Which modern U.S. presidents did Edgar Cayce allegedly predict by name or description?

1. What Cayce actually said about presidential deaths and turmoil

The clearest, repeatedly cited Cayce text on political leadership is a reading widely summarized as predicting turmoil between capital and labor and “the second of the Presidents that next will not live through his office,” language commentators link to the assassination of a president (often retrofitted to John F. Kennedy) and an earlier death of another president in office ^[1]. Major secondary sources and Cayce compendia note that Cayce made warnings about domestic strife and predicted that two presidents would die while in office, but they do not record him naming modern presidents explicitly by full current names in the preserved public readings ^{[1] [5]}.

2. Common matches: Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy — how tidy is the fit?

Several histories and popular lists point to Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy as the pair most readers assume Cayce meant—Roosevelt as the president who died in office in 1945 and Kennedy as the one assassinated in 1963—because Cayce spoke of presidential deaths and national turmoil in the 1930s and 1940s ^{[1] [5]}. That fit depends on retroactive interpretation: Cayce’s phrasing was general and published summaries emphasize themes (financial collapse, world war, domestic division) that later readers mapped onto events and leaders after the fact, a common pattern in prophetic literature ^{[4] [1]}.

3. Modern attributions — Obama and Trump claims lack primary-source backing

Attributions that Cayce predicted Barack Obama’s election outcome or the rise of Donald Trump come mainly from blog posts, promotional websites and a handful of modern interpreters rather than from verifiable Cayce readings; for example, claims that “Obama will not be reelected” appear in tertiary summaries and are contradicted by historical fact and by the absence of such explicit phrasing in Cayce’s documented readings ^[2]. Similarly, recent online pieces asserting a 1944 reading foresaw Trump’s 2026 role are promotional reconstructions without citation to original transcripts and are published outside the Association for Research and Enlightenment’s standard archives ^[3].

4. Why these mismatches happen: translation, promotion, and hindsight

The sources show a pattern: Cayce produced thousands of trance readings often couched in metaphysical language; later authors, New Age promoters, and tabloids distilled them into punchy headlines—sometimes attributing specific names or partisan forecasts that do not exist in archived readings ^{[4] [6]}. The A.R.E. and sympathetic chroniclers highlight accurate-seeming hits (economic warnings, world-war anticipations) while critics and skeptics point out misses (Atlantis timelines, failed dates), producing a tangled record where selective quotation and hindsight mapping blur what Cayce actually recorded ^{[4] [2]}.

5. Balanced conclusion: description, not names, in the historical record

The most defensible summary from available reporting is that Cayce allegedly predicted presidential deaths and political turmoil that later readers associated with figures like Roosevelt and Kennedy, but there is no documented, contemporaneous reading in the mainstream Cayce archives that plainly names later 20th- or 21st-century presidents such as Obama or Trump by name; modern attributions to those figures derive from reinterpretation, blogging, or promotional agendas rather than clear primary-source text ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}. Where claims exist, readers should demand exact reading transcripts and scholarly A.R.E. references before treating modern-name attributions as authentic.