Trump angered some ardent supporters with AI image appearing to depict him as Jesus
A social media backlash wasn’t enough to convince President Donald Trump to apologize or back down from his feud with Pope Leo.
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But he did remove the AI-generated image he posted of himself as a Christ-like figure, after some of his most ardent Christian supporters accused him of blasphemy.
“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” Megan Basham, a prominent conservative Protestant Christian writer and commentator, posted on X. “But he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”
Even some in the right-wing media sphere were aghast.
“I support Trump, and I spend 8 hours a day defending him. I will not defend blasphemy,” conservative political commentator Cam Higby posted on X, urging the president to take the post down.
The image depicted Trump in a white robe with a red sash, with one hand on the forehead of a bedridden man. An orb of light floats in the president’s other hand, along with an American flag and the Statue of Liberty in the background.
The response was swift.
“Why?” Riley Gaines, the former collegiate swimmer turned conservative podcaster who has led the charge against trans women in sports, posted. “Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this. Is he looking for a response? Does he actually think this?”
Gaines wrote that “a little humility would serve him well,” before concluding, “God shall not be mocked.”
Trump confirmed on Monday that he personally put up the image but insisted he thought it portrayed him as a doctor “making people better.”
“Only the fake news could come up with that one, so I just heard about it, and I said, ‘How did they come up with that?’” Trump said. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor.”
In an interview with CBS News on Monday, Trump expanded on why he took down the post.
“Normally I don’t like doing that, but I didn’t want to have anybody be confused,” he said. “People were confused.”
Trump denied being swayed by the criticism, saying he “didn’t listen to Riley Gaines” and that he’s “not a big fan.”
The White House has not responded to questions about the post. But it vanished on the same day that the Religious Liberty Commission, a body Trump set up to ostensibly defend religious freedom, was scheduled to meet.
The offending post appeared online shortly after Trump went after Pope Leo, who has been critical of the war on Iran.
“I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo,” he wrote in a Truth Social post that called the leader of the Roman Catholic Church “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Leo, the first American pope, later responded he has “no fear of the Trump administration.”
David Gibson, who is director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University in New York City, said Trump’s attack on Pope Leo “makes zero sense politically.”
“American presidents, and American Catholics, have often disagreed with the popes, not just with Leo,” Gibson said. “But disrespect like this is different from disagreement. This is uncharted territory.”
In r/catholicism, a Reddit community dedicated to the Christian denomination, moderators created a “megathread“ to corral the discussion on the recent spat between the pope and the president. The thread had more than 1,500 comments as of Monday afternoon, making it one of the most-discussed topics in the 18-year history of the subreddit.
In the CBS interview, Trump said he believes he has “done more for the Catholic Church than any president in the last hundred years.”
Gibson said it’s not gone unnoticed that the post that deeply offended his “key base,” evangelical Christians, is gone, “yet the blast against Pope Leo remains.”
“That is telling, and also complicates the future patch for Trump’s would-be political heirs, JD Vance and Marco Rubio, both Catholics,” Gibson said.
Vance, in particular, has frequently mentioned that he is the first Catholic convert to serve as vice president, and he represented the U.S. last year at Pope Leo’s inaugural mass.
But Trump also risks alienating white evangelicals, a group that continues to strongly back the president but whose support has been slipping of late, recent polls show.
The Trump administration has curried favor with evangelicals by unleashing the Department of Justice to go after what it deems anti-Christian discrimination. Earlier this month, NBC News reported that the Department of Justice was putting the final touches on a report that casts the Biden DOJ as anti-Christian over its enforcement of laws protecting abortion clinics and enforcement of Covid regulations.
Trump and his backers have often reached for religious iconography to defend a president who claims to be a non-denominational Christian but was rarely seen at church until he became president and famously — and wrongly — identified his favorite biblical passage as “Two Corinthians” during a 2016 appearance at Liberty College.
Trump has claimed repeatedly that God “spared him” after two assassination attempts in 2024.
Back in 2019, during his first term as president, Trump described himself as “the chosen one” while fielding a question about the trade war with China. He later said he “was kidding, being sarcastic, and just having fun.”
And over the years, supporters have compared Trump to biblical figures like King David, calling him a flawed figure chosen by God to lead the country.
Trump has even been compared to the king of a land that the U.S. is currently at war with — Iran.
Lance Wallnau, a conservative evangelical Christian preacher in Dallas, said he has in sermons called Trump the modern version of Cyrus, who ruled ancient Persia some 600 years before Christ was born.
“Thus says the Lord to Cyrus, whom I’ve anointed,” Wallnau told his flock. “Donald Trump has an anointing upon him. The hand of God is on him.”
