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Why everyone is talking about the Antichrist

Are the end times here?

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 in a different context, where Palantir founder and conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel has been leading a series of closed-door lectures on the Antichrist (and garnering the disapproving attention of the Vatican). In a wild coincidence, his hypothetical Antichrist appears to be anti-tech people who annoy him.

The Antichrist or antichrist figures have long been a fixture in the minds of religious Americans and secular culture. This biblical figure is supposed to precede Jesus Christ’s second coming, near the end times.

Historically, many figures have been called antichrists, from the Middle Ages to modern times. There tend to be preexisting societal conditions that accompany these perennial panics.

We may be living through one now (as some on the right refer to Trump as such), but there are unique aspects to the modern American obsession with antichrists.

It’s the most the end times have saturated our political culture since the aughts, when the new millennium brought an explosion of renewed interest, spurred on by the apocalyptic Left Behind novels and related Christian media depicting a “realistic” modern Antichrist. Later on, former President Barack Obama became a fixation of related theories on the religious right depicting him as the Antichrist.

Scholars and experts on biblical writing and apocalyptic history say there’s a long history of perceived antichrist figures popping up in moments of collective crisis or despair in the western world. 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.

Yet just like in past periods of panic and perturbation over the centuries, there’s a lot of uncertainty in these discussions over who or what the Antichrist is, when this figure is to return, or even if this biblical character is supposed to be a real thing.

So it’s a good time to ask: Where did the idea of the Antichrist come from in the first place? How does it tend to manifest in politics? And what is it about our current moment that’s driving such renewed interest in the concept?

The biblical roots of the Antichrist

It’s probably helpful to start off with actually defining what the Antichrist is, and what the signs that believers in his arrival actually are.

Definitions vary across various Christian denominations and traditions, but they are rooted in the interpretation of a relatively small number of biblical passages that either use this term explicitly or get linked to the same figure.

Surprisingly, the term “antichrist” only........

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