bergman, a veteran Democratic lawyer who has been in contact with some of those who fear being targets of the retribution Trump repeatedly vowed on the campaign trail.

“There’s certainly shellshock. My view is that Trump is animated by his revenge and retribution agenda.”

Career officials at the Department of Justice have been summarily fired – despite having civil service job protection – after being told they cannot be trusted to implement the returning president’s agenda.

Among those purged are lawyers who were assigned to the investigation of Trump by the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, over his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his removal of a trove of classified documents from the White House.

Also targeted have been about 30 government watchdogs, known as inspectors general and responsible for rooting out corruption and wrongdoing. They were dismissed en masse last Friday night without the legally required 30-day notice being given to Congres…

About 60 senior officials for the United States Agency for International Development (USAid) were put on leave after being accused of trying to circumvent the new administration’s order to freeze all aid operations worldwide.

Other senior staff have found themselves switched from their areas of expertise to much less amenable roles after failing to demonstrate an acceptable standard of loyalty to Trump.

Long-serving officials in the criminal and civil rights division of the justice department have been reassigned to newly created units intended to help enforce the administration’s immigration crackdown in so-called sanctuary cities.

“People are being moved reassigned, fired or otherwise [put] under pressure, if they are not able to say that they are mission-aligned, which is the phrase being used by the transition team to mean you will carry out the orders of the president regardless of whether they’re lawful or not,” said Bergman.

There are ominous signs that the spirit of retribution will continue – or get worse.

Last week, in tactics more redolent of totalitarian regimes the United States has historically been at odds with, federal workers were warned of “adverse consequences” if they failed to report their colleagues who refused to comply with the administration’s purge of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, or tried to sustain the programs with coded language.

An executive order, titled Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government, has been described as a “roadmap for retribution”.

It directs the attorney general and director of national intelligence to “review the activities of all departments and agencies exercising civil or criminal enforcement authority” over the past four years, including the justice department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission – all agencies involved in criminal investigations of Trump after 2020 – and report back to the president with recommendations for “remedial action”.

Joel Hirschhorn, a veteran Washington defence lawyer who defended political demonstrators during the Nixon era, called the order “as clear a roadmap to retribution as you’ll ever see”.

“I saw Nixon, with his enemies list, which was a clear attempt to weaponise law enforcement against these detractors. But this one is mind-boggling,” he said. “Any rational, reasonably tightly wrapped, intelligent person would come to the conclusion that there is no other reason [than retribution].”

Christ, of course, did not engage in an orgy of revenge. His message was one of forgiveness, even toward ones enemies; any reckoning was to be left to God alone.

In contrast, revenge is everything that Satan and his band of exiled angels seek. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan encourages them:

What though the field be lost?/ All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield. So what if we lost some ground? He'll never be able to take away my free will, my revenge, my hate, or my courage never to give up. (I-105)

Christ’s message of forgiveness for ones enemies (along with dozens of other recommendations to care for others) seems to have escaped notice—so far—by the evangelicals who worship Trump. If they take their bible as seriously as they claim, they should recognize that his revenge orgy reveals him not as a savior but an antichrist. Should. But the reality is that the Bible has never really been the authority they turn to. Trump’s word has replaced Jesus’s teachings.

In Christian eschatology, Antichrist refers to a kind of person prophesied by the Bible to oppose Jesus Christ and falsely substitute themselves as a savior in Christ's place before the Second Coming.^[1] The term Antichrist (including one plural form)^[2] is found four times in the New Testament, solely in the First and Second Epistle of John.^[2] Antichrist is announced as one "who denies the Father and the Son."^[2]

The similar term pseudokhristos or "false Christ" is also found in the Gospels.^[3] In Matthew (chapter 24) and Mark (chapter 13), Jesus alerts his disciples not to be deceived by the false prophets, who will claim themselves to be the Christ, performing "great signs and wonders".^[4][5][6]

(From Wikipedia, “Antichrist”)

It’s fitting that the Bible is upside down. Across the street, peaceful protestors were being tear-gassed.

January 30, 2025: Unrobed

The last two weeks have been truly grotesque. For me and many others, the most shocking moment came on January 30 when, after a helicopter/plane crash that killed 67 people, Trump took the opportunity, after some perfunctory prepared remarks, to blame the disaster, whose cause was (and as of this writing is still) not known on diversity hiring during the Obama and Biden administrations. If he himself had been in charge of hiring air traffic controllers, helicopters pilots, etc. “at the highest level of genius” instead of deranged and incompetent “diversity hires,” it would never have happened. He also gave a flip response when asked if he’d visit the site of the crash: “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?” After he spoke, Hegseth and Vance, well-groomed, prime-time-ready sons, did what they were hired to do.

One of my biggest complaints against the corporate media is that normalizing has come to be an intrinsic part of their jobs. Even when they say “This isn’t normal” they do it in a way that negates the reality. Their facial expressions, their smooth talk, their “moving on” to sports, their schmoozing with each other—all negate the reality.

January 30, though, was one time that broadcasters couldn’t hide their spontaneous horror at DT’s words.

I’d thought he’d showed us everything. But it appears he hadn’t. During his first term, he at least tried to pretend he was a responsible, compassionate leader. He wasn’t, but he tried to act the part. Now that he’s safely installed and surrounded by obliging underlings as well as protected by the “Supreme” Court, he’s given up on that show. No need for it. He’s evaded jail, he’s bludgeoned the GOP into submission and is getting a hand-picked bunch of kowtowing incompetents for his cabinet, he feels no need to pretend anymore.

That pretense, even if we knew it was just a performance, was a source of some small reassurance that there were places he wouldn’t go, lest he lose support.

Now we know for sure that there’s no place he won’t go. And even the corporate media was shaken by his heartlessness, cruelty, and lack of humanity. It was a moment when we saw him unadorned, exposed.

It was a horrifying sight. And although before I’d casually thrown the term “Satan” around during discussions with Edward about Trump, it was just one of many different terms I’d applied to him. January 30 was the first time I felt myself to truly be looking straight at him or one of his emissaries. And—sorry, but the cliche fits—my blood ran cold.