Of course Trump thinks he’s the Messiah — his disciples tell him so

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An image of a literally radiant doctor, donning a white robe with a red sash draped over it, his hands emitting a divine light and one of them gently touching the head of a sick man, was posted online by the leader of the free world last Sunday night. The doctor’s pillowy face was his, you see, and, as he explained later, he does “make people a lot better”.

I might have been tempted to note that the doctor — who seemed to have none of the usual trappings of a physician, and above whom appeared to be suspended various strange figures, including a distinctly Satanic one with spikes where his head should have been — bore a remarkable likeness to depictions of Jesus Christ, the Messiah. But “only the fake news could come up with that one”, as President Donald Trump grumbled amid a broad-ranging backlash to it the next day, which had prompted him to delete the post. 

And so I shan’t. I will instead turn to the responses from Christians, because it seemed like rather a lot of them did think that Trump was casting himself as some kind of Jesus-like figure, and were not happy about that. “We are a little bit beside ourselves,” was the restrained response of John Yep, CEO of Catholics for Catholic, a non-profit that has hosted events at Trump’s private members’ club-cum-winter residence, Mar-a-Lago. “Not saying Trump is the Antichrist,” came the slightly less understated comment from conservative Catholic writer Rod Dreher. “But he’s radiating the spirit of Antichrist, no question.”

If you really wanted to see someone making an utter mockery of the Christian faith in recent days, though, that was a job for the thrice-married, crusader-tattooed, Evangelical father-of-seven Pete Hegseth. The Fox News anchor-turned-“secretary of war” got up for his latest prayer service at the Pentagon on Wednesday, asked for the gathered crowd to pray with him, and proceeded to sombrely quote a version of a passage from Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction, which he explained had been handed to him by the lead planner of a US combat search and rescue (CSAR) mission and was named CSAR 25:17, “which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17”.

“The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” Hegseth intoned. In Tarantino’s classic, Samuel L Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield speaks a very similar line right before shooting someone dead. “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.” (Nothing of the sort exists in Ezekiel 25:17.)

Vice-president JD Vance, meanwhile, who converted to Catholicism just seven years ago, might not have made quite such a mockery of his entire faith, but was nonetheless happy to take shots at its leader in order to defend the man he seems to consider the truly almighty one. He took to Fox News to say that Pope Leo XIV, whom Trump had been insulting because of his criticisms of the war in Iran, should “stick to matters of morality” — as if a foreign war could not be classed as such — and should let Trump be the one to be “dictating American public policy”. As for the president’s post of himself appearing as the Messiah — sorry, a doctor — “people weren’t understanding his humour”.

Is it any wonder, when the sycophants Trump has chosen to surround himself with are the supposedly devout Christians in his life, that he seems to be finding it hard to figure out what is and is not blasphemous, and where exactly he fits in the hierarchy of godliness? After all, it’s not as if the president himself has ever seemed particularly familiar with his “favourite book”. And his followers have long described him as some kind of “anointed” figure and “saviour” — rhetoric that increased after he survived two assassination attempts in the run-up to the 2024 election.

Indeed, his “spiritual adviser”, the televangelist Paula White-Cain, stopped only an angel’s breath away from explicitly calling him Jesus on stage during an Easter event at the White House two weeks ago. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Saviour showed us,” she said, as Trump did his best humble-servant-of-God face behind her.

Jesus rose on the third day, as White-Cain went on to say, and we could say Trump rose again on the third election (the second one, his disciples still assure him, was stolen). With such levels of fawning adulation around him, we can see how Trump got here. Not that he had to come very far, anyway. It’s not as if he has ever shown any sign that he worships anyone but the man looking back at him in the mirror.

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