Every generation has named its villain the Antichrist. Napoleon. Hitler. Mussolini. Henry Kissinger. Reagan. Obama. The list is long, and the accusers have always been sincere. I carry that history in mind as I write this. Accusations of this kind have a way of revealing more about the accuser than the accused — fear dressed as theology, politics baptized in apocalyptic language.

That caveat matters. Hold it in one hand.

I should also say plainly: I do not hold the Bible as literal truth. The mythology around the Beast and the end times belongs to a framework I walked away from long ago. And yet I cannot erase what lives in my body from childhood — the memory of my father, and other evangelical preachers, screaming and shouting from pulpits about the Beast and our absolute need to fear him. Those sermons landed somewhere deep, and they stay there, festering and poisonous, one of many layers of religious trauma I carry uninvited into my late sixties.

My father devoured Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth — the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s, twenty-eight million copies sold, Cold War anxieties mapped onto biblical prophecy. He studied its diagrams before he preached. I watched him. The charts surface in memory, unwelcome — a childhood residue I did not ask to keep. What strikes me now, from that distance, is this: Lindsey’s Antichrist — he called him the “Future Fuhrer” — arrives disguised as a global peacemaker. That was the central seduction the book described. Lindsey assumed the threat would come from outside America. A Soviet invasion. A European confederacy. He never imagined the pattern rising from within.

In the other hand, hold this: the texts were written as warnings for people with eyes to see a pattern forming — not a checklist to complete before anyone sounds the alarm. The Beast does not arrive fully formed. He arrives as a seduction. And the text was specific about what that seduction looks like.

Control of commerce. Demand for worship. Elimination of dissent. The consolidation of peace under a single name. The mark — the mechanism by which he decides who can buy and sell.

Now look at what we have documented, in real time, in the past twelve months.

Trump has weaponized tariffs as geopolitical coercion, made overt territorial claims on Greenland and the Panama Canal, and leveraged Venezuelan oil as a tool of economic dominance. He is attempting to control global commerce.

His cabinet meetings have become genuflection ceremonies. Grown men and women — secretaries of state and defense — competing to praise him in terms that make any normal person cringe. That is organized worship.

His Justice Department has become a personal weapon against named opponents: Eric Swalwell — currently running for governor of California — faces investigation. Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, is under investigation, and many others. 

He has directed federal agencies to ignore court orders. Courts have ruled many actions unconstitutional. He continues anyway. He is moving to nationalize voter records, taking direct federal control of the machinery of elections. He has spoken openly and repeatedly of pursuing an illegal and unconstitutional third term, citing popular will as a mandate. The people’s voice, in his telling, supersedes the Constitution.

He used regulatory leverage through his FCC chair to silence critics on late-night television. CBS canceled Stephen Colbert days after paying Trump’s foundation sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit, buying a merger approval in exchange. ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air after threats from the FCC. Networks now police themselves before the order comes. He dismantled Voice of America, America’s independent global broadcast presence.

He seized the United States Institute of Peace — a congressionally established nonprofit that operated in twenty-six conflict zones. A federal judge ruled the takeover illegal. He fired the board, eliminated the staff (one of whom is my close friend), and silenced the operations. Then put his name on the building in large silver letters: the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. Marco Rubio stood before cameras and declared, “President Trump will be remembered by history as the President of Peace.”

Here, the Revelation framework becomes most unsettling. The Beast does not arrive as a warmonger.

He arrives as a peacemaker.

That is the seduction Lindsey’s diagrams were drawn to describe.

When María Corina Machado won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her work against Venezuelan authoritarianism, Trump had publicly campaigned for the award himself, calling it “a big insult” if he did not receive it. Machado, needing Trump’s support for her country’s future, flew to Oslo, accepted the medal, then traveled to the White House and placed the physical prize in Trump’s hands — as a gift from the Venezuelan people. He smiled and kept it. The Nobel Institute had to issue a public statement: the prize cannot be transferred. Trump announced he was honored to accept it anyway.

Meanwhile, he joined with Israel to launch a surprise military assault on Iran on February 28 — during ongoing nuclear negotiations — killing the Supreme Leader and triggering a regional war now five weeks old and still escalating. Thirteen American soldiers are dead — thirteen among thousands across the region, including over 1,300 Iranians, 880 in Lebanon, and the school children of Minab. 

On the first day of the war, a U.S. Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab. The New York Times, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have all documented the U.S.’s responsibility. Iranian authorities report 168 killed — approximately 120 of them children between the ages of seven and twelve, along with their teachers and parents who had come to collect them after the first explosions. When asked if he would take responsibility, Trump said: “I don’t know about it.” He has told the Financial Times he intends to “take the oil in Iran” and is considering seizing Kharg Island, which handles ninety percent of Iran’s crude exports.

He is simultaneously moving to strip states of the authority to regulate artificial intelligence — suing resistant states into compliance, withholding federal funding from those who refuse. When Anthropic, the company behind the AI tools that I use daily, refused to allow its technology to be deployed for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, the Pentagon branded them a “supply chain risk” — a designation reserved for foreign adversaries — and ordered every military contractor to sever all commercial ties with them. A federal court later ruled this was illegal First Amendment retaliation. The administration proceeded anyway. Control who can do business with whom, and you control commerce itself.

He is enriching himself, his family, and his cronies by billions — through cryptocurrency ventures, sovereign wealth fund deals, and financial arrangements no previous president would have attempted in public. And the people who might challenge him — senators, network executives, federal judges, the Chair of the Federal Reserve — are watching their options narrow.

Two hands. History in one: accusers have been wrong before, and these frameworks have been weaponized for political ends for two thousand years.

In the other: a pattern forming in plain sight that the text was written to name exactly.

The Beast was never a monster arriving from outside the gates. He was the man who came promising peace, put his name on the buildings, placed the Nobel medal on his own desk, and made everyone afraid to say no.

And yet the world fearfully watches. My country, Spain — an outlier — has closed its airspace to American military planes. A handful of neutered senators demand answers about the school children of Minab. The resistance is minuscule — and it is losing. Some analysts say oil may cross $200 a barrel. Fertilizer prices are up fifty percent as spring planting season begins across the Northern Hemisphere. The World Food Programme is warning of crop failures. Sri Lanka is rationing fuel again. The Philippines has declared a national energy emergency. These are not abstractions. This is the cost of a war erratically launched during active peace negotiations, for oil, wrapped in the language of security and freedom.

Antichrist or not — the Beast is a useful metaphor for something that devours. Whatever we choose to call this, it is devouring us, and our world.