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. MAGA 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. 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 US 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 Explained comes from Fetch. Fetch is pet insurance if you hadn't figured it out. Do you have a pet? According to a study from a pet insurance company from a few years ago, every six seconds a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000 and it almost never comes at a convenient time. So check out Fetch. You get paid up to 90% of vet bills. You can use Fetch for any vet in the US and Canada. Every vet is in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. With Fin, we've built the number one AI agent for customer service. It solves up to 90% of queries for businesses, tops all the performance benchmarks on the G2 leaderboard and it comes with a million dollar guarantee. Check it out at fin.ai. Oh, yes, please. Christian, many people have been asking, and so I will ask you, is President Donald John Trump the anti-Christ? Yeah, I imagine I have this scoop. It was revealed to me and upon this new rock, I'm establishing a new church. Vox political correspondent, Christian Paas, he's been writing about the anti-Christ. It's Donald Trump the anti-Christ. 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 anti-Christ 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 anti-Christ 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 anti-Christ isn't a real person or thing to come in the future before the second coming of Christ feel that things are bad, 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-Christ narratives. Maybe there's a sense of betrayal or promise is not being kept or being misled. 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 anti-Christ exactly? The term anti-Christ only pops up about five times in the Bible and it's never really in the context of an individual. It's usually a sense that anti-Christ 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 themself and claim that they are God, that they are somebody to be worshiped. 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. It's the end of the world narrative. There are 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. There's a lot of specific detail there about these beasts influencing people, influencing the faithful, taking over world governments, taking command of armies. 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 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 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 in 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? Who knows? And then other folks on the intellectual part of the American right who have made that case, that maybe he's not the Antichrist himself, but he has an Antichrist spirit about him. Not seeing Trump is the Antichrist, Drara 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. 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 Greene 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 Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist. In the 17th century, I can imagine a doctor strange love, Edward Teller, Thai person taking over the world. In our world, it's far more likely to be Greta Thunberg. How to say Marjorie Taylor Greene's interpretation of the Antichrist differ from Peter Thiel's? 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 Antichrist 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. 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, we're not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palantir has done so far. I mean, isn't that a concern? Wouldn't that be 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 instructor regulations and oversight of how AI is 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 want their representatives to be supportive and 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-Israeli evangelical voices that are so concerned for Israel's safety in part because of the theology. But even now in the present day, we have a president of the United States whose former allies, Marjorie 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 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'll be more interesting is seeing who he ends up trying to set up as his successor. If it is G.D. 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. If you're thinking about religious denominations, traditionally, Marco Rubio has had more of the trust of evangelical Christians than maybe G.D. Vance. Now G.D. Vance is trying to carve out this trad Catholic base of support. I think that's why religion is going to continue to be such a central storyline and 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. So support for the show comes from trust and will. 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That's b o m b a s dot com slash explained code explained at checkout. Support for the show today comes from what not and they provided me a pronunciation key that says a what not. That's how it's pronounced what not, but it's one word and what not. If you sell products online or a store full time or as a side hustle, you know how difficult it can be to get noticed. Cush. You know how difficult it can be to get noticed generally, but imagine if you sell products online or in a store. You could spend hours sourcing inventory, setting up your storefront and creating listings. And then you're left waiting, hoping the right customer eventually comes across what you're selling. What not wants to change that model. What not is the largest dedicated live shopping platform, whether it's beauty collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, even cookies, you guys. And our colleague Claire White has tried what not. I had a really great time going through the variety of auctions that they had on what not. It's not just clothes. It's not just jewelry. It's not just tech even, but vintage China antique pieces, places around the world where folks are selling knickknacks from their vintage stores, from their archive, whatever it is. There's a ton of variety on what not, just beyond what you would think for an auction house. Search what not, W-H-A-T-N-O-T, one word in the app store, download, and you can start selling right away. It took me a while to figure it out, but this is today explained. I can't believe you figured it out. Matthew Avery Sutton, and I'm a professor of history at Washington State 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 anti-Christ in American politics? Boy, we could certainly start that story 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 anti- Christ 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 had been pretty optimistic forward thinking. They believed that they were building the kingdom of God on earth, that they were kind of creating the 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, you know, for Armageddon, we're preparing for the anti-Christ, 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 anti-Christ, this global leader who was going to take power, who was going to oppress 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 anti-Christ, 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 One, they gave the movement a name and that was fundamentalism. And then they rebrand themselves in World War Two as evangelicals. And so the fundamentalists and evangelicals are the folks who really are mobilizing around this idea that the anti-Christ 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 anti-Christ, 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 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 that also works for every generation. But the much more interesting one was the return of Jews to Palestine in the reconstruction of Israel as a nation state, that the fundamentalists began predicting this in the 1880s, 1890s. So as the Zionist movement takes off and then Israel is formed in the 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 Jesus had told his disciples to expect in the last days. And so World War One becomes a moment to basically to croll about how they got it right. And then certainly World War Two is another one. And then the creation of the League of Nations and then the United Nations. After the war, the statesman of the world, idiot by President Wilson, sought to prevent its repetition by finding a League of Nations. It is now my duty, my honor and my privilege in the chair, to croll 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 fundamentalists, 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 fit the bill that he was 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 out for a sham march on Rome in 1922. We jump forward to the 1990s and perhaps it's Saddam Hussein because he's trying to rebuild Babel, the 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 percent of Americans, one in six, and 22 percent of Romney voters believe Obama is the Antichrist. Incredible. You are Antichrist! You are Antichrist! You are Antichrist! Those kinds of folks got a lot of traction among fundamentalists 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 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, you know, he was working too closely 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, you know, 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 anti-christiology, rather than just kind of wait within difference 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 the 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 many, many, many, many versions of the 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 adversaries. 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. His most recent book is Chosenland, How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity. Danielle Hewitt produced today's show in Amina El-Sadi edited. Patrick Boyd and David Taddishore engineered and Gabriel Donatov checked the facts. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. So support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. 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