The false prophet Trump and the ghosts of Epstein: between Armageddon and the day of reckoning
Today I am providing my English translation of an article by Margherita Furlan, originally in Italian and published on AntiMafiaDuemila.com on Tuesday 10th March 2026.
(All formatting original, footnotes mine).
America is not seeking regime change in Tehran. It is looking for a Badoglio1. A presentable figure who will sign Iran’s unconditional surrender and hand it over to the White House photographers, preferably with a handshake on the aircraft carrier. It doesn’t matter who it is, as long as they obey. The doctrine is as old as it is brutal: whilst peoples succumb, the signatures at the bottom of the treaties are simply changed. But whilst Washington seeks its Persian puppet (we shall see soon enough if it has found one), Donald Trump is changing the American regime. And he is doing so with a radicalism that no serious analyst can any longer downplay.
The therapeutic monarchy
Congress has been reduced to an advisory body. The Supreme Court is circumvented or ignored. The government swings between seasoned opportunists such as Marco Rubio, who frames the war in textbook neocon terms whilst disguising it as a civilising mission; fervent loyalists such as Pete Hegseth, who has turned the Pentagon into a prayer room; and ambiguously silent figures such as J.D. Vance, whose loyalty is all the more suspect for being so rarely declared. Trump wants to be free from the Constitution. He answers, he says, to his own morality and his own spirit. We are faced with a model unprecedented in American history: the theocratic president-king, a sovereign who does not merely invoke God as a rhetorical device – as his predecessors did – but who presents himself as a direct instrument of divine will. And since we are in America, a country founded on the religion of itself, the Trumpian revolution needs no external justification. It proclaims itself on a heavenly mission. This is confirmed by the evangelical preachers who, on 5th March [2026], laid hands on Trump in the Oval Office, praying for the success of the war against Iran, in a scene proudly shared by the official White House account.
The crusade catechism
The figures speak for themselves. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation – an organisation founded by former Air Force officer, Mikey Weinstein – received over two hundred complaints from more than fifty military installations, across every branch of the armed forces, within five days of the start of operations against Iran. The testimonies are chilling.
One non-commissioned officer put his complaint in writing. During a combat readiness briefing, his commander urged those present not to fear the ongoing hostilities, presenting them as part of a divine plan. He made explicit reference to the Book of Revelation, Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He concluded by stating that Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to set Iran ablaze with the mark of fire that will bring about Armageddon and signal his return to Earth”.
This is not an isolated case. On 6th March [2026], thirty Democratic MPs wrote to the Inspector General of the Department of Defence calling for a formal investigation. The letter is explicit: military commanders are presenting operations in Iran as the fulfilment of biblical prophecies, in breach of the Department’s guidelines on religious neutrality and the abuse of command authority. The MPs have asked for an investigation into whether Hegseth’s eschatological rhetoric has spread down the chain of command, contaminating operational communications.
And the chain of command is, in fact, saturated with such rhetoric. Senator Lindsey Graham has publicly declared that the current conflict is a “religious war” destined to determine the course of the Middle East “for a thousand years”. House Speaker Mike Johnson has described the Iranian faith as a “misguided religion”.
Rubio spoke of “lunatic religious fanatics” in power in Tehran. Hegseth dismissed Iran as a regime obsessed with “Islamic prophetic delusions”. The US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee invoked Israel’s biblical right to control much of the Middle East. Trump’s mirror did not warn him of the deadly irony: he denounces the “Iranian theocracy” whilst building an evangelical theocracy in Washington. And in Tehran, it is not the Imamite theologians who are in charge but the Pasdaran – the Revolutionary Guards, a military-industrial institution far more pragmatic than American propaganda is willing to admit.
The Nationalisation of Jesus Christ
We are witnessing something unprecedented in recent American history: the explicit nationalisation of evangelical Christianity as State doctrine and the foundation of military action. George W. Bush let the word “crusade” slip in 2001, and the White House was quick to correct him. Today, the crusade is the official agenda. [US War Secretary Pete] Hegseth has institutionalised monthly prayer sessions at the Pentagon. He has invited Doug Wilson, a pastor who has made a name for himself through his opposition to women’s suffrage and his support for an overt Christian theocracy, to join him there. He has personally attended weekly Bible studies at the White House, led by a preacher who is convinced that God requires America to offer unconditional support to Israel. The eschatological convergence with the Israeli far right is perfect. [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu invokes Amalek – the biblical lineage that God commands to be annihilated, every man, woman, child and animal – to justify military operations in Iran, just as he did with Gaza. Trump is the armed wing of prophecy. Together they form the God-blessed alliance. But with a contradiction that the mirror does not show: many among the American evangelicals who support Israel with apocalyptic fervour are staunch anti-Semites. Christian Zionism does not stem from love for the Jews, but from the theological necessity of the Jews’ return to the Holy Land as a precondition for Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. After that, in the evangelical vision, Jews who do not convert will be damned. A detail that Netanyahu knows perfectly well and chooses to ignore.
Two Zionisms, two Messiahs, one Greater Israel
To understand the underlying structure of the Washington-Jerusalem alliance, it is necessary to dispel a fundamental misconception: Christian Zionists are not Christians in the historical sense of the term. They are something new, a theological-political hybrid that has bent American evangelical Christianity to a specific geopolitical function. And their alliance with Israeli religious Zionism is built on a deliberate misunderstanding — a tactical convergence between two mutually exclusive eschatologies. Christian Zionism stems from a literal reading of the Book of Revelation, the prophet Ezekiel and Genesis. The prophetic sequence is rigid: the Jews must return to the Holy Land, re-establish the State of Israel within its maximum biblical borders — from the Nile to the Euphrates, the Greater Israel of the Abrahamic promise — and rebuild the Third Temple on the Temple Mount, where the Esplanade of the Mosques with the Dome of the Rock stands today. Only then will the battle of Armageddon take place and Christ return to Earth for the second time. Evangelicals therefore await the second coming of Christ — the glorious return of the Messiah who already came and was crucified two thousand years ago. Israel is the necessary instrument of the prophecy, not the end. Jews are the indispensable extras in a Christian drama. And this is where the theological chasm opens up. For Judaism, Jesus of Nazareth is not the Messiah. He never was. The Jewish Messiah has not yet arrived — he is awaited for the first time.
The Israeli religious far-right — that of [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and [Police Minister Itamar] Ben Gvir, of the settlers and the messianic rabbis who today influence the Netanyahu government — shares with American evangelicals an obsession with Greater Israel and the Third Temple. But for opposite reasons: the reconstruction of the Temple and the restoration of the biblical borders are the preconditions for the arrival of the first Messiah, the one whom Christianity claims to have already identified and whom Judaism has rejected for twenty centuries.
The two trajectories converge on one point — Greater Israel, the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, war as prophetic fulfilment — and diverge on everything else. For Christian Zionists, the finale involves the conversion of the Jews or their eternal damnation. For Israeli religious Zionists, that finale simply does not exist: the Evangelicals’ Christ is a false prophet.
Netanyahu knows this. So do all the Israeli leaders who cynically and pragmatically accept the support of the sixty to seventy million American Evangelicals, their electoral clout, the billions of Dollars in military aid, and the guaranteed votes in Congress. The theological showdown is postponed until the end of time — and in the meantime, they cash in on bases, weapons and diplomatic cover. It is the greatest strategic misunderstanding in the modern history of religions: an alliance between two messianic visions which, if taken to their logical conclusion, would annihilate one another. Then there is a third spectre: the original secular Zionism, that of [Theodor] Herzl, [David] Ben-Gurion, the kibbutz and the reclamation of the desert. A nationalist and colonial project, not a religious one. Herzl did not pray for the Third Temple — he wanted a refuge-State for the persecuted Jews of Europe, and even considered Uganda as an alternative to Palestine. That Zionism has been progressively devoured by the rise of the religious far-right, which today dictates the Israeli government’s line. Smotrich and Ben Gvir are not Herzl’s heirs: they are his negation. For them, Greater Israel is non-negotiable because it is not a political matter — it is a divine matter. And it is this eschatological convergence — two incompatible messianisms united by the urgency of war — that makes the current crisis qualitatively different from any previous Middle Eastern conflict. We are not dealing with a classic geopolitical calculation, however cynical. We are faced with two theologies that use geopolitics as a prophetic tool. And when prophecy guides strategy, compromise becomes heresy. Proclaiming “God is with us” reveals the degree of alignment between American and Israeli leaders. At war for Our Lord against the Devil — whether he is called Amalek in the Hebrew Bible or the Antichrist in the Christian Apocalypse. Two names for the same enemy: Iran, the Persians, the Islamic world. And behind them, for those who can read the map, anyone who opposes Greater Israel and the American hegemony that guarantees it.
The Pentagon advised against it, Trump attacked
Meanwhile, fragments of another truth are emerging. The American media are publishing excerpts from the report in which the Pentagon had advised against an attack on Iran. Military intelligence had assessed the risks of an uncontrollable escalation, the logistical vulnerabilities in the Strait of Hormuz, and the inadequacy of an air campaign without defined strategic objectives. Trump ignored it all. The United States is experiencing a change of season marked by the principle of contradiction: yes heralds no, and vice versa. The Stars and Stripes’ non-strategy had its heyday when overwhelming power could afford to get everything wrong before getting the right move right. But that time is over. You cannot rule the world by looking in the mirror without looking out of the window. And if you believe yourself to be the Supreme Being’s envoy, you cannot do otherwise, for you would succumb to earthly temptations.
The ghosts of Epstein: the skeleton in the White House’s closet
And this is where the most troublesome ghost of Trump’s America enters the scene: Jeffrey Epstein.
On 30th January 2026, the Department of Justice released over three million pages of documents, two thousand videos and one hundred and eighty thousand images under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by Trump himself in November 2025. The total number of documents released amounts to around three and a half million pages. Trump’s name appears over three thousand times.
The White House has proclaimed that the files “exonerate” him. The reality is more complicated.
On 6th March [2026] – just as American bombs were falling on Iran – the Department of Justice published sixteen additional pages that had been “erroneously classified as duplicates”. These were three FBI memoranda dating from 2019, containing transcripts of interviews with a woman who accused both Epstein and Trump of sexual abuse she suffered when she was between thirteen and fifteen years old. According to her account, Epstein took her to a building in New York or New Jersey, where he introduced her to Trump. The allegations are detailed and serious, though they remain unsubstantiated. The fourth interview with the FBI was shorter: the woman asked the agents what was the point of speaking out, given that the statute of limitations had likely expired.
The politically explosive aspect is not only the content of the allegations, but the dynamics of their concealment and release. An NPR2 investigation found that dozens of documents were missing from the public database. Democratic Representative Robert Garcia accused the Department of Justice of illegally shielding the president. Even today, at least thirty-seven pages remain untraceable. The victims’ lawyers have highlighted massive redaction errors: at least forty-three full names of victims were exposed, including over two dozen who were minors at the time of the abuse. The Wall Street Journal documented home addresses visible in keyword searches. The 30th January [2026] release was described by the victims’ lawyers as “the most serious violation of victims’ privacy in a single day in US history”.
The international scope is significant. The political fallout from the files has already led to criminal investigations in three cases: former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, charged with aggravated corruption; Prince Andrew; and British politician Peter Mandelson, whose email exchanges with Epstein suggest the sharing of sensitive British government information. UN experts have described the files as “credible evidence of large-scale, systematic abuse, trafficking and exploitation of women and girls” which could amount to sexual slavery, enforced disappearance, torture and femicide.
War as a diversion?
Timing is everything in politics. Republican Representative Thomas Massie – the same man who had pushed for the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act – wrote on X the day after the bombing of Iran began: “Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files disappear”. The timing is hard to ignore. The files most embarrassing to Trump – those containing allegations of child abuse – were published just as global media attention was focused on Iran. A journalist from The Hill described the Epstein files as “the political albatross hanging around Trump’s neck”, comparing them to the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s emails due to their potential to destroy the president’s credibility. But America is the country that has elevated mass distraction to a form of governmental art. And a war – especially a holy war – is the perfect diversion. If God has chosen you as an armed prophet, who would dare to question you about your dealings with a paedophile who died in circumstances that have never been clarified?
Prophets without a calling to martyrdom
And yet, whatever the military outcome of the crusade, one fundamental fact remains: the biographies of the two leaders – Trump and Netanyahu – rule out any calling to martyrdom, at least to their own. Both have built careers on the art of the comeback and the retreat disguised as victory. The language is eschatological, but the men who utter it are deeply earthly: a casino builder and a politician on trial. Neither fits the profile of a martyr — if anything, that of a salesman who raises the price knowing he must close the deal. It would come as no surprise to see them suddenly veer from end-of-the-world warfare to prosaic pragmatism. To a compromise with reality that might push them towards a dirty truce disguised as total and definitive victory, as was the case after the Gaza campaign. After all, Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates remains a utopia even for the most fanatical of the settlers: turning prophecy into a borderline would require the military conquest of half the Middle East. And not even the sixty million American evangelicals would be enough to man that front. But the problem with instrumental messianism is that sometimes the instrument slips out of one’s hands. Once you have told your commanders that war is God’s divine plan, you cannot stop without admitting that God has changed his mind. Once you’ve convinced seventy million evangelicals that Armageddon is underway, you cannot declare a ceasefire without appearing a false prophet. And when you’ve founded an alliance on two incompatible eschatologies, the first to reach a compromise will betray the other — and their own God.
If the eschatological spiral were to continue to its logical conclusion, then the apocalyptics would have been right. Posthumously.
Meanwhile, the Epstein files lie on the table like a corpse at a banquet. The war in Iran rumbles like the thunder meant to mask its stench. And America, a prisoner of its own mirror, fails to notice that the window is open. And that the world is watching.
Copyrighted images have been used for non-commercial purposes and fall within the scope of fair use.
Pietro Badoglio (1871-1956), Italian Military General Officer and Marshal of the Royal Italian Army from 1916 to 1943 during both World Wars and Prime Minister of Italy from 1943-1944. He signed the Italian armistice with the Allies in World War 2 - Wikipedia
National Public Radio