U.S President Donald Trump holds a Bible outside St. John's Church, in June, 2020, in Washington.Patrick Semansky/The Associated Press
It was easy to miss, at least for those whose interests do not include both the end times and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Late last year, controversial UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell, who once said he would “take a bullet” for Donald Trump, urged his social media followers to read, from the Book of Revelation, a verse about the healing of a beast with a mortal wound to one of its seven heads.
“The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast,” says the verse, which is typically read as a description of an antichrist.
“I do think that Donald Trump is that beast of Revelation 13:3,” said the Arkansas-born Mr. Mitchell, who also goes by the name “Thug Nasty.” He has raised high the Bible at the end of fights and calls the book “the most accurate historical document that ever existed.”
The U.S. President, Mr. Mitchell wrote in another post this week, “is an antichrist of Revelation.”
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On Tuesday, Mr. Trump joined a week-long event organized by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, reading an Old Testament passage in which God promises to heal the land of those who “humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways.” Other Bible readers included members of Congress, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet.
In and around the White House, the Trump administration has frequently espoused Christian ideology. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth leads prayer services. Later this year, Vice-President JD Vance will publish a memoir titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. On social media, Mr. Trump has portrayed himself as both a messianic healer and a leader anointed by Jesus Christ.
But the increasingly overt displays of presidential religiosity have coincided with a very different assessment of Mr. Trump from devout voters, some of whom have questioned their faith in a leader who has backed away from his campaign promises, including his pledge to keep the country out of wars in distant countries.
Last week, influential podcaster Tucker Carlson cited a passage from the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians about the “man of lawlessness.” That man, Mr. Carlson said, “will pose as God. He will mock other gods and put himself in their place.”
In drawing a parallel to a man whose agenda he once promoted, he continued: “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?”
It was a clear indication that Mr. Trump’s religious rhetoric has, for a subset of people who voted for him, had unintended consequences.
“There are things that Trump has been doing in his second term that are starting to really bother those evangelicals that supported him,” said André Gagné, the chair of the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University, who has closely studied the politics of religion in the United States.
“They’re starting to wonder: Was Trump really chosen by God? Or did we vote for someone that is actually the Antichrist?”
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner prays during a Cabinet meeting with Mr. Trump at the White House in February, 2025.The Associated Press
Such concerns have done little to prompt Mr. Trump to alter course. Instead, he and those close to him have brought Christian oratory into some of the most important decisions of his second term.
At the outset of the U.S. war on Iran, the U.S. President’s religious confidant, Franklin Graham, son of famed evangelist Billy Graham, tweeted a request for prayers for Mr. Trump ”and that the people of Iran will be set free from the bondage of Islam.”
It amounted to framing the strikes on Iran “as a kind of religious existential war,” Prof. Gagné said. In the Old Testament, the “Prince of Persia” is a demonic entity that has asserted control of earthly territory.
In that sense, war with Iran is “a kind of answer to the prayers of Christians,” Prof. Gagné said. Success could clear the way for a great awakening in which billions convert to Christianity.
The notion that Mr. Trump has been ordained by the heavens gained credibility among some believers when he survived an assassination attempt with little more than a superficial wound.
That “propelled to another level the explicit association of Trump with divine destiny. Since then, many of his supporters describe him as a messianic figure,” said Victor Gaetan, a journalist who has covered the Holy See and authored God’s Diplomats: Pope Francis, Vatican Diplomacy, and America’s Armageddon.
The President and his cabinet have subsequently used ”religious language to insulate themselves from criticism,” Mr. Gaetan said.
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While many American leaders have leavened their speech with religious allusions, Mr. Trump has taken the familiar invocation of “God bless America” and turned it into a claim that his administration has been uniquely blessed by the divine, said Kate Ward, a theological ethicist at Marquette University who teaches about U.S. Catholicism.
The notion that “God is on the side of this administration and its choices is really new − and troubling,” she said.
Instead, for some of the devout, Mr. Trump’s recent actions have cemented questions about a president who has also sneered at the Pope and threatened the erasure of Iran’s entire civilization, rhetoric that ”strikes so many people as being unhinged, inappropriate and even un-Christian,” Mr. Gaetan said.
Because Mr. Trump “was never a very devout person, perhaps he does not even understand that people of true faith consider Christ a figure who transcends politics.”