In case you didn’t notice, the Antichrist is back.
All right, forgive the hyperbole — this biblical agent of Satan hasn’t actually returned to lead a rebellion against God before Christ’s second coming. But in the year of our Lord 2026, a curious surge in chatter about this herald of the apocalypse seems to be underway.
A number of far-right dissidents, from Marjorie Taylor Greene to Nick Fuentes, are asking questions about whether President Donald Trump is more than he seems. “Could this be the Antichrist?” Tucker Carlson asked on his podcast. “Well, who knows?” It didn’t help when Trump posted an AI-slop image of himself as the Messiah, which he later claimed was meant to be a doctor. “Not saying Trump is the Antichrist,” conservative Rod Dreher told the Wall Street Journal. “But he’s radiating the spirit of Antichrist, no question.”
The antichrist talk is also taking off in the politics-adjacent tech world, where Palantir founder and conservative billionaire Peter Thiel has led a series of closed-door lectures on the Antichrist (and garnered the disapproval of the Vatican).
Scholars say that perceived antichrist figures tend to pop up in moments of collective crisis or despair. And there are certain traits that tend to supercharge these narratives: the presence of war, especially in the Middle East; economic or public health crises; political or societal instability; and the appearance of an unusually charismatic leader.
Needless to say, we were probably due for a revival.
What the Bible actually says about “the Antichrist.” It’s helpful to start by defining the Antichrist, since definitions vary across Christian denominations and traditions. Across the board, they are rooted in the interpretation of a relatively small number of biblical passages.
Catholic and mainline Protestant traditions tend to interpret these passages symbolically: The Antichrist is less a specific figure than a metaphor for un-Christian behavior or persecution of the church.
Some fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, however, interpret the Antichrist more literally: as a specific, evil figure whose arrival will precede the apocalypse and Christ’s return to earth. Israel is central to this interpretation because many biblical apocalyptic stories concern the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Global governance also features heavily, since the Antichrist assembles a global army for battle at Armageddon.
A brief history of antichrist panics. Given the vagueness of the source material, many historic figures have been tarred with the antichrist accusation. The turn of the first millennium CE saw one of the earliest surges, given the New Testament’s fondness for thousand-year periods and the violent and unstable nature of life in the early Middle Ages.
In the modern era, any charismatic figure who has presided over a time of upheaval, especially in the Middle East, has been targeted with antichrist rumors. Figures like Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin were all labeled Antichrists in their time; so were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Saddam Hussein, and Hillary Clinton.
But nobody has drawn more scrutiny than Barack Obama, whose message of international cooperation and outreach to the Muslim world made him a magnet for antichrist talk. (Racism also likely played a role.) In 2008, the co-authors of the Left Behind novels about the Antichrist actually had to step in to reassure their readers that Obama “did not fit the criteria.”
The end, again. The latest flare-ups fit into these traditions. In his antichrist lectures, Peter Thiel warns that efforts to regulate AI could bring about the conditions for a central power to seize global authoritarian control — a key theme in many antichrist narratives. Trump also fits the mold of historical antichrist hunts: He’s a charismatic leader who has launched civilizational wars in the Middle East, survived multiple assassination attempts, and blasphemed to advance his personal brand.
The problem with this type of apocalyptic discourse is that it risks further radicalizing American politics.
“This image sustains a crisis mentality,” said Robert Fuller, a religious studies professor at Bradley University. “It summons out hatred and resentment. … It makes compromise unthinkable since no one compromises with the devil.”
In other words, antichrist narratives are politically useful — and thus, very persistent. We’ll likely see many returns of the Antichrist, at least until the world does actually end.
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