You are mistaken...If Satan can lift us Christians off the face of the earth while we least expect it, and open the grave and resurrect the dead, you may have an argument...
The Rapture is something God does...Not us...If Satan can pull that off, who's he going to resurrect...Did God give Satan the authority to Rapture the Christians to deceive the Christians???
they will reason, that the seemingly benificent false substitute for Christ cannot be Antichrist, and their times cannot be the Tribulation, because the Rapture has not taken place.
I'm confident that those familiar with the Bible will have no doubt they they are going thru the Great Tribulation when it happens...
Your reasoning is faulty. Satan deceives through falsehoods, including misreadings of the Holy Scriptures (while it was Shakespeare who wrote that the devil can quote Scripture, the notion is Scriptural—the Evil One quotes Scripture in his temptions of Christ).
The notion of a ‘pre-tribulation rapture’ is a 19th century innovation. Before then, no Christian, Orthodox, Latin, monophysite, Nestorian, Anglican or protestant (of any variety) believed the Scriptural passages adduced to support it referred to anything other than the experience of Christians alive at the time of the General Resurrection, which is after the tribulation described in the Apocalypse of St. John. Doctrines that were manifestly not held by the Holy Apostles have a really strong track record of being false, and the ‘pre-tribulation rapture’ is plainly not an Apostolic doctrine.
My point is not Satan will deceive with a false rapture, but rather with the absence of a rapture at the time those who believe the false doctrine of the ‘pre-tribulation rapture’ expect one.