Donald Trump is back with another religious image just days after his first one set off a firestorm across the political spectrum. The president posted a new picture to Truth Social showing Jesus Christ with his arm around Trump’s shoulders, captioned with a message suggesting God is “playing his Trump card.”
The new post came days after Trump deleted a heavily criticized AI-generated image that showed him in a white robe healing a man in a hospital bed, surrounded by bald eagles, warplanes, the Statue of Liberty, and the Lincoln Memorial. According to UNILAD, the original image was posted hours after Trump publicly attacked Pope Leo XIV, calling him “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
The backlash to the first post was swift and came from both sides of the aisle. Even loyal MAGA supporters spoke out, with conservative commentator Riley Gaines writing on X: “Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this. Does he actually think this? Either way, two things are true. 1) a little humility would serve him well 2) God shall not be mocked.” Megan Basham, a culture reporter at The Daily Wire, called it “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy” and demanded Trump “take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”
Vice President JD Vance downplayed the controversy, suggesting Trump had been “posting a joke” and removed it once he realized people were not finding it funny.
Trump claimed the first image showed him as a doctor
When reporters pressed Trump about the original post after it was taken down, he offered an unusual defense. He acknowledged sharing the image but said he believed it showed him as a doctor, not as Jesus.
“It’s supposed to be as a doctor making people better,” he told reporters on Monday. “And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”
He later said he deleted it because he “didn’t want to have anybody be confused. People were confused.” Also, previously, Trump said the AI image of himself as Jesus was ‘me as a doctor.’
Some critics also noted that the man in the hospital bed in the original image appeared to resemble Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier, adding another layer of controversy to the post.
The new post references QAnon themes
The second image Trump shared came from an X user’s post and showed Jesus with his arm around the president. Al Jazeera noted that the post’s caption, which referred to “satanic, demonic, child sacrificing monsters being exposed,” is language connected to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that claims Trump is fighting a hidden cabal of child traffickers.
Trump captioned his reshare with: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!! President DJT.”
The pope, meanwhile, has made clear he is not backing down either. Pope Leo said on Monday that he has “no fear” of the Trump administration or “speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.” The tension between the two has been building for weeks, with Trump even suggesting the pope would not have been elected without him. This ongoing feud is part of a broader pattern of clashes you can follow in our coverage of Trump sending JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner to Pakistan for Iran ceasefire talks.
