How Fascism Works Now: A Note about Trump as the Healing Christ

Hidden in plain sight

The image of a youthful Donald Trump, laying his hand on the forehead of a sick or dying man has by now been interred in the meme graveyard. By the time you read this, another will have taken its place, and then another, and so on. That’s one purpose of the AI barrage:  misdirection. By attending to obvious outrages – the supposed blasphemy of an image of Trump as Healing Christ — the public is more likely to overlook bigger, but less promoted ones, like weakened pollution standards, cuts to disease research, and of course, war. But there’s another, equally important communication strategy at work, and it’s hiding in plain sight: insipidness or kitsch. That’s the language of fascism now.

Iconography

For all the controversy it generated, the meme is barely coherent. Trump wears a loose-fitting white toga beneath a red poncho, though the latter equally resembles a kimono (it has sleeves) and a golf sweater casually draped over the shoulders. Rays of light emanate from the head of the recumbent man, suggesting he’s the holy figure, and Trump only a nurse or nurse’s aide checking the patient’s temperature. The president holds a ball of light in his left hand, like Disney’s “Never-fairies” who catch and hold sunbeams.

Surrounding the sick or dying man are four other figures. Clockwise from upper left, a middle-aged man with baseball cap and neatly trimmed white beard and moustache – in queer parlance a “wolf” or “daddy”; a youthful, clean-shaven marine; a young nurse –miniscule compared to the gargantuan Trump; and another young woman of no evident occupation, with auburn hair parted in the middle.  Middle-aged or older women were not invited to this party — unsurprising given the host. Craggy, right-hands at lower left and right suggest two other men apparently kneeling, their heads below the level of the hospital bed. Are they orderlies cleaning the floor with their other hands?

Finally, there are the soldiers floating in the sky, like Napoleon’s troops entering Valhalla in the famous painting from 1801 by Girodet-Trioson. The one in the middle appears to be in retreat and in drag, wearing a crown like the Statue of Liberty and carrying two standards. Also in the busy sky are a pair of bald eagles and three jet fighters risking mid-air collision or bird-strike. Beneath are the Statue of Liberty, Lincoln Memorial and another classical-looking building in the left background – possibly an AI scrambled U.S. Capital.

The reason the image was controversial is because it was understood by some Christians to be blasphemous. According to the four canonical gospel books, Christ regularly healed the sick: “And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people” (Mathew: 4:23). His patients suffered from dropsy (edema), paralysis, blindness, and leprosy. Jesus also raised the dead.  To represent a politician – even a president – as Christ is not kosher. The first of the Ten Commandments reads: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”  A president who glows and heals by touch is godly.

The association of Jesus with a doctor or healer is fundamental to Christian pictorial iconography. Among the earliest depictions of Jesus, preceding even scenes of crucifixion, is as a healer. The Catacombs of Peter and Marcellinus in Rome (4^th C. CE) contain a fresco

illustrating an episode from the book of Mark (the earliest gospel book): “And a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years. And had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse.” (Mark 5: 25-26). After kneeling and touching the hem of Christ’s toga, she was cured.

More than a thousand years after the Catacombs painting, the subject was still securely embedded in Christian iconography.  There are innumerable examples, including El Greco’s Christ Healing the Blind (c. 1570) at the Met, illustrating passages from John (9:1-41) and Mark (8:22-26).  It shares with the Trump meme the motif of hand touching forehead with classical architecture and sky in the background – but no Airforce jets.

Given Trump’s frequent promises to devise a health insurance plan better than Obamacare, it’s understandable he would claim that the controversial meme concerns his medical, not spiritual prowess. He told an interviewer: “It’s supposed to be [me] as a doctor making people better. And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.” According to the president, the image shows him miraculously healing the American “people” – the body politic – not just a single, recumbent person.

A few days later, Trump undercut his own protestations against the charge of blasphemy by posting another meme. This time, he himself was not Jesus, just a man chosen and touched by Jesus. It’s a bust-length, double portrait of a white-berobed Jesus with left arm extended around the president’s shoulder and right hand on his chest. Like Christ, Trump’s eyes are closed or downcast, as if in prayer or asleep. (The photo-source must have been a cabinet meeting.) The gauziness of the image is purposeful — either Trump dreams of Christ, or Christ dreams of Trump.

In composition, the second image resembles Friedrich Overbeck’s Italia und Germania (1828), a painting that celebrates the supposed closeness of two cultures. During the 1930s, the work became an emblem of the German/Italian, Nordic/Mediterranean/ Nazi/Fascist alliance.  It was also taken as an example of healthy, German art in contrast to the “entartete” (“degenerate”) art of modernists like Picasso, Chagall, and Modigliani.

Nazi prototype for the healer and savior

Though many national leaders and dictators have used the language of medicine and salvation as political metaphors, few did so as frequently or consequentially as Adolf Hitler. He was specifically described as “arzt der Deutschen volk” (doctor of the German people) and liked to be photographed laying hands upon the sick or injured, caressing the hands or heads of small children, and in at least one case, taking a child’s pulse. In his autobiography and manifesto, Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler wrote about “social disease,” “moral disease,” “political disease,” and “hereditary disease.” It was the task of the true leader —Hitler himself — to “recognize the nature of the disease…and seriously try to cure it.”

Hitler and his followers turned these metaphors into reality. They believed Jews, Bolsheviks, queers, Roma, the mentally ill and physically disabled were a pox on the national body and had to be excised – by genocide, so-called euthanasia (the cruel murder of people with disabilities or heritable diseases) and forced sterilization. And just as Hitler saw himself as a physician, he also understood himself as savior of the German people and nation. “We are admittedly small in number”, he wrote in 1919, soon after leaving military service: “But once another man stood up in Galilee, and today his teaching rules the whole world.” Later, he prophesied that after his death, he’d be described as: “A man who never capitulated, who never gave up, who never made compromises, who knew only one goal and the way toward it, who had a great faith named ‘Germany’.”  What Christ began, this imagined, future biographer would write, “Hitler, would accomplish.”

Trump’s association with Hitler – indeed his cribbing of the Fuhrer’s speeches – is well documented. In  2024, at a  Veterans Day rally in New Hampshire, Trump vowed to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country.”  Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “[The Jew] remains the eternal parasite, a sponger who, like a terrible bacillus, spreads out more and more as soon as a favorable medium invites him to do so.”  Two decades later, near the end of World War II, Hitler looked back over the previous years and summarized his aims: “To exterminate the vermin throughout Europe.”

Insipidness or kitsch as form and meaning

The president’s 2024 speech about “vermin” and others like it – and the current Trump/Jesus memes — are provocations, what child therapists call “attention-seeking behaviors.” For Trump and his regime, they are also a shell game, as suggested earlier, misdirection that hides from view some of the most vicious programs and policies the nation has ever known. But the social media and other Trump imagery should also be understood as part of a larger representational apparatus encompassing presidential portraits, banners, rallies, posters, stamps, coins, White House gilt decoration, the planned ballroom, triumphal arch, and NFTs. The last of these include corny and absurd depictions of the rotund, near-octogenarian president as cowboy, king, mobster, boxer, motorcyclist and action hero.

A recent Department of Labor social media campaign is equally corny and contemptable. It features images – suitable for printing as posters – of mostly white, male and blond workers and families. Recalling Norman Rockwell paintings, Nazi posters and Soviet socialist realism, they suggest that the future will soon resemble an imagined American past of unquestioned patriarchy, patriotism, Christian faith, white supremacy, and conjugal (nuclear) families.  Like the Trump/Christ memes, they have attracted considerable, negative publicity.

All these images celebrate stereotype and cliché, in a word, kitsch — and everyone knows it. They thus invite audiences to believe they have been made privy to a media strategy – as indeed they have. They are insiders let in on a joke told at the expense of others: Democrats or political progressives, Black people, Latinos, immigrants, queers, or women.  The stigmatizing is obvious to all.

Trump’s offensive and insipid meme crusade therefore – like his kitschy White House gilding, gigantic ballroom, triumphal arch and all the rest — does its ideological work not by asking its audience to admire or accept the offensive messaging, but by inviting them to understand the game being played, the better to gratify their individual powers of aesthetic and political discernment. In short, they are asked to become absorbed in the works, and to naturalize them. That’s how fascism enters the house of capitalist democracy – through the front door.

What Trump and his enablers discourage is any criticism of the president’s policies or the man himself, except perhaps sniffing at his mischief. And that’s why the Trump as Healing Christ meme was quickly withdrawn from view — it failed to be entirely insipid. Whereas kitsch offers seamlessness (false resolution of contradiction), this image, as suggested earlier, was awkward and jarring, patched together like bricolage.  Its personages were hard to peg; its clichés threatened to collide – like the bald eagles and jet fighters. Its religious meaning was worse than offensive – it was unclear. The fascist image must be whole and complete; this one was cracked. So, the regime itself, bogged down in a foreign war, freighted by elevated prices, reduced health care, and rising insurance rates, risks the wrath or worse, disengagement of its faithful.

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