President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself depicted as Jesus Christ, drawing bewilderment and outrage just a week after his spiritual advisor compared him to the Christian figure.
The image, shared on Trump’s Truth Social page, depicts the 79-year-old president in attire reminiscent of Biblical times, appearing to heal a sick man as he places his hand on the man’s forehead. The image also includes political and patriotic references, such as the American flag, military jets flying overhead, and national monuments like the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial.
The clear reference to Trump as a healer, like Jesus, drew quick condemnation, even from some MAGA influencers. Several hours after posting the controversial image, the president had taken it down.
Standing next to a DoorDash worker who had delivered McDonald’s to the Oval Office on Monday, President Trump tried to dismiss the reference to Jesus. He told reporters, “I thought it was me as a doctor…I make people better.” He added, “Only the fake news could come up with that.”
Bishop Joseph Tolton, a former pastor and executive director of Interconnected Justice, told theGrio that Trump’s Truth Social post is “sacrilegious” and an “insult to the Christian faith to the point that faith becomes unrecognizable.” However, contrary to Trump’s explanation for the post, Tolton believes it was meant to send several political messages at a time when Trump is publicly beefing with the Pope, engaged in a war with religious undertones, and still facing political headwinds over the Epstein files, among other signs of the president’s waning political power.
“To make yourself equal to God…the blasphemy is towering,” said Tolton, who argued Christian figures like Paula White, who said Trump “paid the price” as Jesus did with his life, and Franklin Graham, who said “God has raised [Trump] up for a time such as this,” are displaying “the hypocrisy of white Christian nationalists,” which he said “out measures the blasphemy here.”
By standing by Trump—as he embraces comparisons to Jesus, threatens to kill the entire Iranian civilization, and makes historic cuts to health care and social services that many poor and vulnerable communities need to survive—Tolton explained, “They have clearly displayed a total lack of reverence for the deity and the divinity and the sacredness of the person of Jesus Christ.” He added, “It just absolutely dilutes any sense of spiritual authenticity that they even may have tried to still claim. At this point, they are a spiritless movement.”
U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who serves as senior pastor of the historic church of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, said of Trump’s Truth Social post: “To the Christian leaders who carry water for Donald Trump: Will you stand by and say nothing while the President commits blasphemy? While this wannabe king suggests he’s King of Kings? Will you stay silent while Donald Trump makes a mockery of our faith?”
But Trump’s shocking post comparing himself to Jesus isn’t happening in a vacuum. It comes as he has publicly attacked Pope Leo XIV, who criticized the U.S-Israeli war in Iran and the president’s vow to annihilate the Iranian civilization. On Sunday, Trump called the Pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”
Bishop Tolton believes Trump’s latest Truth Social controversy is a distraction from several things, including calls for greater transparency from the Trump administration on the full release of FBI files on Trump’s former friend, sex trafficker, and pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein; and Sunday’s election in Hungary that saw the defeat of ultra-right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a Trump ally.
“That’s a big loss,” Tolton said of Orbán’s defeat, adding, “That’s a major chess move in the kind of ideological networking of the hard right, autocratic Christian nationalist movement.”
There is also a parallel between Trump’s war in Iran, where a fragile ceasefire is currently in place, and his positioning as some Christ-like savior, said Tolton.
White Christian nationalists, he explained, see Trump as a president who is “preparing the world for the apocalyptic end of times and the second coming of Jesus Christ.” He told theGrio, “The war in Iran plays directly into the apocalyptic notions of America fighting a war that will preserve Israel’s integrity as a Jewish state.”
Iran, in the eyes of Christian leaders around Trump, like Franklin Graham, represents “an existential threat to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state.”
Ultimately, by embracing imagery of himself as Jesus Christ, President Trump is trying to “fool” the world in comparison to what he’s actually doing on the domestic and global stages, says Tolton, who described it as the president’s “imperial, militaristic adventures.”
By trying to portray himself as a “healing figure,” he said, Trump’s “lunacy and cognitive dissonance is just on marvelous, tragic display.”
Tolton added, “We keep saying that there is no basement here, and clearly this is another low. It’s unimaginable that there’s no public rebuke coming from conservative Christians.”
