The Fourth Beast: Is Donald Trump The Antichrist?

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In 2017 the infamous white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was held to “Unite the Right.” That was the hope of the participants at the time. But the follow-up rally a year later drew a fraction of the original. It’s not clear that the white nationalist (alt-) right has united effectively or can place many troops on the field. The total of arrested identified Capitol rioters so far looks like it maybe over 30% are either members of identified organizations (mainly Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters) or former or serving cops or military. There is probably a high overlap. This “movement”—disparate and uncoordinated as it appears to be—is small. It could pull off one action in Washington at the behest of the president, assuming itself immune from prosecution, and assuming Trump’s participation and subsequent praise. I don’t want to wade into eschatological debates. I would prefer to forget they exist. So I will only say that many (but certainly not all!) Evangelicals believe that God will take them into heaven before the Antichrist comes to power and instigates the Tribulation. Christians would vanish, “like a thief in the night,” as the verse goes, leaving their clothes and their apostate relatives behind. God thus spares them the thrilling horrors of the Antichrist, and they get to watch the show from above, as they lounge about in celestial glory. Until Pat Robertson ascends to his McMansion in the sky, there’s not much to worry about. Trump has been raised up in the spirit of that charming but much misunderstood rascal King Nebuchadnezzar. No one disputes that Trump always manages to be evil adjacent, but no matter how devilish his conduct looks to us, his immorality is a designated instrument of God's will. President Trump will be arrested during Lent – a time of suffering and purification for the followers of Jesus Christ,” Joseph McBride, a rightwing lawyer who represents several insurrectionists, tweeted last March. “As Christ was crucified, and then rose again on the third day, so too will Donald Trump.”

He tried to damage or dismantle political and military systems designed to keep peace in the world, including the UN, NATO and the Iran JCPOA

4. He is one and many

Thus, the house of cards may fall, as the bourgeois state under Biden (which now officially posits that white supremacists constitute the main terrorist threat to the country) impresses upon the Trump goons that bourgeois law must be upheld and that they can’t bust into Congress and break and steal things, threatening to hang the vice president, and get away with it. That is, the basic reestablishment of normalcy is primary, not the retention of the MAGA program, whatever the individual FBI agent thinks about Trump.

He was prescient. Graham’s son, Franklin, threatened Americans with God’s wrath if they had the temerity to criticize Trump. At the time, Moore was president of the SBC ethics and religious liberty commission. His politics forced him to choose. He opted for Christ and his convictions. He joined a nondenominational church. He lied about Covid (after disclosing the truth to Bob Woodward in February, 2020), causing more disease and deaths in America than any other nation in the world 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?

Donald Trump has begun his presidency with a rash of executive actions aimed at undoing a lot of what his predecessor achieved. His inauguration was marred by an unseemly row about the numbers attending and overshadowed by mass protests from women marching to express their disdain for him, though it's fair to say he probably doesn't care. Christian evangelicals from around the world march during a parade in celebration of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, in downtown Jerusalem. Getty Images Recall how St. Paul foretold the Antichrist: “the lawless one…the one destined for destruction….[who] opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God” (2 Thessalonians 2:1-4).

The world is a disaster. But the kind of people who take the Book of Revelation very, very literally tend to believe that things will get much worse before the Antichrist shows up and promises stability. There will be natural disasters, and plagues, and war. While climate change contributes to natural disasters, the world is not necessarily more violent than it has been at any previous point in human history. Trump, meanwhile, beats the war drums with Iran and denies climate change altogether.

Editorial

But what did Jesus--the guy Trump's white evangelical followers claim as their savior--say was necessary to get into heaven? Moore is mindful of history, and the roles Christianity has played: “Parts of the church were wrong – satanically wrong – on issues of righteousness and justice, such as the Spanish Inquisition and the scourge of human slavery.” He is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, a publication founded by Billy Graham. Losing Our Religion offers a mixture of lament and hope. In places, its sadness is tinged with anger. In the south, the expression “losing my religion”, popularized by REM in a 1991 song, “conveys the moment when ‘politeness gives way to anger’,” Moore explains. Since millions of Americans are possessed by the spirit of their personal Antichrist, they continue to do its bidding. Anarchy? What anarchy? What insurrection? Jan. 6 was about love and patriotism! Trump's grip on their psyches remains as powerful as ever more than half a year after leaving office. If that's not supernatural, what is? 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.