By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
(CNN) — On Sunday, in the midst of a Truth Social tirade against Pope Leo XIV, President Donald Trump shared an image depicting himself as Jesus Christ.
The picture, which appeared to be AI-generated, presented Trump as a healer dressed in the kind of red and white robes seen in biblical art. Towering over devotees — with the American flag, bald eagles and warplanes flying in the background — the Trump figure rested one hand on the forehead of an ailing man, while a beam of divine light emanated from the other. (The right-wing influencer and State Department special envoy Nick Adams shared a nearly identical image in early February; in Trump’s version, one of the soldiers in the background has horns.)
Christians across faith traditions — even many in the MAGA universe who have otherwise supported Trump — roundly denounced the rendering as “blasphemy.” Some on the right went further. “It’s more than blasphemy,” Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X. “It’s an Antichrist spirit.”
On Monday, the post was deleted, and the president denied that he had represented himself as Jesus: “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better,” he told a reporter. “And I do make people better.”
As president, Trump has embraced both religiosity and self-promotion to degrees far beyond anything done by his White House predecessors. By combining the two, though, the image earned a secular political office an unusually intense chorus of theological criticism.
“Blasphemy” entered English around the 13th century from the ancient Greek “blasphēmia” via French and Latin, generally describing speech or actions that show irreverence for God, sacred people and sacred things. But before it came to mean denigrating the divine, the word referred more broadly to the act of slandering someone, says Kim Haines-Eitzen, a professor of early Christianity and early Judaism at Cornell University.
Though “blasphemy” appears in the Bible in both senses, it eventually took on a religious meaning with serious implications: God tells Moses in the book of Leviticus that “Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death;” In the New Testament, Jesus himself is accused of blasphemy before his execution.
As the followers of Christianity came to equate Jesus with God, Haines-Eitzen says, blasphemy also came to include words or actions that denigrated Christ. Over time, this would also extend to institutions such as the church, to saints and the pope, and to religions beyond Christianity: In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” an insult to Islam and issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill the