Unfit
The only question is which frightening possibility is real
On Sunday, after posting “praise be to Allah” twice in the previous week, Donald Trump posted a picture of himself in flowing robes, touching the head of a sick man as people pray around him. It has been suggested that the sick man, who is obviously being healed by Trump, bears a striking resemblance to Jeffrey Epstein. While the Epstein reference may not (or may) be intentional, the episode is further proof of Trump’s unfitness both mentally and morally.
The post has obvious messianic overtones and has drawn criticism even from avowed Trump supporters like Riley Gaines of Fox News. It goes way beyond Christian Nationalism into blasphemy and cultism. At the same time, Trump posted a rant against Pope Leo on Truth Social,
Interestingly, the picture was apparently first posted by another account in February. At some point, one of the figures resembling soldiers in the sky in the original picture was altered to appear as something vaguely demonic. This makes the whole weird episode even more bizarre.
I have waffled on whether Trump should be labeled a false prophet. In the past, most of the messianic claims were made by people around Trump, rather than the man himself. He was surrounded by false prophets and did not reject their claims. I considered Trump an antichrist in the biblical, 1 John sense, because, not only did he reject the messianic claims made by his followers, his platform, policies, and behavior were often diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christ and the Bible. But with this post, the evidence seems clear that Trump is claiming divinity and had clearly crossed into false prophet territory.
Let me be clear about one thing: In America, our First Amendment freedoms of speech and religion protect the right of Trump and his disciples to claim that he is the Messiah. MAGA has the freedom to literally worship Trump if they want.
I’ll go further. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for any public office. Trump and MAGA don’t have to be Christian, and they can campaign on a platform Trump worship if they so desire. That’s all constitutionally protected.
Having said that, it is delusional behavior. Donald Trump has apparently gone way beyond believing his own press. If the president believes that he is the “chosen one,” as he said in 2019 during his first term, and can resurrect dead Epsteins, it is a clear sign of mental problems akin to the trope of dressing up like Napoleon.
The Old Testament gives us a biblical test for prophets that should be applied to Trump and his followers: “When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” This verse should be applied to Trump and the other false prophets who try to deify him.
If Trump is the messiah, let him raise the dead for all to see. To paraphrase Jesus, which is more difficult, to post a picture of yourself healing someone or to actually heal someone of a real affliction?
It should be obvious at this point that Trump is either stunningly incompetent and delusional or a dangerously malevolent force. There really is no middle ground.
Some have tried to explain it away or deflect. Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s press secretary, theorized that it was a mistake, saying, “President Trump’s team never should have posted this image. If he saw it first, he never should have approved it.”
As I write this on Monday, both posts are still up, which undermines the theory that someone other than Trump posted them (although the text post is uncharacteristically free of misspellings and randomly capitalized letters). If it was a mistake, it would be easy to take them down and apologize. Neither has happened. [Note: The picture was apparently quietly deleted on Monday afternoon. The rant against Leo is still up.]
Others try to shift the focus. I’ve seen numerous accounts argue that a) Democrats booed God in 2012 or that b) Democrats only care about anti-Catholic bias or anti-Christian behavior when it benefits them. On the first point, bad behavior by Democrats does not excuse worse behavior by Trump. The second and third points rely on stereotypes of the Democrats that are easily proven untrue. Many Catholics and other Christians are Democrats. This was true before Trump and is even more true 10 years into the MAGA cult.
The Trumpist argument becomes a “no true Scotsman’ logical fallacy when it is pointed out that 36 percent of Protestants and 39 percent of Catholics voted for Harris in 2024. “Well, those aren’t real Christians,” the MAGA apologists often say. In reality, neither party has a lock of Christianity or Christian voters.
An alternative explanation that emerged was that the original context of the image was that Trump was not “portraying himself as Jesus,” but rather, was “doing the work of God to heal our nation.” I saw a number of posts making this argument that appeared to be copied and pasted, possibly shared by an army of bots.
The first problem with this argument is that nothing in the context of the photo suggests that it is symbolic of Trump healing our nation. The second problem is that it still portrays Trump in a messianic fashion, healing not just one person, but the entire country. That’s arguably much worse.
I haven’t seen Speaker Johnson’s reaction, but my guess is that he would say he hasn’t seen it.
As Monday wore on, faced with the choice of being seen as blasphemous or monumentally stupid, Trump went with stupid. An official White House account posted a video of Trump admitting that he shared the video. His explanation?
Trump said, “I did post it. I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with the Red Cross as a Red Cross worker, which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one.”
“I just heard about it,” Trump continued, “and I said, ‘How do they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better, and I do make people better, I make people a lot better.”
If Trump explained why he was sharing a picture that portrayed him as a doctor, which is only slightly less crazy than portraying himself as Christ, it was not in the clip. For added context, the Red Cross was one of the organizations that lost funding due to Trump and Musk’s cuts to USAID, and no doctor I’ve ever seen dresses like the man in the picture.
However, the truth is that this is not the first time that Trump has shared images of this nature. There was the picture of Trump dressed as the pope, an image that said he was on a “mission from God,” and the infamous golden idol, among others. These previous posts did not make the splash that Sunday’s post did, but they were of the same vein. With Trump, it’s always helpful to look at the big picture of his general bad behavior rather than letting his supporters rationalize away specific instances.
The frightening truth is that our nation is being led by a man with a messiah complex who believes that he can do no wrong. This man is surrounded by people who only tell him how great he is. This man has started a destructive war that threatens to cripple the global economy as shortages of oil disrupt entire supply chains from both the transportation and manufacturing sides.
We are at the mercy of a madman.
In a sane, healthy democracy, the answer would be the constitutional process of the 25th Amendment. In our reality, the constitutional process is an inadequate answer that would require a majority of the sycophants in Trump’s cabinet to support his removal. That is unlikely in the extreme.
Our best hope at this point, other than hoping that the cabinet wakes up to the danger, is that we can survive until a midterm backlash occurs that will hopefully install enough Democrats to impeach and remove the president. But November is a long way off with a delusional madman in control, and January is even further away.
In the meantime, feel free to weigh in on whether Trump really thinks he is the best thing since and is on an equal footing with Jesus Christ or whether he’s just so monumentally stupid that he thinks doctors wear flowing white robes and have glowing hands. Maybe he just thinks we are stupid. Maybe it’s all of the above.
Pick your poison.
TWO REPS DOWN A Democrat and Republican will both be leaving Congress. Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-Cal.) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) are both resigning amid sex scandals.
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My vote: "monumentally stupid "
Shout out to your old running mate EE. I've often wondered how smart (which he is), religious (which he is) people can watch on a daily basis as trump asks his followers to accept his crazed antics as normal.
Apparently the last 10 days was a bridge too far. We can only hope many more will come to understand trump is just "monumentally stupid."