Evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump to be president, and polls indicate that they haven’t wavered in their enthusiasm for President Trump and the GOP despite the opinion of a growing majority of Americans that, because of his “many scandals after only one year as president” and because of his “manifest unfitness for high office, Mr. Trump is easily the worst president in U.S. history,” as one national poll concluded.
This has led political scientists and pollsters to wonder why Mr. Trump can still count on his base of evangelical Christians even though his behaviour is obviously unchristian. According to the president’s many critics, his mendacity, sexism, racism, bigotry, narcissism, and personal wealth all indicate that Donald Trump has no interest in even appearing to care about the Christian message, and yet the most vocal American Christians flock to Trump and to the Republican Party, which has so far shielded Mr. Trump from impeachment proceedings.
Mr. Birdbrain, a televangelist in Kentucky and author of 4,012 books on evangelical Christianity, held a press conference in which he announced that he believes evangelicals support Donald Trump precisely because they think he’s “not just a God-awful president and an abysmal human being,” but “the Antichrist in the flesh.”
When asked why so many supposedly earnest Christians would intentionally cheer for the Antichrist, whereas the New Testament is widely interpreted as preferring Christ to Satan’s earthly representative, Mr. Birdbrain said, “The Antichrist is close enough. I mean, we’ve been waiting a long, long time for Jesus Christ to return. It’s been over two thousand years and the Bible says he was supposed to come back before the first generation of his followers died. He’s evidently been delayed, to say the least, and many Christians now are getting impatient.
“So when we see the Antichrist, Donald Trump, in our very midst we figure, well, it’s only four letters away from ‘Christ,’ right? You take away the ‘anti’ and lo and behold, you’ve got the Christ. We’ve been waiting too long and Antichrist is close enough to Christ. That’s why Trump has my unconditional support and I know I speak for tens of thousands of my evangelical congregants.”
Leon Birdbrain went on to explain that he wears an upside down cross around his neck for similar reasons. “Once again, it’s simple: it’s close enough. You just turn the cross around 180 degrees and you’ve got the old-time cross, so I’m still in God’s good graces.”
According to Mr. Birdbrain, if President Trump does manage to destroy the planet, “it will be close enough. Christians have been waiting a long time for God to destroy human civilization to install his divine kingdom, so if the Antichrist accomplishes that in God’s absence, because of whatever’s been delaying Jesus Christ for so long, evangelicals will be fine with that. Either way, we’ll have a wrecked planet, so what’s the difference who pulls the trigger? Hopefully at that point God will finally step in to fix things and everything will be good as new. Like Satan, the Antichrist is being used by God anyway, so it’s all good.