CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There is something at once profoundly demonic in its cynicism, deeply unsettling, and almost burlesque in Donald Trump’s latest AI-crafted spectacle: a man who spent decades socializing with Jeffrey Epstein—whom he once described as a “terrific guy” with a taste for “younger women”—now reappears as a messianic healer, a kind of white, Protestant-Zionist “Christ,” as though resurrected from the visual grammar of Nazi propaganda about the blond Aryan Übermensch. With an outstretched hand he bestows light upon the afflicted, while in the background loom eagles, fighter jets, and hovering figures that resemble anything but the traditional iconography of Christian angels.

In truth, it is disturbing only to those for whom this performance marks something new in Trump’s repertoire—and to those who fail to grasp that pathological cults are merely one layer of the cultural superstructure of deeply pathological societies. Societies, in this case, profoundly de-Christianized, however loudly the ruling MAGA sect may invoke Christ and the Gospel.

For if, within the classical Christian paradigm, the central figure is the Incarnate God who declares that “one cannot serve both God and Mammon”—that is, translated into the language of our age: God and capital—then it becomes evident that the heart of contemporary American political theology is not occupied by Jesus of Nazareth. On the contrary: if He was ever truly at its center, He has long since been expelled as subversive, impractical, scandalous, and, in essence, a profoundly dangerous presence for public morality. In His place arises an altogether different divinity—a kind of deified consumer, wearing a MAGA cap in lieu of a halo, whose spirituality is measured by stock indices, whose asceticism has been replaced by junk food, and whose contemplation has dissolved into an unbroken stream of........

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