Donald Trump Is Not Jesus
This just in, the president posted an image depicting himself as the messiah, and took it down giving a lame excuse for why he posted it.
If there’s one thing Donald Trump knows how to do, it’s troll the Left. Unfortunately for him, his latest effort also angered many on the Right.
On Sunday night, he posted an AI-generated image of himself in a white-and-red robe, healing a sick man, surrounded by adoring people, including a nurse and other figures, and images of the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, eagles, and fighter jets. It was a ridiculous caricature of Trump, typical of some of the “Christian” imagery found on some outlying social media sites.
According to The Daily Wire, “The image appears to have originated on social media in February when conservative social media personality Nick Adams shared it on X with the caption, ‘America has been sick for a long time. President Trump is healing this nation.’”
Trump posted the image to infuriate leftists, which it did. He loves making them lose what’s left of their minds. Yet as I noted, he also got a lot of well-deserved blowback from his allies. There were many Christians and other conservatives on social media criticizing Trump for overstepping and offending. Some called it blasphemy.
Naturally, the media asked him about it after he took down the post. “Normally, I don’t like doing that, but I didn’t want to have anybody be confused,” Trump said of deleting his post. “People were confused.”
“It wasn’t a depiction,” he added. “I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one.” Meaning the Jesus connection. “You had the Red Cross right there, you had, you know, medical people surrounding me, and I was like the doctor, you know, as a little fun playing the doctor and making people better,” he continued. “So that’s what it was viewed as.”
There’s no red cross in the image, though Jesus is the Great Physician. And it wasn’t “only the fake news” — I just noted that a lot of conservatives thought it was bad form.
I don’t believe that Trump didn’t make the connection between this image and Jesus, he just didn’t expect to anger his own base. And he thought the same kind of excuse you’d hear from a teenager would absolve him?
If you’re not a Christian, you may be wondering why this was a big deal.
I guess the first thing I’d say is imagine if he had posted a picture of himself as Mohammad. There would already be a fatwa out on his life. Christians aren’t making death threats; they just wanted him to take it down and apologize.
Trump doesn’t do apologies. It’s one of the many pieces of evidence that he is not a Christian. I know some will disagree with me, but I just don’t see any evidence that he is repentant of his sins, or regenerate and born again.
Well, he has a spiritual adviser in the White House, you might say. Yeah, I don’t see any evidence that Paula White-Cain is a Christian, either. In fact, she recently compared Trump to Jesus in some very misguided ways.
“Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price,” White-Cain told him during an Easter event at the White House. “It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested, and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you.” She added, “Because of His victory, you will be victorious in all you put your hands to.”
If Trump has the impression that he’s just like Jesus, maybe it’s because his spiritual adviser is telling him so.
There are other problems here, too. Trump has a bad habit, going back to his first term, of saying something incredibly stupid and derailing the news cycle, often shooting himself in the foot after doing something good. In recent days, his team has been working to reach a satisfactory conclusion in Iran. Now this.
Meanwhile, Trump has also been in a tiff with the pontiff. Pope Leo issued some not-so-veiled (and also misguided) criticism of the president, and Trump doesn’t take such things lightly.
I’m Protestant, so you can take my views of the pope and his status accordingly, but my advice to the president is simple: Don’t pick a fight with the leader of the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church and follow that up by posting a picture of you as Jesus.
Last year, Trump also posted an AI-generated picture of himself as the pope, so I guess there’s that. Did I mention that JD Vance and Marco Rubio, among others in Trump’s administration, are Catholic?
Arguably, the only thing the president achieved here was to give the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd justification to say, See, we told you so! He thinks he’s the messiah! He’s ushering in a Christian nationalist theocracy!
Whatever, guys.
Trump is only human, of course. He’s a 79-year-old New Yorker with a particular sense of humor, too. If I’m charitable, the old guy found the AI image amusing and didn’t think twice before posting it. We’ve all said or laughed at something that, in hindsight, we regret.
If I’m less magnanimous, I think Donald Trump — and not a few of his supporters — have a very wrong view of his status. There are dangerous aspects of a personality cult at play here, and sometimes he drinks his own Kool-Aid.
It really didn’t work this time.
On a closing note, along the lines of AI and Jesus, there’s a company offering people a deal to talk to an AI-powered Jesus for just $1.99 per minute. The good news is that anyone can talk to the real Jesus — for free. All you have to do is start.
