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How Trump Keeps Getting Away With Blasphemy

Liberals struggle to understand why the president’s evangelical supporters never seem to mind his sacrilegious tendencies. They’re missing the point.

President Donald Trump with an AI-generated picture he posted on his Truth Social platform, depicting himself as Jesus Christ, after criticizing Pope Leo XIV.

Taking a break from convulsing the news cycle with nonsensical ultimatums about the Iran war, President Donald Trump elected to stir things up at the start of the week by posting an image of himself as Jesus on his Truth Social account. That now-infamous depiction came in the wake of a long screed Trump posted the day before assailing Pope Leo XIV for his dissension from the illegal attack on Iran (as well as for being “soft on crime,” in an apparent call to revive the Spanish Inquisition). The general run of dazed commentary about Trump’s self-deifying display grouped it together with other Trump-branded power plays; as the Son of God, Trump could clearly claim to outrank the lowly pontiff. After evangelical and Catholic detractors properly called out the post as blasphemy, Trump finally took it down, and the backlash from diehard Trump devotees on the religious right seemed poised to dissipate, in keeping with thousands of other episodes of Trump-centric transgression.

Trolling the pope was no doubt part of what might be charitably termed the president’s strategic thinking, but there’s a broader, though equally demented, logic at work here. The best way to plot out this logic, curiously enough, is to contrast Trump’s Jesus post with another Trump image that came into prominence this week: an Oval Office shot from Getty Images photographer Andrew Harnick, which won the White House Correspondents Association Award for Excellence in Presidential New Coverage by Visual Journalists. It shows the president standing at the Resolute Desk as a group of White House functionaries have rushed in the background to attend to a pharmaceutical executive who fainted during the president’s photo-op touting a White House initiative to lower prescription drug prices.

It’s a revealing foil for the Trump-as-Jesus image, being such a vivid reminder of who the actual Donald Trump is. As everyone else in the room is animated by concern for the fallen man’s well-being—they’re elevating his legs to ensure that blood is flowing to his brain—Trump is assuming the bored-to–petulant affect he normally shows when he’s not the center of attention. He’s standing with his arms dangling at his side with his prepared remarks open on the desk in front of him. He’s registering awareness of the health crisis behind him with an exasperated sidelong glance, showing his seeming impatience to resume the carney-patter presentation of a drug plan that’s achieved vanishingly little in the way of actual consumer savings.

The photo sums up what we’ve long known about Trump: He brandishes the clinical narcissist’s hatred of weakness, disease, and dependence, which all serve as rude reminders of the mortality of the self. This trait goes far back in Trump’s biography, starting with his repudiation of his alcoholic........

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