In a seven-minute video posted to X on Tuesday, a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives made a shocking declaration. “This is a message to all of God’s children in our country,” said William Upham. “We must defend ourselves against all enemies. We are at war with evil. This is a war between God and the Antichrist. There is no doubt in my mind that the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is the Antichrist. He is a false Messiah, and he is your enemy, and he must be killed.”

An ex-Marine who received a medical discharge in 2025, Upham is running as a Republican write-in candidate in Florida’s Fifth Congressional District. He is one of three Republican challengers to incumbent Rep. John Rutherford (R) in the August 18 primary.

Given his status as a write-in candidate, Upham is likely not a serious contender for the seat, but his provocative social media video has propelled his “normal Joe” campaign into the national spotlight. Provocative, however, does not always mean profound. Here, many of Upham’s ideas remain muddled and half-formed.

Upham sets up his argument by establishing that the “principle of defending others, especially the innocent and the vulnerable, is seen in the Bible in many passages.” As examples, he cites Mordecai’s edict in Esther 8:11 and Nehemiah’s exhortation to the armed wall-builders in Nehemiah 4:13. “Although self-defense is not explicitly endorsed, it is implied through these passages and should be used to protect the innocent and vulnerable,” Upham argues. “Violence should never be used for evil purposes, such as vengeance or plunder.” His explanation of self-defense is biblically grounded and properly nuanced — a good start.

Without any further attempt to draw a connection, however, Upham moves straight to his main assertion, “We must defend ourselves against all enemies. We are at war with evil. This is a war between God and the Antichrist. There is no doubt in my mind that the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, is the Antichrist. He is a false Messiah, and he is your enemy, and he must be killed.”

This attempts to leap a logical chasm and falls short, plunging into a canyon of error. Upham applies the principle of self-defense against physical harm (or rather, half-applies it) to spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is real, but it is not fought with physical weapons. Worse, Upham invokes self-defense as a justification to attack a government official, who is tasked with bearing the sword for the same sort of restraint against evil (Romans 13:4).

Upham once again cites Scripture for support, or at least for context. “In [Second] Thessalonians chapter 2, verses 3-12, [the] Apostle Paul describes the man of lawlessness, otherwise known as the Antichrist, as someone who opposes God, worships himself, and claims to be God,” Upham explains. “In Revelation chapter 13, verse 1-8, John describes the Antichrist as a ruler backed by Satan who demands to be worshiped, blasphemes God, and wages war on our saints.”

While plunging into a canyon of fallacy, Upham is at least intelligent enough to realize that claims must be supported by warrants, so he offers two pieces of evidence that Trump is “the Antichrist.” First, “President Trump posted an AI-generated image of him in the likeness of Jesus Christ.”

Upham instinctively recognized Trump’s AI image as blasphemy, and he correctly associates blasphemy with the Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:4) and the beast (Revelation 13:7), whom he takes to be the same person. But it seems like hyperbole to call someone the Antichrist for blasphemy alone, when other markers will accompany him. His worldwide rule will compel “all who dwell on earth” (Revelation 13:8) to worship him, but Trump was shamed into deleting the image after public pushback.

Second, Upham adds, Trump “has also criticized the pope.” This is a far less serious charge because the pope is a human being, as sinful as any other. It is also a strange concern for anyone concerned about the Antichrist to express. There are Christians who actively look for the Antichrist and Christians who revere the pope, but those Venn diagrams do not overlap.

Because of these two facts, Upham concludes, Trump “is nothing like Jesus Christ.” Again, criticism of the pope does not support this conclusion because Jesus also criticized religious leaders (Matthew 23).

Upham continued, “All of these Antichrist descriptions describe President Trump. If you disagree with me, you must ask yourself, is your perspective clouded by MAGA ideology? Are you worshiping a false idol? Is President Trump anything like Jesus Christ?”

Christians can agree that President Trump often shows an ungodly character. We can even agree that Trump wrongly exalts himself and is on the road to hell unless he repents. That does not make him the Antichrist.

One detail that Upham failed to highlight is the fact that the beast of Revelation 13 is “allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them” (Revelation 13:7). Upham reasons that, if Trump is the Antichrist, then this proves he is at war with the saints. But he fails to elaborate on what Trump has done to war against the saints.

Undeterred by these oversights, Upham continued to press his apocalyptic case. “The book of Revelation is occurring right now. America is Babylon. God and his angels have condemned our country because we are drowning in sin,” Upham announced.

At this point, Upham almost (almost) began preaching, “Who are we now? We are selfish, worshiping ourselves and false idols, not showing love or kindness to our fellow American[s], and treating life without love or dignity. Instead of remembering our Founding Fathers’ intention as a nation under God, we have lost sight of God and treated him like he was an accessory. We have become too proud to be an American and not proud enough to be God’s child.”

The argument here fails to cut one way or another. Is Upham condemning civic religion or endorsing it? He wants America to be a nation under God, yet he wants Christians not to take pride in being American. Make a choice. (It might be inconvenient to point out here that the words “under God” were not added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954; they were not original to the founding era.)

Upham’s conclusion was equally confusing. “I ask this question to all of you: is it too late for us to turn from our sins? Is it too late for America? My answer is no, it’s not too late. The lamb will be sacrificed to pay for all of our sins. And our country will be saved from the Babylon that we have become. President Trump is the Antichrist, and he will be killed and sent to hell. God will prevail against evil.”

There are many Christians asking whether it is too late to save America, and who tremble with fear when they read of God’s judgment on sinful nations. But most Christians would see widespread revival — even an awakening — as America’s only hope. Upham concludes that America can be saved by the death of a single villain, without providing any explanation for how this would work.

Ironically, Upham justifies this with biblical allusions that associate Trump with Jesus — the very thing he condemned Trump for doing. “The lamb will sacrificed to pay for all of our sins” sounds very much like, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). It also sounds like the prophecy of Caiaphas, “it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish” (John 11:50).

It’s worth noting that Upham slightly tempers his language here. Whereas earlier Upham declared that Trump “must be killed,” here he says that “he will be killed.” The former could sound like a threat or an incitement to violence. The latter, in context, sounds like a patient reliance on God’s judgment.

Perhaps this distinction informed the Secret Service’s vague response, “The U.S. Secret Service is aware of the comments made by a congressional candidate in Florida, and we investigate anything that can be perceived as a threat toward one of our protectees. Out of concern for operational security, we do not discuss matters of protective intelligence.” (The U.S. Marine Corps was more forthright in denouncing his “disturbing statements.”)

In either case, Upham’s interpretation veers far from the biblical interpretation. In verses Upham omitted, John concludes his vision of the beast with “a call for the endurance and faith of the saints”: “If anyone is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes; if anyone is to be slain with the sword, with the sword must he be slain” (Revelation 13:9-10). When the Antichrist comes, Christians will not overcome him through force of arms; they will be trampled underfoot. But, when Jesus returns with his heavenly army, he will capture (not kill) the beast and throw him “alive” into the lake of fire” (Revelation 19:20). No killing necessary.

Upham’s message also serves a very different gospel than the one taught in the Bible. “President Trump will never bring us together like God intended,” he laments. But God never promised to bring Americans together; God only brings together those who believe “in Christ Jesus,” reconciling them “in one body through the cross” (Ephesians 2:13-17). Upham is also not concerned with saving souls from eternal destruction but with saving America from — well, that’s never made clear. Division? Lack of kindness?

Although he plays up Christian themes, it is difficult to place Upham in any particular Christian tradition. He leans heavily into a dispensational interpretation of the Antichrist. He places the pope above criticism. He lifts phrases like “all of God’s children” from Martin Luther King, Jr. Who is this guy?

Again, he cites chapter and verse four separate times but forgets to say which letter to the Thessalonians. He makes a nuanced argument for self-defense, quoting obscure books like Esther yet misapplies well-known images like the sacrificial lamb. He mispronounces Nehemiah (“neh-heh-MEE-uh], stumbles over the word “blasphemes,” and then clearly interprets the confusing vision of Revelation 13. Is there any pattern at all in these inconsistencies?

I must confess that, even as a professional pattern-spotter (what else are journalists, really?), I almost despaired of finding a pattern here. I nearly concluded that Upham was simply an independent thinker trying to articulate a biblical worldview without the indispensable support of a local church. Apollos benefited from the insight of Priscilla and Aquila, who “took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately” (Acts 18:26), while Upham clearly has no such teachers. Perhaps Upham concocted his beliefs from a hodgepodge of personal instincts, cultural influences, and various online teachings (such as, perhaps, an insightful article on self-defense).

If so, the moral of the story would be how essential it is for fledgling believers to grow up into maturity in the nourishing environment of the local church, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Ephesians 4:14).

But then, I stumbled across an explanation at once more enticing and disturbing. Perhaps Upham did not write his speech at all; perhaps it was written for him by AI. It would explain a lot: the inconsistencies in style, the drawing from contradictory Christian traditions, the strange omission of “Second” Thessalonians, the logical inconsistencies, and the absence of any coherent vision or worldview. The more this author reread Upham’s words, the more sense this explanation made.

Yet this explanation is also the most disturbing. If true, it would mean that any AI user (which could be anyone) could ask the soulless computer program to give a biblical justification for assassinating the president. And it would mean that, instead of rejecting the request, reporting the user to authorities, or refuting the proposition, the soulless computer program would say, “Sure, here’s a 500-word essay.”

How much more frightening is the prospect that nowadays people can be “tossed to and fro” not by the waves of a false doctrine, but by imprecise ripples of no doctrine in particular, but an incoherent mashup of doctrines, plausibly articulated not by “human cunning,” but by soulless artifice.

As suggested above, Upham is likely not a serious contender for Congress, but his video does signal a serious problem. No one can know for certain the state of another’s soul — certainly not the soul of a complete stranger. But it is obvious when a sheep is wandering from the fold. Christian readers of good conscience, pray for William Upham. Whether he is currently a believer or not, pray that he would find a church where he can sit under biblical teaching, that the steady flow of gospel truth, year in and year out, may insulate him from the perplexing waves of error.