An article titled Trump, the God has been circulating online. It was written by Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. He has taught at Columbia, NYU, Princeton, and the University of Toronto. The piece calls the President of the United States a cult leader by name. It compares him directly to Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite. It dresses the comparison in the clinical vocabulary of psychologists and sociologists, and it is being shared widely by intelligent, well-educated readers who believe they have finally found the explanation for what is happening to America.

They are right that something unusual is happening. They are wrong about what it is.

And they are not the first to try this particular attack.

An Eleven-Year Pattern of Failed Attacks

For eleven years, a large and well-funded coalition of media, academic, and political voices has been trying to end the public career of Donald J. Trump. They began in June 2015 and they have not stopped. They tried Russian collusion. That investigation ran for years, cost tens of millions of dollars, and produced no charges against the man himself. They tried impeachment. Twice. Both attempts failed, and both times his base grew. They tried indictments in four different jurisdictions. He was reelected while the trials were pending. They tried to strike him from the ballot in state after state. The Supreme Court unanimously stopped them. They tried, on at least two occasions, outright assassination. He is still here.

Chris Hedges is not introducing a new argument. He is adding another paragraph to an eleven-year chorus that has failed every test it has been subjected to. The cult-leader framing is simply the current shape of a campaign that has already tried every other shape and failed. It will fail too, for the same reason the others failed. The truth is not on its side, and the scriptures are not either.

The Marring Is Happening in Real Time

Isaiah described the latter-day servant this way:

The Lord Himself repeated the prophecy in the Book of Mormon:

The word "marred" in Hebrew carries the sense of disfigured, ruined, reduced in reputation. The prophecy is not about a man who will be politely disagreed with. It is about a man whose name will be dragged, whose image will be distorted, whose every public move will be framed as evidence of madness, corruption, or tyranny.

Look at the headlines from the last ten years. Look at the language. Look at the intensity. The marring is not a metaphor. It is a daily project conducted by some of the most talented writers in the country, and it has been going on so long and at such volume that the prophecy has been fulfilled in plain sight. I have written at greater length on why a destroyed reputation is itself a required feature of the last-days servant, and the Hedges article is simply the newest entry in a file that is now decades deep.

The piece does not offer direct evidence that President Trump has done the things cult leaders do. It offers associations. Jim Jones did this, and here is a superficial trait that can be applied to Trump. Reverend Moon did that, and here is another stretch. The author never has to prove anything. He simply places the names next to each other often enough that the reader's mind does the fusing for him.

What the Accusations Actually Say

Consider the specific charges.

Hedges says cult leaders impose dress codes on their followers. The implication is that Trump does the same. There is no Trump dress code. There is no uniform. Tens of millions of Americans who support this President dress however they want, work in whatever profession they choose, and attend whatever church they wish. The author has to reach all the way to the evening wear at a private club to make the charge stick, and even then he is describing a social setting, not a demand imposed on a movement.

Hedges says cults are characterized by rampant sexual abuse and pedophilia, and by proximity invites the reader to apply the charge to Trump. No such proximity exists. There has been no pattern of sexual abuse discovered among his followers. There has been no evidence of coercion, trafficking, or child exploitation tied to the movement he leads. The charge is constructed entirely from inference. The technique is to describe the crimes of Jim Jones in graphic detail and then place Trump in the same paragraph, hoping the reader's emotional reaction does the rest.

The article mentions Epstein. The suggestion is always the same. Trump knew him. Trump was seen with him. Therefore the reader should suspect. But if Donald Trump had been on the client list in any meaningful way, the Democratic Party would have produced the evidence years ago. They have had every motive in the world to destroy him, every federal agency at their disposal for four full years, and billions of dollars in coordinated media support. They have produced nothing. That silence is not the silence of a cover-up. It is the silence of a search that came up empty.

This is what the whole article is. Inference, association, and mockery. It is the lowest form of public argument dressed in the highest form of vocabulary, and the dressing is what persuades educated readers to share it.

A Conversation This Afternoon

I want to share something that happened to me this afternoon, while I was already working on this article.

A man came into my Facebook group repeating the same kinds of charges I have just walked you through. Trump and Epstein. Trump and corruption. Trump and the long list of inferred sins that never seem to come with a citation. I responded to him directly. I told him that if any of it were true in any meaningful way, the Democratic Party would have produced the evidence years ago. They had every motive, every agency, and every ally in the press working in their favor. They produced nothing.

He pushed back for a while. And then he did something I did not expect. He admitted that he had no proof. He admitted it in writing, in a public thread.

And then he turned it around. He told me I had no proof either.

I told him what I do have. I have a personal experience in which God instructed me to write what I have learned about the prophecies of the last days. I told him I had no expectation he would read it, but that he was welcome to. And I asked him, now that he had admitted he had no evidence for what he was saying, to please stop saying it.

I do not know whether he will stop. But I watched the pattern collapse in real time. The accuser had nothing. He admitted it. And the moment he admitted it, he tried to drag me into the same emptiness, as if a man with nothing and a man with something are both standing on the same ground.

They are not.

They Think They Are Above It. They Are Below It.

Here is where the prophetic lens changes everything.

The authors of these attacks believe they are rising above the unwashed masses who support this man. They believe they are the clear-eyed adults in a room full of brainwashed cultists. They believe their education, their sophistication, and their access to academic vocabulary place them on higher intellectual ground than the ordinary Americans they are describing.

In reality, they are standing exactly where the scribes and Pharisees stood when they called the Savior a deceiver. They are standing exactly where the religious establishment of Nauvoo stood when they called Joseph Smith a fraud. They are standing exactly where Pharaoh's court stood when they mocked the Hebrew with the stutter who claimed to speak for God. Every one of those people believed they were above the events they were judging. Every one of them was, in scriptural reality, beneath the event they were living through, blind to what God was actually doing in their generation.

I have written separately on how hatred itself functions as a spiritual blindfold, because that is really what is happening here. The contempt came first. The argument was built afterward to justify the contempt.

The Book of Revelation gives this kind of accuser a specific name:

The Joseph Smith Translation places this verse at the very center of the book of Revelation. It is the hinge on which the entire last-days prophecy turns. At the moment the Kingdom of God is established, the accuser is cast down. Every voice that has spent years accusing God's chosen servant will one day find itself on the wrong side of that turning. Not because God is vindictive, but because accusing the servant God sent has always been the same sin as accusing God Himself.

Your Bible. Your Eyes. Your Decision.

I want to close carefully, because I know what a reader of the Hedges article is thinking by now. He is thinking that a writer who disagrees with Hedges has simply pointed to his own religious promises and offered them as a replacement. Believe my story instead of his, the reader is supposed to conclude, and everything will work out.

I am not asking you to believe my story.

I am not asking you to follow anyone. I am not asking you to join anything. I am not asking you to send money, attend a meeting, cut ties with your family, or trust me with anything more than the time it takes to check my sources.

The scriptures quoted in this article were written between two thousand and twenty-seven hundred years ago. Isaiah wrote in Hebrew in the eighth century B.C. The Book of Mormon prophets wrote on plates buried in the ground centuries before any of us were born. The Apostle John recorded the book of Revelation while exiled on a Greek island two thousand years ago. None of them had any idea Donald Trump would exist. None of them had any stake in modern American politics, or in my reputation, or in yours.

Either their words describe the pattern we are living through or they do not. That is something you can check for yourself. You do not have to trust Chris Hedges, and you do not have to trust me. You can open your own Bible. You can read the text. You can ask whether the servant described there looks more like the man in the White House or the men accusing him.

If, after you have read them, you see what I see, that recognition will not have come from me. It will have come from the text itself, which has been in front of all of us the entire time. If you remain unconvinced, I have still done my duty by placing the scriptures in front of you. The rest is not my responsibility, and it is not Chris Hedges's either.

It is yours.

It always was.

Kelly Smith is the author of The First Horseman: Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy. He is a lifelong student of biblical prophecy and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.