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Blog Post | April 13, 2026

Is Donald Trump Antichrist?

by Matthew Walther

On an open question.

About the author

by Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp.

Is Donald Trump antichrist?

My question is not quite the provocation it will probably sound like to some readers. For one thing, even an answer in the affirmative does not necessarily mean that the former host of Celebrity Apprentice is actually the Beast From the Sea foretold by St. John—the monster whose power comes from “the dragon,” who demands the worship of the entire human race, and somehow survives a serious head wound, a marvel at which “all the world wondered.” Nor does it mean that Trump’s rise to power is necessarily a portent of the world’s ending, or of anything worse than a further multiplication of the ignominies with which we are all familiar. Whether he is, at minimum, simply one in a long line of “types” that runs from Cain and Nimrod on is not, I think, an unreasonable thing to ask about someone who now literally identifies himself with Jesus Christ.

First, a bit of Wednesday night catechism. Many of you will be aware that the familiar conception of antichrist as a specific named individual—familiar even to non-Christian viewers of horror films such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen—is not drawn from a specific passage in the Bible. Instead, like the devil—whom we identify with the serpent in the Book of Genesis, the “accuser” of Job, Christ’s tempter in the wilderness, and divers passages in Apocalypse—antichrist emerges from an interpretive tradition rooted in a wide range of scriptural sources. The word “antikhristos” itself only appears in the second and third of St. John’s epistles, when he speaks of multiple “antichrists,” and of the “spirit of antichrist” roaming abroad; indeed, at one point we are told that everyone who does not believe” that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” is “a seducer and an antichrist.” Our Lord Himself never uses the word; the closest we get are His references to a “pseudokhristos” or “false prophet” in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark, and His terrible warning reported by St. John: “I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive.”

This is not to suggest that the established image of antichrist as a discrete figure—albeit one whose eventual coming will be preceded by a series of forerunners—is a theological novelty. The tradition which identifies the lawless, deceitful, covenant-breaking king prophesied in the Book of Daniel who “shall destroy wonderfully” and “exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvellous things against the God of gods” with the “man of sin” and “son of perdition” spoken of by St. Paul who insists “that he is God”—and both with the sea monster of the Apocalypse—is a very old one. It seems to have been well established by the second century; by the fifth, it was more or less universally held, and references to a singular antichrist are a commonplace among the Fathers. St. Athanasius argued that Arius was a “harbinger” of antichrist; St. Jerome believed that the fall of the Western Empire presaged his coming.

How did we come to identify antichrist with temporal rulers? It began for understandable reasons with the emperors who persecuted the early Church: Nero, Diocletian, Julian the Apostate. After the fall of Rome, the identification was extended to barbarian conquerors such as Attila the Hun (who styled himself “the Scourge of God”) as well as to Mohammad. During the thirteenth century, Frederick II was called “antichrist” by his contemporaries. Nearly three hundred years later, Luther and Calvin would claim that antichrist was synonymous, if not with a particular pope, then with the papacy itself (a view that still enjoys some currency in radical Protestant circles). More recently still, Bonaparte—who, among other things, at his coronation snatched the imperial tiara from Pope Pius VII and crowned himself—was called antichrist by his political enemies and by clergymen of all denominations from Dublin to St. Petersburg.

How does Trump fit in with this rogues’ gallery? Obviously he is not the first politician to get sideways with a pope. Nor is he the first head of state with a penchant for cruelty and lying, or the first to be the subject of a (rapidly fading in his case) cult of personality, or to be deeply weird about sex.

“Blasphemy” is not a phrase we are used to seeing in print these days even in magazines like this one. When it does appear, it is usually in a non-literal sense, meaning something like “insouciance.” But blasphemy is not a mere casual lack of concern for sacred things; it is their willful profanation.

If the image posted on Trump’s TruthSocial account on Sunday evening (only moments after a bizarre diatribe against Pope Leo) is not blasphemous, the word has no meaning. It features Trump attired like Jesus (or at least Jesus as he appears in mid-twentieth century Christian kitsch of the Warner Sallman school) flanked by two men and two women, one of whom appears to be bowed in prayer before him. Behind him are an American flag, two bald eagles, three fighter jets, the Statue of Liberty, and what appear to be the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. Above him four half-translucent soldiers are descending from the clouds; in the midst of the four is a horned figure raising his arms in a posture of triumph. But the most horrifying thing about the image is Trump himself. His right arm glows with an eerie white crystalline light; his left arm is pressed gently against the head of a man who appears to be dead. The picture is not only blasphemous but idolatrous. It is an invitation to worship our 47th president.

Perhaps this is taking a bit of A.I. slop too seriously. I am not so sure. It is difficult to understate just how shocking the image is. No president, no medieval king, no emperor or modern dictator has ever publicly represented himself as Jesus Christ or claimed for himself the ability to raise the dead. To Catholics the posting of this image is, or should be, the most profoundly offensive act imaginable, a grave public sin that brings shame to, and invites God’s judgement upon, our nation. Even for secular readers it must be a staggering reminder of the dangers of divinizing those in authority and of the role institutional Christianity has played historically in preventing it. (Trump now claims that the image, which was posted minutes after he seemed to call for the deposition of the pope, depicted “me as a doctor.” It has since been deleted.)

So much for Trump himself. Perhaps it behooves us now to turn the discussion away briefly from the president to ourselves. In “The Patristical Idea of Antichrist,” a series of lectures given in 1838, John Henry Newman tried to imagine what sort of people would be willing to accept the rule of antichrist. Newman envisions a society “built on mere principles of utility,” one in which “expedience, and not truth” become “the end and the rule of measures of State,” with mobbish enthusiasm as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong (“as if we had any reason,” he scoffs, “for thinking that the many will be in the right, and the few in the wrong”).

For me what is most interesting about Newman’s lecture is his insistence that when faced with antichrist, we will deceive ourselves every bit as much as he deceives us. Antichrist, he argues, will not simply lie; he will lie about everything, especially the fact of his own lying—and he will expect all of us to repeat these lies. “Do you think he is so unskilful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the Truth?” Newman asks. “No,” he continues. “He offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty. . . he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.” This, Newman says, is how antichrist “conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you.” That work is not simply co-operation with a series of falsehoods or accepting the overthrow of certain hitherto settled laws and customs—it is nothing less than a spiritual revolution, a rejection of all existing bonds, duties, affections, obligations, pieties, a reduction of all moral reasoning to a crude calculus of gain, a hatred for “times gone by” and “every institution which reveres them.”

Once we accept this revolution, implicitly or otherwise, Newman thought that antichrist’s work would be done. This was true even, indeed perhaps especially, if you believe that the whole thing is hysterically funny: “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.”

The Lamp Magazine

Is Donald Trump Antichrist?

by Matthew Walther

Is Donald Trump antichrist?

My question is not quite the provocation it will probably sound like to some readers. For one thing, even an answer in the affirmative does not necessarily mean that the former host of Celebrity Apprentice is actually the Beast From the Sea foretold by St. John—the monster whose power comes from “the dragon,” who demands the worship of the entire human race, and somehow survives a serious head wound, a marvel at which “all the world wondered.” Nor does it mean that Trump’s rise to power is necessarily a portent of the world’s ending, or of anything worse than a further multiplication of the ignominies with which we are all familiar. Whether he is, at minimum, simply one in a long line of “types” that runs from Cain and Nimrod on is not, I think, an unreasonable thing to ask about someone who now literally identifies himself with Jesus Christ.

First, a bit of Wednesday night catechism. Many of you will be aware that the familiar conception of antichrist as a specific named individual—familiar even to non-Christian viewers of horror films such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen—is not drawn from a specific passage in the Bible. Instead, like the devil—whom we identify with the serpent in the Book of Genesis, the “accuser” of Job, Christ’s tempter in the wilderness, and divers passages in Apocalypse—antichrist emerges from an interpretive tradition rooted in a wide range of scriptural sources. The word “antikhristos” itself only appears in the second and third of St. John’s epistles, when he speaks of multiple “antichrists,” and of the “spirit of antichrist” roaming abroad; indeed, at one point we are told that everyone who does not believe” that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh” is “a seducer and an antichrist.” Our Lord Himself never uses the word; the closest we get are His references to a “pseudokhristos” or “false prophet” in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark, and His terrible warning reported by St. John: “I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive.”

This is not to suggest that the established image of antichrist as a discrete figure—albeit one whose eventual coming will be preceded by a series of forerunners—is a theological novelty. The tradition which identifies the lawless, deceitful, covenant-breaking king prophesied in the Book of Daniel who “shall destroy wonderfully” and “exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvellous things against the God of gods” with the “man of sin” and “son of perdition” spoken of by St. Paul who insists “that he is God”—and both with the sea monster of the Apocalypse—is a very old one. It seems to have been well established by the second century; by the fifth, it was more or less universally held, and references to a singular antichrist are a commonplace among the Fathers. St. Athanasius argued that Arius was a “harbinger” of antichrist; St. Jerome believed that the fall of the Western Empire presaged his coming.

How did we come to identify antichrist with temporal rulers? It began for understandable reasons with the emperors who persecuted the early Church: Nero, Diocletian, Julian the Apostate. After the fall of Rome, the identification was extended to barbarian conquerors such as Attila the Hun (who styled himself “the Scourge of God”) as well as to Mohammad. During the thirteenth century, Frederick II was called “antichrist” by his contemporaries. Nearly three hundred years later, Luther and Calvin would claim that antichrist was synonymous, if not with a particular pope, then with the papacy itself (a view that still enjoys some currency in radical Protestant circles). More recently still, Bonaparte—who, among other things, at his coronation snatched the imperial tiara from Pope Pius VII and crowned himself—was called antichrist by his political enemies and by clergymen of all denominations from Dublin to St. Petersburg.

How does Trump fit in with this rogues’ gallery? Obviously he is not the first politician to get sideways with a pope. Nor is he the first head of state with a penchant for cruelty and lying, or the first to be the subject of a (rapidly fading in his case) cult of personality, or to be deeply weird about sex.

“Blasphemy” is not a phrase we are used to seeing in print these days even in magazines like this one. When it does appear, it is usually in a non-literal sense, meaning something like “insouciance.” But blasphemy is not a mere casual lack of concern for sacred things; it is their willful profanation.

If the image posted on Trump’s TruthSocial account on Sunday evening (only moments after a bizarre diatribe against Pope Leo) is not blasphemous, the word has no meaning. It features Trump attired like Jesus (or at least Jesus as he appears in mid-twentieth century Christian kitsch of the Warner Sallman school) flanked by two men and two women, one of whom appears to be bowed in prayer before him. Behind him are an American flag, two bald eagles, three fighter jets, the Statue of Liberty, and what appear to be the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. Above him four half-translucent soldiers are descending from the clouds; in the midst of the four is a horned figure raising his arms in a posture of triumph. But the most horrifying thing about the image is Trump himself. His right arm glows with an eerie white crystalline light; his left arm is pressed gently against the head of a man who appears to be dead. The picture is not only blasphemous but idolatrous. It is an invitation to worship our 47th president.

Perhaps this is taking a bit of A.I. slop too seriously. I am not so sure. It is difficult to understate just how shocking the image is. No president, no medieval king, no emperor or modern dictator has ever publicly represented himself as Jesus Christ or claimed for himself the ability to raise the dead. To Catholics the posting of this image is, or should be, the most profoundly offensive act imaginable, a grave public sin that brings shame to, and invites God’s judgement upon, our nation. Even for secular readers it must be a staggering reminder of the dangers of divinizing those in authority and of the role institutional Christianity has played historically in preventing it. (Trump now claims that the image, which was posted minutes after he seemed to call for the deposition of the pope, depicted “me as a doctor.” It has since been deleted.)

So much for Trump himself. Perhaps it behooves us now to turn the discussion away briefly from the president to ourselves. In “The Patristical Idea of Antichrist,” a series of lectures given in 1838, John Henry Newman tried to imagine what sort of people would be willing to accept the rule of antichrist. Newman envisions a society “built on mere principles of utility,” one in which “expedience, and not truth” become “the end and the rule of measures of State,” with mobbish enthusiasm as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong (“as if we had any reason,” he scoffs, “for thinking that the many will be in the right, and the few in the wrong”).

For me what is most interesting about Newman’s lecture is his insistence that when faced with antichrist, we will deceive ourselves every bit as much as he deceives us. Antichrist, he argues, will not simply lie; he will lie about everything, especially the fact of his own lying—and he will expect all of us to repeat these lies. “Do you think he is so unskilful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the Truth?” Newman asks. “No,” he continues. “He offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty. . . he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.” This, Newman says, is how antichrist “conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you.” That work is not simply co-operation with a series of falsehoods or accepting the overthrow of certain hitherto settled laws and customs—it is nothing less than a spiritual revolution, a rejection of all existing bonds, duties, affections, obligations, pieties, a reduction of all moral reasoning to a crude calculus of gain, a hatred for “times gone by” and “every institution which reveres them.”

Once we accept this revolution, implicitly or otherwise, Newman thought that antichrist’s work would be done. This was true even, indeed perhaps especially, if you believe that the whole thing is hysterically funny: “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.”

The Lamp is published by the Three Societies Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Three Rivers, Michigan, in partnership with The Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. Views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Institute for Human Ecology or The Catholic University of America or of its officers, directors, editors, members, or staff.