Today, Explained - Why the Antichrist is back

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

Former supporters of President Trump have speculated about whether he could be the Antichrist. Accusations like this are not new to politics in the US. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. New York Daily News front page for February 19, 2016. Photo by New York Daily News via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember back in April when President Trump posted that meme depicting himself as Jesus, and everyone was like, maybe he's the Antichrist? We have some major news right now. Mag is now declaring Trump the Antichrist. Whenever I see Donald Trump, spiritually the Holy Spirit always shows me that he is filled with the spirit of the Antichrist. I've been saying since Trump got elected, he's definitely the Antichrist and guys, guys. You've been talking on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist. I have not said that.

Yes, he had. America, 250 years of going from zero to 100 in no time flat. As we wait through a new round of is he or isn't he the antichrist, we are reminded that the U.S. has a long history of declarations and accusations and just asking questions, re the beast. Today on Today Explained from Fox, we amble through that history and ask, what are we doing, USA? Support for today's explain comes from Fetch.

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Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. To explain. Christian, many people have been asking. And so I will ask you, is President Donald John Trump the Antichrist? Yeah, imagine I have the scoop. It was revealed to me. And upon this new rock, I'm establishing a new church.

Vox political correspondent Christian Paz. He's been writing about the Antichrist. Is Donald Trump the Antichrist? I can't say that. But if you were to look to certain corners of the internet and of social media and of digital media, people who used to support Donald Trump, have been starting to wonder that. It's coming up more and more, for sure. Yeah, it's coming up more and more. And I am old enough to remember a time when we did not in American life talk very much.

about the Antichrist at all. But the past maybe, I don't know, six months to two years, we do hear quite a bit about the Dark Lord. Why are we hearing so much about the Antichrist now? I think there's both eternal reasons and specific to the 2020s. In general, right now, the vibe among a lot of people who believe that the Antichrist isn't a real person or a thing to come in the future before the second coming of Christ feel that things are better. that the economy is bad, that there's wars around us, that we've lived through life-changing public health crises, pandemics. The signs of plague, pestilence, war, destruction, and political transformations and changes are aligning. And then you get added on top of that, that these wars are specifically happening in the Middle East,

that there have been threats to the state of Israel, which is a key part to anti-crice narratives. and that maybe there's a sense of betrayal or, you know, promise is not being kept or being misled. And that specifically gets to some of what these far-right Trump critics are saying, that perhaps they have been led astray by a false prophet, essentially. You said false prophet. I always think of the devil. That's not quite right. What is the antichrist exactly?

Yeah. So the term antichrist only pops up about five times in the Bible. And it's never really in the context of an individual. Yeah, it's usually a sense that Antichrist is a term to describe a spirit person, people, movement that try to convince you to worship God differently than the way that Jesus established. But then this gets merged with a bunch of other mentions specifically across the Old and New Testament of figures like in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul writes about a man of lawlessness. in one of his letters to the Thessalonians, somebody who would establish themselves and claim that they are God, that they are somebody to be worshipped. And then that's also connected to the book of Revelation, the infamous apocalyptic biblical scripture that writes about visions of what

comes before Christ's second coming, right? It's the end of the world narrative. And then there are their specific references to a seven-headed beast coming out of the sea, to another beast that walks on land. that these beasts are empowered by the dragon, which is understood to be Satan. And there's a lot of specific detail there about these beasts influencing people, influencing the faithful, taking over world governments, taking command of armies. And all of these little mentions, including some mentions in the Old Testament, gets merged into the figure of the Antichrist, someone who will literally come before Christ's

returns before we all get raptured or judged. So who are the people talking about the Antichrist concerned with the Antichrist right now? You have voices like Marjorie Taylor Green, the former congresswoman from Georgia, who has, you know, said on social media that Donald Trump carries the spirit of the Antichrist. It's more than blasphemy. It's an Antichrist spirit. You have loud far-right voices, whether that's Nick Fuentes. Now, Trump compares himself to Jesus Christ and declared war on the church. He is an antichrist in league with Israel.

Tucker Carlson. 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? And then other folks on the intellectual part of the American right who have made that case, that maybe he's not like the anti-crime. himself, but he has an anti-Christ spirit about him.

Not seeing Trump is the Antichrist, Dreyer told the Wall Street Journal, but he's radiating the spirit of Antichrist. No question. The Wall Street Journal, April 2026. In 18 months, I went from hesitantly voting for Trump to thinking there's a decent chance he's the Antichrist. Hoof, what a ride. There are competing visions among these people who keep bringing the Antichrist to our

attention of what the Antichrist is. Marjorie Taylor Green seemed upset when President Trump tweeted a meme of himself appearing to be Jesus Christ. But you also have Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire, who did a very interesting interview with Ross Douthit in which he seemed to suggest, if I was hearing him correctly, that like Greta Toonberg might be the Antichrist. In the 17th century, I can imagine a doctor strange love, Edward Teller type person, taking over. over the world, in our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg. How to say Marjorie Taylor Green's interpretation of the Antichrist differ from Peter Teales, because they are talking about two different people, two different things.

Right, and it's funny because historically, antichrists are like popes, emperors, or kings, and then you have Greta Thunberg. This is all wrong. The Peter Thiel interpretation of the Antichrist, it's more rooted in the expectation that this this anti-crimeist figure will command world governments, will command world armies, will essentially become a form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism where no one can oppose or resist this. And his perspective comes from the sense that AI is advancing, progressing. He helped to contribute to this, right? Wouldn't the Antichrist be like, great, you know, we're not going to have any more technological

progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far, right? I mean, isn't that a, Isn't that a concern? Wouldn't that be the, you know, the irony of history would be that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival? Look, there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don't think that that's what I'm doing. What he's concerned about, however, is that this kind of advanced development of AI will be used as an excuse by governments, by international organizations to call for stronger and stricter regulations and oversight of how AI has developed, which then leads to the rise of a world government that uses artificial intelligence or some kind

of international power that wields artificial intelligence as it controls it and manipulates it under the guise of regulation or safety. Is this something that is driving any policy at this point? At this point, it's difficult for me to point to anything that is policy that's either pro or anti-Antichrist. What I can say is so much of the foreign policy around supporting Israel specifically fits into some of these general concerns about Antichrist. For a lot of right-leaning Republican or conservative evangelical Christians, for example, part of why they are so loyal and wants their representatives to be supportive in Alice. strong allies of Israel specifically. Part of Revelation mentions that armies of the world will gather in the valley of Armageddon to try to wipe out Israel.

Then they gathered the kings together in the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon. Revelation chapter 16, verse 16. That is a connection between religion and public policy, or in this case, foreign policy, with some of the pro-Israel evangelical voices that are so concerned for Israel safety, in part because of this theology. But even now in the present day, we have a president of the United States whose former allies,

Marjor Taylor Green, Tucker Carlson, are openly comparing him to the Antichrist. What does that mean for President Trump? Does this mean his evangelical supporters abandon him or criticize him or see him differently? Yeah. At this point, it seems two things are true that he still manages to hold massive amounts of support,

more massive levels of full. support from evangelical Christians. They are still, from what I've seen from polling of various religious denominations, they are still the subset of Christians and of believers who are most supportive of Donald Trump and of his policies, of his presidency. Yet that support has dropped a bit. It's not as high as it was a year ago. His support among other denominations has dropped as well, but that evangelical slippage is significant. It is, at least statistically, significant. Whether that means that you'll see even more opposition on religious grounds to Trump, I'm not sure about that. I think what will be more interesting is seeing who he ends up trying to

set up as his successor, if it is JD Vance or if it is Marco Rubio or if it's somebody we don't know about, they all have very different bases of power and support. You know, if you're thinking about religious denominations. Traditionally, Marco Rubio has had more of the trust of evangelical Christians than maybe JD Vance. And now J.D. Vance is trying to carve out this, right, trad, Catholic kind of base of support. I think that's why religion is going to continue to be such a central storyline in who succeeds Donald Trump and what we see in 2028.

That was Vox's Christian pause. Coming up, a brief history of the Antichrist in American politics. Support for the show comes from trust and will. A death in a family can flip your world upside down. And the last thing you want to deal with during it all is confusing paperwork and tough legal decisions. Estate planning can take away some of that anxiety. And trust and will says they can help you create an estate planning that covers child and pet guardianship, asset distribution, and health care directives.

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I can't believe you figured it out. Matthew Avery Sutton, and I'm a professor of history at Washington State University. University. I teach courses on religion and politics, and my most recent book is called Chosenland, How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. All right. So, as we all know, America is approaching its 250th birthday, 250 years of history behind us. Where would you start the story of the Antichrist in American politics? Boy, we could certainly start that story, you know, really in biblical times, which of course has nothing to do with North America. But in the North American context, I think the way we think of the Antichrist today really begins in the 1880s and the 1890s.

And it has to do with the rise of the modern nation state, with global militarization, and the kind of creation of the modern world order. So Americans, you know, had been pretty optimistic forward thinking. They believed that they were building the kingdom of God on Earth, that they were kind of creating this utopia. Then they hit the Civil War. They were dealing with this problem, which was the growing divide over the issue. of slavery. And once Christians start killing other Christians, it became really, really difficult to justify an optimistic, hopeful politics. And so these apocalyptic ideas began to seep into everyday theology, began to seep into everyday church life. And then they hit the Industrial Revolution, and then they saw all these immigrants come over, many of whom were Catholics and Jews. And so for Protestants who were used to calling the shots, who were controlling much of the

destiny of the United States through the 19th century, a small group of them began to rethink their theology and began to think, you know what, maybe we're not building the kingdom of God. Maybe we're in fact preparing for Armageddon. We're preparing for the Antichrist. And then they began to scour the news and to study events and to align them with the Bible to try to make sense of what they saw happening all around them. So as the small group of Protestants begins to reconceptualize what they thought of as the end times, at the core of their story was this concept of the Antichrist, this global leader who was going to take power, who is going to Christians who was going to transform the world. And so what they did is they began holding conferences

and writing books and debating these kinds of issues and arguing about who might be the Antichrist. Where might he appear? How do we know how close we are to the end times? And they ended up launching a movement and then by about World War I, they gave the movement a name and that was fundamentalism. And then they rebrand themselves in World War II as evangelicals. And so the fundamentalists and evangelicals are the folks who really are mobilizing around this idea that the Antichrist is out there somewhere and we better be ready for them. When Americans in the early days, so the 1800s, early 1900s were thinking about the Antichrist, what were the signs that they were looking for?

There are a handful of signs. Some of them are really hard to demonstrate. So they talked about, you know, falling away from true Christianity, but of course you could make that argument in every generation. The classic is immorality, that the kids today just aren't following the rules like their parents. So, you know, that also works for every generation. But the much more interesting one was the return of Jews to Palestine and the reconstruction of Israel as a nation state, that the fundamentals began predicting this in the 1880s, 1890s.

So as the Zionist movement takes off and then Israel is formed in late 1940s, it becomes absolutely clear to them that everything they've been predicting is correct. The Jewish democratic state begins its new life in the ancient homeland of the Jews. This is what they have waited for. This is what they have prayed for. The other thing that they're expecting is the rise in wars and rumors of wars. That was something that Jesus had told his disciples to expect in the last days. And so World War I becomes a moment to basically to crow about how they got it right.

And certainly World War II is another one. and then the creation of the League of Nations and then the United Nations. After the war, the statesmen of the world, hidied by President Wilson, sought to prevent its repetition by founding a League of Nations. It is now my duty, my honor and my privilege in the chair, to call for a vote on the approval of the Charter of the United Nations. These kind of global international organizations that would create the mechanism by which the Antichrist could take power, could seize power.

So all of these things become huge, you know, blinking red lights, telling fundamentalists and evangelicals that they've got it right, that their reading of the Bible is lining up with world events. When we look back to the times in which these two terms emerge, evangelical fundamentalist, who were the figures? Who were people saying, oh, this person might be the Antichrist? Or this might be the evidence that, you know, we're approaching Revelation. So there were two ways they conceptualized it. One was to identify the actual Antichrist. But the problem with doing that was that the Antichrist was going to be a deceiver. Like, that's what the Bible says.

And so they knew it was going to be hard to figure out exactly who it was. But they would still speculate. And often from generation to generation, there are specific figures. So in the 1930s, Mussolini absolutely seemed to feel. fit the bill. That he was, yeah, he's trying to resurrect the Roman Empire. That seemed to be one of the key characteristics of the Antichrist. Mussolini, the would-be Caesar, the founder of fascism, started with an armed gang and finally

built it into an army, seizing power after a sham march on Rome in 1922. We jump, you know, forward to the 1990s, and perhaps it's Saddam Hussein, because he's trying to rebuild Babel. ancient biblical city. But there's also then this idea, what about American leaders? What role are they playing? And so many of them believe that while the Antichrist probably would not be an American, because biblical authors had no concept of the United States, of course, they thought that American leaders might be complicit, that they might help facilitate the rise of the Antichrist. And often it was liberals. It was internationalists. So Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama.

13% of Americans, 1 in 6, and 22% of Romney voters, believe Obama is the Antichrist. Incredible. Those kinds of folks got a lot of traction among fundamentals and evangelicals as potential allies of the Antichrist. And usually unwittingly, not intentionally working with the Antichrist, but it's helping set the stage for Americans to lose their sovereignty to this diabolical, global, new world leader. It's debatable, I think, how seriously we should take various men. American leaders being called the Antichrist. It does make me wonder, though, whether this interest in the Antichrist has actually shaped American politics. Did we hit a point in the country's history? It was like, oh, FDR is the Antichrist and thus we must X, Y, and Z. Working hand in hand

with the rise of the religious right was the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. There's a great spiritual awakening in America. Ronald Reagan was actually a natural partner for many of these folks because he seemed to be obsessed with ideas of the Antichrist and with the end times. Somehow, eschatology and Bible prophecy came up, and Ronald Reagan made the comment that we could be the generation that sees Armageddon. And so while it certainly was not shaping his policy, it was an obsession for him, and it was something that his critics often pointed to to criticize him and to say that he was working too close. with these evangelical freaks and was too obsessed with these kinds of issues. Reports of Mr. Reagan's references to Armageddon has caused about 100 mainstream Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish leaders

to sign a statement of concern. The statement says that the Armageddon theology is a false reading of the Bible and that belief in it diminishes concern about the possibility of nuclear war. New York Times 1984. In my scholarship, I argue that, In fact, that it's extraordinarily important for politics that, certainly in the 1930s, that when we have the rise of the modern New Deal liberal state, it's no coincidence that we have the rise of fundamentalist anti-liberalism, and that is grounded in this kind of apocalyptic

theology. But we see it again more recently with the rise of the religious right, and the reason it's so important is because it becomes a tool for mobilizing people for action, that if you believe the rise of the Antichrist is imminent, what comes right after the Antichrist is the return of Jesus, the second coming. And so you've got to be ready for that, and you've got to be ready for the judgment that's going to come. And so you want Jesus to find you being an active and good and faithful servant, somebody who's using your gifts to do everything you can to prepare the rest of the world for the end times. And so that means that folks who are true believers in this apocalyptic antichrist theology, rather than just kind of wait with indifference because it's going to happen.

Instead, they have to get their asses out there and get to work because they know that Jesus is coming at any moment. and he's going to expect them to be doing everything they can to prepare the way for his second coming. And that means fighting the Antichrist. Okay, so what's happening right now in evangelical communities? How would you situate this in the long history of what Americans have been thinking about the Antichrist? Yeah, so the Antichrist for me is the gift that keeps on giving, that he really works for every generation. And so it's always about Christian folks reading their Bibles and aligning them with world events and trying to make the two compatible. And so with each generation, it's going to be a different idea about what the Antichrist is.

It's going to be a different idea about where history is going, where the trajectory of the nation falls on that. But I don't know that it's necessarily different. It's just the latest version of, you know, many, many, many, many versions of this same story. That there's political mobilization. There's expectations about change. And then there's second guessing because things don't always work out exactly as you expect them to. And so what does that mean for our politics? Unfortunately, it's pretty dangerous because what it does is it fuels and increases polarization.

Because rather than having policy debates where you can just agree to disagree or talk about, you know, what is going to be the best policy for the greatest number of people, instead, once you add this kind of spiritualized language, whether or not, you know, supporting the United Nations becomes a question of whether or not you're supporting the Antichrist, then that completely changes the stakes. And so it makes it much more difficult to have conversation, to have dialogue, to find a middle ground, and to work with your adversary. is it's much more fulfilling to fight absolute evil than to just, you know, have a discussion about tax policy. Matthew Avery Sutton is a professor of history at Washington State University's most recent book is Chosenland, how Christianity made America and Americans remade Christianity. Daniel Hewitt produced today's show and Amina El-Saudi edited. Patrick Boyd and David Tattashoor engineered and Gabriel Donatov Check the Facts. I'm Noil King. It's today explained.

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