Trump is right: He is MAGA’s Jesus

In a sign of how disorganized the White House is, they can’t even settle on a single lie to deny Donald Trump‘s god complex. On Sunday, the president posted artificial intelligence-generated fan art depicting himself as Jesus Christ healing a sick man while being worshiped by white Americans in modern clothing. When this drew criticism, even from some of his biggest sycophants in the punditry, Trump deleted the post. Then the conflicting excuses began.

“I think the president was posting a joke,” JD Vance argued on Fox News. The vice president, who is promoting a new book titled “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” added that Trump “likes to mix it up on social media.”

But the president long ago stopped pretending he has a sense of humor, so he offered an even dumber cop-out. “I thought it was me as a doctor,” he claimed, insisting that only “fake news” would see the image as Christ rather than, uh, something “to do with the Red Cross.”

Readers can study the image and decide for themselves, of course. Trump is portrayed wearing a white tunic and a red mantle, as often shown in renderings of Jesus, while rays of light emanate from his hands. No one other than saints or the Great Physician himself are depicted this way, a fact the president — who enjoys the best medical care while depriving millions of their health coverage — surely knows. 

These laughable excuses were only rolled out because the post drew a rare rebuke of Trump from conservative Christian pundits and leaders. In some cases, the criticism was blistering, with words like “blasphemous” and “demonic” coming from people who usually defend the president’s most depraved behavior as godly. This, along with Trump’s subsequent deletion of the post, led to a wave of coverage suggesting that, to paraphrase a headline from Gizmodo, their faith in Trump might finally have broken.

At the (extremely low) risk of being proved wrong, I’ll predict it hasn’t. A couple of spicy words on social media mean nothing, especially from people who spend their days online, trolling for attention. The responses from prominent right-wing voices were mostly muted. Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles gently asked Trump to “delete the picture, no matter the intent.” Popular Christian influencer Brilyn Hollyhand, while calling the image a “gross blasphemy,” reminded the president “You don’t need to portray yourself as a savior when your record should speak for itself.”

One gets the sense that most evangelical influencers weren’t really angry so much as they were embarrassed that Trump said the quiet part out loud: He has supplanted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior.

MAGA leaders love to praise Trump’s bluntness when he’s attacking their presumed enemies, but they expect him to be a little more circumspect when assessing the character of the people who follow him. That is a huge miscalculation. Trump eventually betrays everyone who shows him loyalty, so it should have come as no surprise that he couldn’t help but strip away the pretense that their faith is about following the teachings of Christ. In the corny AI language so loved by MAGA, Trump told the truth: What the Christian right worships is power.

After all, in the days leading up to Easter, evangelical minister and White House spiritual adviser Paula White gave a speech comparing Trump to Jesus while he nodded along. Progressive Christian podcaster Tim Whitaker outlined how the president has enjoyed a decade of this treatment from evangelical leaders, who continuously compare him to biblical figures like King David and regard him as a savior sent by God to redeem the nation and usher in the end times.

“Christian nationalists built the throne,” Whitaker said, “and now they’re acting shocked that he sat on it.”

Trump’s post came immediately after another of his diatribes on Truth Social, this time aimed at Pope Leo XIV, the American-born pontiff who has implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — criticized Trump for his violent deportation campaign against immigrants and for starting an unnecessary war with Iran.

“If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” he complained, attacking the pontiff for being “WEAK on Crime,” and advising Leo to “get his act together as Pope.”

Trump’s post likening himself to Jesus came nearly a year after he posted a similar AI picture of himself as, who else, the pope. This, too, was excused as a joke. But his critique of the pontiff suggests that it was not — that he does indeed think he would be better at the job of than Leo.

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As for the world’s second-most famous Catholic, he has defended Trump’s attack on the pope. JD Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, during a time when he was being heavily bankrolled by esoteric Catholic billionaire Peter Thiel. In a Monday interview with Fox News, the vice president scolded Leo, saying he should “stick to matters of morality” and “let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”

Plenty of people have objected to Trump’s policies and conduct. Innocent civilians being bombed in an Iranian school and shot on the streets of Minneapolis are indeed grave matters of moral concern, they have argued. But anyone fluent in the language of the Christian right knows that, in their worldview, “morality” is limited to a certain range of issues, such as controlling the sexual behavior of women and LGBTQ people. The same belief, though, isn’t applied to straight men, as seen by evangelicals’ lack of concern over not just Trump’s adulteries, but also the many credible accusations of sexual violence against him. Under this model, the killing of Renee Good for protesting the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers doesn’t fall under the pope’s purview, but her widow’s lesbian identity does.

Here is what will almost certainly happen next: Since the Trump-as-Jesus picture was deleted from his Truth Social feed, MAGA influencers will promptly return to offering him over-the-top worship. They are already praising the president for taking the post down, declaring how “impressed” they are with him  and characterizing his swift action as “amazing.” (Meanwhile, his Trump-as-pope picture is still up.) While this little public relations hiccup might damper their rhetoric for a few weeks, evangelical leaders will soon return to comparing him to biblical figures and claiming he has been chosen by God.

I don’t claim to be a prophet. This is predictable because the Christian right is really not about worshipping God — it’s about worshipping power. In the Christian tradition, Jesus is the conduit to God for the faithful. In the MAGA movement, Trump serves a similar role. He connects his followers not to the Almighty, but to what they really want: control over American government and society. And there is nothing the president could do that would cause the Christian right to lose their faith in him.

The post Trump is right: He is MAGA’s Jesus appeared first on Salon.com.