Just months after signing legislation that will pull nearly 12 million Americans off health insurance by gutting Medicaid, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself to Truth Social on Sunday depicting him as a Jesus Christ-like figure, with divine light emanating from his hands as he heals a stricken man in a hospital bed with a demon from hell floating in the background.
Some of his most high-profile and loyal Christian supporters, many of whom have stood by the president through multiple other indiscretions, are unable to contain their righteous fury.
Riley Gaines, Fox News host and conservative commentator, said she “cannot understand why he’d post this”. “Is he looking for a response? 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,” she wrote on X.
Megan Basham, a writer at the conservative Daily Wire, called the post “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy”.
“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this,” she wrote. She demanded Trump “take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God”.
Isabel Brown, a host on the same outlet, said the image was “disgusting and unacceptable”.
“Nothing matters more than Jesus,” she wrote. “This post is, frankly, disgusting and unacceptable, but also a profound misreading of the American people experiencing a true and beautiful revival of faith in Christ.”
Steve Deace, a host at the rightwing BlazeTV, posted a single word: “No.”
The AI-generated image Trump shared was not the original. The picture first appeared in early February, posted to X by Nick Adams, a conservative commentator with a history of sharing AI-generated, biblically themed Trump content. In Adams’s version, a silhouette of a US soldier stands in the background. In Trump’s version, that soldier has been photoshopped into a demonic figure with horns looming behind the president as he performs his miracle.
But the outrage was not just among high-profile media figures. Users on Truth Social – Trump’s social platform where devoted supporters almost never dissent – have also turned on the president over the image.
Trump is engaged in a war of words with Pope Leo XIV, the first US-born pope in Catholic history, after Leo suggested, without naming the president, that a “delusion of omnipotence” was driving US foreign policy, particularly surrounding the war with Iran.
Trump responded by calling the pontiff “WEAK on Crime,” and saying he was “not a fan of Pope Leo” and suggesting the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics was “catering to the radical left”. Leo, who was also outspoken about the carnage and catastrophes in Gaza, told reporters on the papal flight to Algeria that he did not fear the Trump administration and would continue to speak out against war.
Trump’s AI post not only comes after that spat, but one week after Easter Sunday for Catholics, and the morning after Easter Sunday for Orthodox Christians.
The Gospel of Mark records Jesus healing the sick, feeding the hungry and casting out demons. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in 2025, will cut federal Medicaid spending by about $900bn over a decade with children’s hospitals warning the cuts will directly harm their most vulnerable patients. More than $1tn of those cuts come from Medicaid, the joint federal program that provides healthcare to low-income and disabled Americans.
One user on X, Mandy Arthur, captured the mood: “God, we might have made a mistake and accidentally elected the Antichrist. Send help.”
