Yesterday, on Orthodox Easter, Donald Trump faced an eruption of backlash for posting an AI-generated photo of himself as Jesus Christ, just a couple of minutes after he criticized Pope Leo XIV on Truth Social. The image parodies the centuries-old Catholic image of the Divine Physician, with Trump wearing a flowing white mantle with a red robe, a beam of light emanating from his left hand as he rests his right on the forehead of a man in a hospital bed. Surrounding him are an older man in a dark navy cap (presumably a veteran), a man in military camouflage, a woman in a blue surgeon cap with a stethoscope, and a woman with hands folded in prayer — all of whom are White. Behind him waves a rippling American flag, while eagles and fighter jets soar through the sky above the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial.
Trump posted the image right after going on a political tirade against Pope Leo about an hour after 60 Minutes aired a segment about the pope and American Catholic leaders’ ongoing opposition against the president’s war in Iran and immigration policies. In his post, Trump claims, “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”
The post was deleted after outcry from his loyalist supporters, including Bishop Robert Barron, who serves on the presidential administration’s Religious Liberty Commission, formed last May. Conservative pundit Michael Knowles — himself a practicing Catholic — posted that “it behooves the President both spiritually and politically to delete the picture, no matter the intent.” Even the Knights Templar International, a far-right Catholic group that has long supported Trump, said they “demand that this offensive and blasphemous image be removed forthwith.” Today, Trump denied that the AI image depicted him as Jesus, claiming that it rendered him instead as a doctor.
Last May, I wrote about how Trump posted an AI-generated meme of himself as the pope as a way of virtue signaling to MAGA Catholics. However, his latest attempt to fashion himself as an American messiah is costing him some of his most loyal Catholic supporters, who are now faced with the choice of publicly supporting the pope or the president. It’s not the first time that Catholics have had to choose.
Despite the recent ascendency of wealthy White Catholics into positions of power, anti-Catholic sentiment is deeply rooted in American history. For much of the nation’s lifespan, Catholics were targeted and discriminated against due to anti-Catholic, xenophobic bigotry. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Catholic immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe arrived in the United States, they faced intense nativist violence, including from the Ku Klux Klan. Now, the Trump administration is wielding nativist violence against immigrants and communities of color — including Catholic Latinos — whom he accuses of taking resources away from “true” Americans: White Protestants.
Trump’s absurdist image of himself as Jesus with a fake tan makes clear who he has come to “save.” Just like 19th- and 20th-century anti-Catholic campaigns, Trump fashions himself a Messiah for American Protestant Christian nationalists, whom he blesses with a blazing, white light emanating from his left hand.
But art historians and cradle Catholics alike will recognize that light is emanating out of the wrong body part — light poured out of Jesus’s side wound, not his hand. It’s a perfect illustration of just how little Trump knows about the art and religion he is weaponizing, all in the name of his false White Christian Jesus.
