Colby Cosh: Donald Trump, our self-styled lord and saviour

In the AI-generated image, Trump appears dressed in red and white robes as he cures a man with his healing hand. The American flag is shown over his shoulder. Photo by DonaldTrump/Truth Social

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One of the iron lessons of the dual Trump presidencies has been that shamelessness works pretty well. If you continuously and confidently express the conviction that you are awesome, this will manifest itself as charisma. So on Sunday (of all days), when the president posted an unambiguous depiction of himself as Christ on his social-media site, I kept having to correct the thought “Well, the fellow’s gone too far this time.” Fool, going too far in self-praise is what he does! That’s his almost entire technique as a public figure! As the finest newspaper columnist in the entire English-speaking world, surely you must know this!

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Well, maybe he did push things a little too far. Donald Trump withdrew the offending image from the internet early Monday after encountering some backlash from evangelical Republicans, who are the bedrock of his diminishing political support if you believe the pollsters. (I have a little more willingness to believe American and international ones than I do our gang of sellouts and weirdos.) But you can imagine what Trump might say in his own defence, what he might have said by the time you read this. I don’t compare myself to Jesus, and this is just an AI image some well-meaning person put together, but many are saying, etc., etc. They’re using words like “miracle worker” and “healer.” Anyway, I don’t remember anybody getting sore when they called Michael Jordan “Black Jesus.”

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Even the hardest-headed evangelical must by now have begun to entertain suspicions that the president’s proclamations of faith are about an inch deep, if that. Perhaps he’s found sympathy among male voters who leave religion to the wife, and who have a secretly Nietzschean view of the whole thing: God’s there if you’re weak and needy, like a woman. Perhaps the United States of America has really become an object of idolatrous worship among nominal Protestants, as it sometimes seems from outside, and Trump is simply building the foundations of a new faith in utero.

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It’s really not for me to say. I’m an atheist, and this AI slop isn’t even the kind of blasphemy I approve of. My instinct is that it is truly an unforced error on Trump’s part, a manifestation of last-days-in-the-bunker behaviour. Americans sense that the war against Iran is not going well, and there is increasing disapproval of his improv-comedy tariffs. A normal politician might react to this by doubling down on appropriate religious messaging instead of picking fights with an American Pope and casting himself as the Son of Man.

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National Post

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