For reasons that still don’t make sense, Donald Trump picked a fight with, of all people, Pope Leo XIV, lashing out at the pontiff as someone who “likes crime,” caters to “to the Radical Left,” is taking steps that are “hurting the Catholic Church” and who’s met with “Obama Sympathizers.”

Offered an opportunity to apologize, or at least to walk back his rhetorical offensive, the president refused, insisting again that the pope “said things that are wrong.”

Whether the Republican pays a political price for this odd and unnecessary broadside remains to be seen, but it was his other religio-political controversy that seems to have created an even bigger mess.

On Sunday night, Trump apparently thought it would be a good idea to promote an image that appeared to present him as some kind of American Jesus.

The item that he published to his social media platform was removed on Monday morning, but just as notable was the way in which Trump tried to defend the image during a brief Q&A with reporters at the White House.

When a reporter asked, “Did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?” he replied, “Well, it wasn’t depiction. It was me. I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one. So I just heard about it, and I said, ‘How did they come up with that?’ It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better, make people a lot better.”

Right off the bat, I more or less assumed he’d try to laugh this off, the same way he shrugged last May after suggesting he should be the pope and promoting an AI-generated image of him in papal attire. It seemed likely the president would again complain about too many people being too serious to appreciate his “jokes.”

But he went a different direction this time. Instead he relied on Orwellian tactics and asked Americans to pretend they didn’t see what they obviously saw.

The public is apparently supposed to believe Trump saw an image of himself in a white robe and a red stole, with a bright light emanating from his hands, and he concluded that this was an image of him “as a doctor.”

I don’t know what kind of medical facilities the president has visited, but I’ve met quite a few physicians over the years and not one of them ever wore a white robe and a red stole while bright lights emanated from their hands.

What’s more, while Trump complained that “the fake news” concocted the idea that he promoted an image depicting himself as divine, the truth is the online item generated significant pushback, not from journalists, but from Christian conservatives, many of whom are generally aligned with the White House.

In other words, it wasn’t news organizations, or even his detractors on the left, that pushed back against Trump’s apparent sacrilege, it was many of his own allies, who characterized the image as offensive and blasphemous.

Finally, the Republican concluded the image was defensible because he “makes people a lot better.” His administration’s record on health care policy tells a very different story.

The post Already in a ditch, Trump digs deeper in defending image depicting him as Jesus appeared first on MS NOW.

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