Trump’s self-mythologizing has crossed from politics to blasphemy

Donald Trump, the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president of the United States, has spent a lifetime treating the truth like a rented mule—work it hard, feed it little, and swap it out when it drops. But somewhere along the line, that casual arrangement with reality curdled into something darker.

He stopped bending the truth to suit his purposes and started demanding that the truth bend its knee. And now, with the quiet fury of a man who has mistaken the White House for a throne, he has decided to take on the Vicar of Christ.

Let us be plain about what happened.

The president posted an image of himself as Jesus Christ. Not as a man of faith. Not as a humble servant. As the Son of God, robed in white, reaching down to heal the sick while the light of heaven streamed from his very hand.

He posted this on his social media platform—the one he calls Truth Social, which is a bit like calling a den of card sharps an academy of mathematics—and when the howl went up from Catholics who had voted for him not once but twice, he deleted it.

But he did not apologize. He does not apologize. He claims it was misinterpreted.

Now, friend, how exactly does one misinterpret a picture of yourself dressed as the Messiah rendering mercy to someone who looks like Jeffrey Epstein?

Is there some subtle theological nuance to depicting Donald J. Trump with a halo? Because the rest of us, we look at that and see something that would have made Pharaoh blush and Nero say, “Now hold on, let’s not get carried away.”

The man who asked a crowd to tell him he won an election he lost, who counted angels on the head of a pin and called them votes, who has spent ten years treating every fact he doesn’t like as a personal insult—that man has now set his sights on Pope Leo XIV.

And here is where the story takes a turn that even the most cynical among us might not have seen coming.

The pope is an American. Born in Chicago. Raised in the shadow of the stockyards and the lake. He knows the territory.

When the president of the United States launched a war with Iran—a war he promised he would never start, because the man has a complicated relationship with promises, treating them more like suggestions—Father Bob from Chicago did what popes have done for two thousand years.

He said war is a failure. He said the followers of Christ do not stand with those who drop bombs on cities. He said, in so many words, that there are lines a nation crosses that leave it standing on the wrong side of judgment.

And the president, who has surrounded himself with Protestant pastors and other right-wing religious zealots who tell him he was chosen by God, could not abide it.

He lashed out. He called the pope a disgrace. He said the pontiff should stick to matters of the church and leave the business of war to the man behind the Resolute Desk.

Then he posted the picture.

Now here is the strangest part of this whole sorry carnival.

The Catholics who put him in the White House—twenty million of them, give or take—are not defending him this time.

They have swallowed a great many things over the years.

They have swallowed the divorces and the casino floors and the casual cruelties. They have swallowed the mocking of prisoners of war and the boasting about grabbing women and the thousand small degradations that would have ended any other political career before it began.

They swallowed it all because the adjudicated rapist and fraudster gave them Supreme Court justices who filled a promise to protect the unborn.

But this, they say, is different. This is the pope. This is not a matter of politics but of something older and deeper.

While puritanical Protestant religious zealots may believe he is the second coming, others warned that he is the antichrist.

The sins and lies and war crimes and greed of the worst person alive could not shake his support among people of faith, but a random picture broke the hearts of these holy rollers.

When a man from Missouri named Shane Schaetzel, who voted for Trump three times, cancels his subscription to Truth Social and sells his Trump stocks, GOP strategists might want to pay attention.

That is the sound of something breaking.

The pope, for his part, has not backed down.

He said he has no fear of this president or any other. He said he is not afraid to speak the Gospel, which is what he was put on this earth to do.

American bishops, who have spent years walking a tightrope between their liberal faith and their right-wing politics, have lined up behind  the Pope instead of the President of the United States.

They have issued statements. They have quoted the just war tradition. They have said, as politely as churchmen will say anything, that the president is wrong.

Trump, who cannot stand to be seen as wrong despite his penchant for being wrong, who has built his entire public life on the fiction that he is never wrong, has kept swinging.

He attacked the Italian prime minister for defending the pope. He called her a coward.

The Iranians, who have learned to fight this thin-skinned man with his own weapons, mocked him as the Commander in Grief.

Even his own vice president, a Catholic convert who once wrote a book about the struggles of his people, told the pope to be careful when talking about theology. As if the pope, of all people, needed a lecture on that subject from a hillbilly heretic.

This is where the road leads when you spend ten years telling people that truth is whatever you say it is.

You start to believe your own bullshit. You start to think that reality is a negotiation and the moral law is a suggestion.

You start to think that you can post a picture of yourself as Jesus Christ and the only problem is that people didn’t understand the joke.

But the joke, if there ever was one, has worn thin.

The faithful are restless. The bishops are speaking. The pope, that quiet American from Chicago, is holding his ground.

Antichrist or not, Donald Trump, for the first time in a very long time, is learning that there are some people you cannot bully and some truths you cannot bend.