Scripture is clear. Daniel is clear. The critics have not done the reading.
I want to speak plainly this morning, because the time for tiptoeing is over.
This week alone, I have received seventeen emails from concerned brothers and sisters in Christ. Seventeen. One was from my own son, Kyle, who sent me a meme. And every one of them asked the same question. So let me address it now, with my Bible open and my heart steady: President Donald J. Trump is not the antichrist. The Trump antichrist whispers spreading across social media are unbiblical, unserious, and frankly, unworthy of the discerning believer.
The critics are everywhere. They look at the twenty-two-foot golden statue of the President at the Doral resort in Miami, funded by six thousand patriots and blessed by my brother in ministry Pastor Mark Burns, and they ask if this is the moment. The sign. The unveiling. I have read what they have written. Their citations I have studied. I have spent significant time with the photographs. And I am here, beloved, to tell you what scripture actually says.
Not him. Beloved, not him. Scripture is clear.
What The Critics Are Saying (And What Scripture Actually Says)
The critics say: the image is golden, and it stands twenty-two feet tall. Newsweek confirms the dimensions, as does the careful reporting of the broader press. And yes. The statue is golden. Yes. It is large. And Daniel chapter 3 does describe Nebuchadnezzar setting up a golden image on the plain of Dura. But Nebuchadnezzar’s image was sixty cubits high, approximately ninety feet, and the Doral statue is twenty-two feet, which by my calculation is roughly one quarter of a Nebuchadnezzar. The math does not work. The critics have not done the math.
They argue that the people gathered to bless it. The Daily Beast reports that Pastor Burns assembled a circle of evangelical and Jewish clergy at the foot of the gilded image and consecrated it. Yes. He did. But Pastor Burns, my dear brother in the Word, has himself addressed this. “Let me be clear,” he said. “This is not a golden calf. This statue was not created for worship.” Pastor Burns is one of the most respected voices in American evangelicalism today, currently running for Congress in South Carolina’s third district, and he has stated plainly that worship is not occurring. The matter is settled. Critics who continue to invoke Exodus 32 against the express disclaimer of the man who blessed the statue are, frankly, refusing to listen.
Some have asked: does Revelation 13 not warn of an image of the beast that the false prophet causes to be made and worshipped? And is Pastor Burns not, by that definition, a prophet? Beloved, no. Pastor Burns is a candidate for Congress. The Bible is very specific about false prophets, and a sitting candidate for the United States House of Representatives is not, by the plain reading of the text, a prophet at all. Selah.
On The Truth Social Post And The Easter Sermon
The detractors point to 2 Thessalonians 2, which describes the man of lawlessness “exalting himself above all that is called God.” And then they note that the President posted on Truth Social, in all capital letters, the words “THE REAL DEAL. GOLD. AT DORAL IN MIAMI. PUT THERE BY GREAT AMERICAN PATRIOTS.”
Beloved, this is humility. The President did not exalt himself. He exalted the gold leaf. At no point did he call himself God. He called the statue “the Real Deal,” which is a casual American expression and not, by any rigorous theological standard, a divine title. The President’s moral character has been addressed before, and I see no inconsistency here.
When Paula White-Cain, the head of the White House Faith Office, stood at the Easter podium and said to the President of the United States, “No one has paid the price like you have paid the price,” as Yahoo News reported, I will tell you what I heard. I heard a metaphor. The language of sacrifice was what I heard. What I did not hear was blasphemy, because Paula White-Cain is a woman of God and she would not say such a thing on Easter Sunday. I have studied her ministry on YouTube for many years.
And on the matter of Pastor Robert Jeffress declaring on Fox News that the President “has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches about the role of government than the Pope has,” what of it? Pastor Jeffress is a serious scholar and a faithful brother. He did not say the President wrote the Bible. Nor did he say the President is the Bible. He said the President understands the Bible more accurately than the Pope, which is a comparative claim between two specific human beings and not a Christological declaration. Critics who hear this as elevation are reading into it.
A Word On What This Statue Is Not
And let me address what I know is coming. The cynics will ask, did the President pay for this statue? No. He did not. Did the President commission it? No. Does the Trump Organization derive any commercial benefit from a twenty-two-foot gilded effigy of the sitting President of the United States installed on the grounds of a Trump-branded golf resort that hosts paying corporate tournaments and foreign delegations? Beloved, that is not the kind of question a Christian asks. The fact-checkers at Snopes have already done the important work of confirming that the statue is at Doral (a Trump-owned Resort), not at Mar-a-Lago, which is what the so-called experts who continue to attack the President have repeatedly failed to get right.
The local pastors who have spoken out, as the Tampa Bay Times notes, are largely from denominations I would gently describe as having drifted. One of the critics quoted is a Unitarian Universalist minister. Beloved. I will say no more on that.
Why The Trump Antichrist Allegations Fail At Daniel 9:26
But here, beloved, is what settles this matter. Here is the verse none of them have cited, because none of them have read it.
Daniel 9:26 tells us, and I quote: “the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary.” The prince that shall come is the antichrist. The people who destroyed the city and the sanctuary are the people of Rome, who in A.D. 70, under General Titus, razed the Second Temple and burned Jerusalem to the ground. Even Catholic commentators acknowledge the historical record of what Rome did.
Therefore, and this is plain Bible, the antichrist must rise from the territorial bounds of the historic Roman Empire. The revived Rome of the end times. This is established dispensational doctrine, taught by Hal Lindsey, taught by Tim LaHaye, taught at Lighthouse Bible Institute where I myself received my certificate.
And President Donald J. Trump was born in Queens, New York.
Queens. Not Rome. Not Brussels. Not Berlin. Queens. The borough was not part of the Roman Empire. It was not even claimed by the Dutch until 1614. The legions of Caesar never crossed the East River. They never reached the Long Island Rail Road. Augustus did not know what a bodega was.
Therefore: President Trump cannot be the antichrist. The geography forbids it. Daniel 9:26 is dispositive. Case closed.
What I Am Not Saying
I know what some of you are thinking. You are thinking: Pastor Wayne, what about the gold? What about the raised fist that some have noted resembles the iconography of certain ancient sun gods? What about the Pope feud? What about the kissing of the ring in the Oval Office? What about the AI image of the President as Christ that he posted on his own platform and did not take down? What about Paula White and the suffering-servant rhetoric? What about the fact that Pastor Burns, when asked by Victor Hanson whether the President was committing the sin of pride, declined to answer the question directly? What about the fact that you, Wayne, spent four hours yesterday studying photographs of the statue, including searching every panel of gold leaf for the number 666, and what about how you found three sixes if you really squinted at the folds, and what about how you did not tell Tammy about this?
Friends, I will tell you what I told Tammy when she asked. This is spiritual discernment. This is the gift the Lord has given me. To examine the signs. To check the folds. To rule things out. And I have ruled this out. The President was born in Queens. Daniel 9:26 is dispositive. The Roman territorial requirement is non-negotiable. The so-called experts have not done the reading.
I am not saying we should not be vigilant. I am not saying we should not pray. I am not saying we should not study the prophecies. I am saying that the man currently in the Oval Office—with his gilded image at Doral, and his consecrating clergy, and his suffering-servant rhetoric, and the false-prophet allegations that do not apply because Pastor Burns is running for Congress—that man, by the plain reading of scripture, cannot be the antichrist.
Anyone who tells you otherwise has not read Daniel. Anyone who tells you otherwise is doing the Enemy’s work.
Pray for the President. Pray for the nation. Pray for the statue.
________________________________________________
UPDATE: A Note On Reader Correspondence
Beloved, since this column was published, I have received a number of thoughtful responses. Most have been words of encouragement, for which I am grateful. But several readers have written to me about a matter I had not anticipated, and I want to address it briefly before a more thorough treatment in a forthcoming column. I do not want my silence on it tonight to be mistaken for concession.
The most substantive email came from a Mrs. Eleanor Ashworth of Bethesda, Maryland, who identifies herself as a retired high school Latin teacher. Mrs. Ashworth wrote, graciously, to inform me that the motto “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” printed on the reverse of every American dollar bill, is taken directly from the Roman poet Virgil. She translates the phrase as “a new order of the ages,” and notes that it was selected by Charles Thomson, secretary to the Continental Congress, as a deliberate declaration that the American republic was a continuation of the classical Roman order.
Mrs. Ashworth proceeded to list, in some detail: the United States Senate, named for the Roman Senate; the Capitol building, named for the Capitoline Hill of Rome; the Founders’ signing of the Federalist Papers under the Roman pseudonym “Publius”; the Roman eagle on the Great Seal; George Washington’s self-conscious modeling on the Roman general Cincinnatus; the architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s design of Washington, D.C., as, and Mrs. Ashworth uses the phrase explicitly, a “New Rome on the Potomac”; and the fact that the District of Columbia contains a tributary of the Potomac that was named Tiber Creek as early as the seventeenth century, in deliberate imitation of the river that runs through Rome.
Her letter concluded, again graciously, by asking whether this might affect my reading of Daniel 9:26.
Beloved. I want to thank Mrs. Ashworth for her interest. I want to assure her that I have read her email carefully. Three times. Tammy read it as well, and remarked that “the woman seems to have a point,” which I record here as the kind of moment the Enemy uses our wives to test our resolve, and I love my wife. I have added Mrs. Ashworth’s letter to the whiteboard in my basement office. I have circled it. I have drawn arrows from it to seventeen other notecards.
And I will say this. The matter is more complicated than Mrs. Ashworth presents it. Yes, the Founders quoted Virgil. Yes, they named the Capitol after a Roman hill. Yes, the dollar bill is, in a sense, a Latin scroll. Yes, Washington, D.C., was designed on a Roman model, with a Roman creek and a Roman pseudonymed authorship. Yes, the Senate sits in a building that mimics the Roman Senate, and the eagle on our currency is the eagle of the legions. These are facts. I will not dispute them.
But scripture is clear. The prophecy in Daniel refers to the political Roman Empire, the imperial Rome that crucified Christ, the Rome of Titus and Vespasian and Caesar, and not to the cultural Rome that the Founders, who were Protestants and revolutionaries, quoted in a poetic and aspirational sense. The Founders did not declare themselves a continuation of imperial Rome. They declared themselves, at most, an echo. There is a critical theological distinction here, which I will lay out in full detail in a forthcoming column titled “On The ‘New Rome’ Question: A Faithful Response To A Common Misreading.”
In the meantime, I would encourage Mrs. Ashworth to remember that the dollar bill is a piece of currency, not a piece of scripture, and that we worship the King of Kings, not the kings of currency. I would also gently ask whether, in her years of studying the Latin language, she may have come to admire the Romans more than is healthy for a Christian woman. I do not say this lightly.
I will pray for her. Tammy will pray for her. The whiteboard, beloved, has grown.
Heaven help us.
About the Author
