End Times prepper and unsuccessful congressional candidate Michael Snyder is the latest conservative Christian figure to blame the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the U.S. on the Trump administration’s proposed Middle East peace plan. Snyder’s Friday column in Charisma reminds readers that in January he called the proposed deal “the biggest mistake that Trump has made in his entire presidency” and warned that it would curse the U.S.
Snyder says he was “deeply, deeply grieved” by the fact that many evangelicals supported Trump’s plan, saying, “I knew that would mean big trouble.”
“Now here we are, less than three months later, and churches all across America have been shut down by this coronavirus pandemic,” Snyder writes. “Do you actually believe that this is just a coincidence?”
“Is it not just a coincidence that this coronavirus pandemic is hitting the United States much harder than anyone else?” Snyder asks, noting that the more than 600,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. is far more than any other country.
Snyder offers 10 examples that he says were signs of God’s judgment on the U.S. for actions toward Israel, beginning with the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident that occurred two days after the Egypt-Israel peace treaty was signed in Washington, D.C.
As Right Wing Watch has reported, Snyder is an anti-flouride and anti-vaccine activist who has appeared multiple times on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars. In 2016, he called Hillary Clinton a modern day Jezebel and said the election was God’s “final test for America.” After the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Snyder speculated—against all evidence—that it had been carried out by antifascist activists as “an attack on Trump supporters.” Snyder ran and lost in the 2018 Republican primary in Idaho’s 1st Congressional District.
Others who have blamed the pandemic on U.S. efforts to encourage Israel to give up land in return for peace include End Times author William Koenig and the American Pastors Network’s Sam Rohrer.
Among religious-right figures, there are many competing interpretations of the meaning and purpose behind the COVID-19 pandemic, from a biowarfare weapon meant to destroy the Trump presidency to an instrument of God to push people toward the church for an End Times revival. This week, Florida-based televangelist Candice Smithyman said the coronavirus is a “demonic stronghold from ancient Egypt.”
