Is Trump the Antichrist?

“I looked, and there before me was a white horse! Its rider held a bow, and he was given a crown, and he rode out as a conqueror bent on conquest.” Revelations 6:2 NIV

In the various depiction of the antichrist in the Bible, he is described as a false Messiah who seduces the world in order to conquer it and destroy Christ’s followers.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a buffoonish carnival barker who will tell anyone who has pledged their loyalty to him, exactly what they want to hear, and proving P. T. Barnum’s famous adage –“There’s a sucker born every minute.”

In his autobiographical-business book - The Art of the Deal, Trump tells the story of how he duped the corporate executives from Holiday Inn into investing in his first casino by hiring a construction crew to move piles of dirt back and forth on the proposed sight in Atlantic City. Trump still enjoys retelling the story which took place seven years before he filed the first of his four business bankruptcies

Listen to Trump and you’ll think that the world is in love with him. Though he has disparaged women with crude insults, he claims to be the best candidate for women. During the Vietnam War he received multiple deferments from serving his country while in college, and then obtained a medical disqualification for a foot ailment after he graduated. Still he sees himself as embraced by veterans. Perhaps no group is at odds more with Trump than the Hispanic community. If elected, Trump has announced plans to send all eleven million illegal immigrants back to Mexico and build a wall between the US and Mexico and make the Mexican government pay for it. Nevertheless he claims that Hispanics “love him”. Trump has made similar claims about his relationships with African Americans as well as other minority groups.

Perhaps no group that is falling for Trump’s pitches is more troubling than evangelical Christians. Despite his divorces, bankruptcies, adultery, casino ownership, and obsession with his own wealth, many Christians now see him as an answer, if not a savior of their conservative political ideology. This actually shouldn’t be a surprise considering how conservative-Christians have a long history of being enamored with bullies, having embraced right-wing mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck

Trump’s proposed policies are scary. Domestically, there’s little or no clarity of what he actually intends to do for our citizens. Most of his domestic concepts are a convoluted narrative involving deportation of illegal workers combined with change in our trade policies that seem to evolve depending on where he’s speaking and to whom he’s addressing. He has claimed that he will overturn Obamacare and replace it with something much better, although he has yet to identify what that would be. At the same time, he promises that he will provide veterans with the best free healthcare ever.

His so-called foreign policy is a muddle-mess of threats of military domination mixed with isolationism. Listening to his brag about building the US military into the mightiest in the world, while promising to cancel trade agreements with our biggest trade partners, should be sending shivers down conservative’s spines, not a thrill up their legs. His constant promise to use that military to - “take the oil” from Middle-Eastern countries, is the kind of behavior that this country has always abhorred and stood up to.

Trump doesn’t seem to grasp…or care about our responsibilities or relationships around the world, and for that matter, neither do his constituents. After supporting Republican policies that have encouraged outsourcing American manufacturing jobs to less-developed countries, conservative are now talking like their pre-WWII political ancestors, longing for a self-contained America. Unfortunately, too much damage has been done in that respect, as big business has embraced the global economy and priced American workers out of the workforce. There’s no turning back now.

One prominent prophecy in the Bible about the antichrist is that his ultimate goal is the destruction of the nation of Israel. Allowing bully like Trump to ascend to the Oval Office, would be a prescription for international, as well as domestic confrontation. His inflammatory rhetoric alone would be enough to ignite hostilities around the world, and in particular the Middle East, where Israel would be quick to respond to any perceived acts of aggression. With so many countries possessing nuclear capabilities, this prophecy could be realized.

Today, Teddy Roosevelt’s advice of – “Walk softly, and carry a big stick”, is absolutely imperative. As we have seen from our ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003, sometimes it’s better to leave situations alone and moderate them with economic sanctions, not military intervention. We need to respect our relationships around the world, and more importantly, understand that our cultural and ideological differences cannot be changed by military aggression, which ultimately only exacerbates them. 

If the Democratic electorate continues to display the apathetic voting trends of the last several election cycles that allowed right-wing Conservatives to take control of our Congress, the possibility of an amoral, thin-skinned bully ascending to power could become a reality. If that happens, the biblical prophecy of an Antichrist rising up may be fulfilled.