America’s Orange Jesus
In her 2023 memoir, “Oath and Honor,” published the year before Donald Trump’s remarkable return from political oblivion, the Republican apostate Liz Cheney describes watching in amazement on January 6, 2021, as her fellow-Republicans in Congress lined up to sign electoral-vote objection sheets. Cheney, who had been No. 3 in the Party leadership throughout Trump’s first term in office, concluded that her colleagues suffered from a “plague of cowardice,” summed up by their willingness to go along with Trump’s false claims about the “rigged” 2020 election despite understanding full well that he had lost fair and square. “The things we do for the Orange Jesus,” Cheney heard one of them, Mark Green, of Tennessee, mutter as he put his name down. (Later, Green denied having made the comment; the following year, Trump praised the congressman for his many “political talents.”)
I immediately thought of Cheney’s Orange Jesus line this week when Trump, amid an escalating public feud with Pope Leo XIV, circulated an A.I.-generated image of himself as the Christian Lord and Saviour, before deleting it and telling reporters the next day, at the White House:
It is not enough to read these words, as silly and mendacious and incoherent as they are. Trump’s remarks, in my view, make for essential viewing, thirty-seven seconds that showcase the precipitousness of our fall as a superpower. Look at how Trump stares straight into the cameras as he lies. A doctor? Seriously? It’s as though he felt no need to come up with a better excuse—or any excuse at all. (To be fair: the fact that, as Trump said this, he was flanked by a fifty-eight-year-old MAGA enthusiast from Fayetteville, Arkansas, who had just delivered to him a bag of takeout McDonald’s in a bright-red “DoorDash Grandma” T-shirt suggests that God does have a pretty good sense of humor.) By Wednesday, Trump had reasserted his claim to divine authority, posting another A.I.-generated image of himself standing alongside Jesus, who has his arm wrapped around Trump’s shoulder; both of them are bathed in the soft glow of a heavenly light. Trump’s caption: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”
The point is simply this: in Trump 1.0, Orange Jesus was a snarky shorthand for the hypocrisy of Republicans who knew better but joined up with the cult of Trump anyway. In Trump 2.0, Trump thinks he has actually become Orange Jesus.
How else to explain the President’s many otherwise inexplicable acts since returning to office? The gilding of the White House to resemble a profane copy of the Vatican, the ever more baroque lies, the slapping his name on everything, and, perhaps most of all, the repeated reminders that our leader recognizes no earthly limits on his power as he wages war in the Middle East and speaks of conquering other lands. “There is one thing,” he told the Times, in January. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” America First-ism is not the ideology of this Presidency; Trump First-ism is. The fact that he serves up his megalomania with such an excess of dark farce only reinforces how shameful it is that this is the man for whom so many Republicans have chosen to sacrifice what remained of their integrity.
On Thursday, a federal commission stacked with Trump appointees voted to approve the President’s plans for a triumphal arch on the National Mall, modelled on those built by Napoleon and the Roman emperors to celebrate their military victories. At two hundred and fifty feet tall, it would be the biggest such structure in the world. Asked last fall by CBS News’ Ed O’Keefe what this modern-day arch was meant to commemorate, Trump pointed to himself and replied, “Me.”
One might conclude from the fact that Trump quickly deleted his Jesus post on Monday morning, some thirteen hours after posting it on Orthodox Easter, that he realized he had gone too far, even for many of his most vocal followers. There’s no doubt that the online backlash was swift and laugh-out-loud funny, the worst kind of insult to a man who sees himself as endowed with otherworldly powers. I particularly loved one from Sarah Palin—an image of Jesus seemingly begging Trump to stop making such an ass of himself: “Alright. That’s enough. Give me the phone.” You literally cannot buy publicity this bad for a politician.
At such a moment, it would seem to be an extreme case of political malpractice for the President to pick a public fight about the extent of God’s imprimatur on his decision to go to war on immigrants at home and Iranians abroad with no less of an authority on God than the Pope himself. Even before the whole I-am-Jesus thing, Trump’s popularity was plummeting to historic lows as his war upended the global economy and sent prices for oil, gas, and a zillion other products skyrocketing.
But the cult lives. On Thursday morning, at a Pentagon press briefing, there was Trump’s self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, comparing Trump to the Lord once again, as he likened reporters’ “incredibly unpatriotic” coverage of the President’s conflict in the Middle East to the evil Pharisees tearing down Jesus after he had performed a miracle in front of their very eyes. (That same day, it was revealed that Hegseth, during a Pentagon sermon, had quoted fake Bible verses from the movie “Pulp Fiction”—who knew that Trump 2.0 could turn “Saturday Night Live” into a reality-TV show?)
At almost exactly the same time that Hegseth was going on about the Pharisees, Pope Leo’s latest missive to his flock landed on X. “Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth,” the Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, and Patriarch of the West wrote to his tens of millions of followers.
Not long after, Trump was given the opportunity to walk away from his no-win feud. But, no, responding to reporters’ questions on the White House lawn, he suggested that the Pope, in condemning war as the Scriptures demand, was in fact in favor of allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon, whereas he, Trump, would not allow that to happen. “I want him to preach the Gospel, I’m all about the Gospel,” the President added. I am not much of a Bible quoter, but it seems pretty clear which side the Lord would be on in this fight between the Orange Jesus and the real one’s personal emissary on earth.
The folly of the ancient Roman emperors springs to mind here. History has not judged kindly their demand that their subjects not only build great arches in their honor but that they literally worship their rulers as Dominus et Deus, Lord and God. Those imperial cults of personality, and many of their monuments, lasted no longer than the short period of their rule. Trump may scar our beautiful capital with golden memorials to himself, but how long, really, will it last, this tacky reign of a President who styles himself a MAGA god? ♦