When Power Starts Dressing for the Altar

This is not a joke. It is not internet sludge. It is not one more vulgar Trumpian performance to be filed under bad taste and forgotten by tomorrow. Trump has now appeared in sequence as king, as pope, and as a Christ-like healer, with the latest AI image showing him in white robes, glowing, touching the wounded body of a man beneath patriotic and militarized symbols. Reuters notes that the Jesus-like image followed the earlier pope image from 2025, and the “LONG LIVE THE KING” episode, complete with a crown image circulated by the White House. 

That sequence is the story. King, pope, savior: these are not random costumes. They are three old technologies of legitimacy. The king claims sovereignty. The pope claims sacred office. The savior claims redemptive necessity. Put them together and you no longer have ordinary democratic politics. You have a ladder of sacralized power, a political imagination in which the leader is no longer meant to be judged, limited, replaced, or embarrassed. He is meant to stand above procedure as the one who restores order when procedure is said to be too weak for the age. The images do not decorate a project. They disclose it. 

This is why the usual liberal response is too shallow. The problem is not that the image is offensive. The problem is that it trains the public to see power as salvific. In the Christ-like image, Trump is not shown signing legislation, negotiating a treaty, or commanding a bureaucracy. He is shown healing. Light flows through his hands. A wounded body lies beneath him. The nation, the crowd, the military, and transcendence fuse into one visual liturgy. Reuters and People both describe the image in exactly those terms: robes, healing gesture, patriotic spectacle, and miraculous staging. That is not governance. That is political soteriology made cheap and infinitely reproducible through AI. 

It would still be dangerous if it were only Trump’s vanity. But it is not only vanity. It is an atmosphere. Reuters reported last week that evangelical leaders have been amplifying Trump’s religious framing of the war with Iran, presenting the conflict as spiritually charged and, in some cases, comparing Trump not only to biblical figures but even, controversially, to Jesus. Reuters also reported in 2025 that Trump created a White House Faith Office led by Paula White, one of his longest-standing religious allies. This means the images are not floating above politics as memes. They are visual condensations of a wider environment in which war, power, providence, and political loyalty are being fused into one field. 

There is another layer, and it matters. Trump’s symbolic escalations fit a broader admiration for forms of power that are personal, theatrical, and weakly constrained by law. Reuters reported his effusive praise for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, calling him “an incredible man,” “a great guy,” and saying, “I like him too much.” Reuters also documented Trump’s earlier praise for Vladimir Putin as “genius” and “pretty savvy,” and his notorious language of personal warmth toward Kim Jong Un. This is not just a taste for “strong leaders.” It is a preference for political forms in which ceremony expands, law shrinks, and the leader begins to occupy the place institutions were supposed to occupy. 

That is why these images are not peripheral to geopolitics. They are part of a moral and geopolitical revision. A leader cast as king, pope, or savior is being offered not simply as an officeholder but as an answer to the alleged exhaustion of the existing order. Liberal restraints are made to look small. Procedure is made to look weak. Institutions are made to look cowardly, slow, and spiritually empty. The message is clear enough: the world crisis is too large for ordinary politics, so the public must grow comfortable with a figure larger than politics. This is how a constitutional order begins to lose its own emotional legitimacy before it loses its legal one. 

And now the harder test. What would happen if the same machine circulated an image of Trump as Muhammad? Everyone knows the answer. The language would change immediately. We would stop talking about branding, trolling, and blasphemous narcissism. We would start talking about threats, platform liability, security posture, diplomatic fallout, and public safety. That asymmetry reveals something ugly but real about the West: we do not live under one civic standard of symbolic courage. We live under unequal sacred thresholds. One sacred vocabulary can be turned into campaign spectacle with manageable consequences. Another triggers the logic of risk management. That is not pluralism. It is an order trained by unequal fear. The strong backlash from Christian leaders to Trump’s Jesus image only proves the point in one register; the larger asymmetry remains intact. 

Jews should not treat this as someone else’s cultural pathology. The question is not whether Trump’s religious supporters say warm things about Israel, cite the Bible, or oppose Iran. The question is whether Jews recognize the old danger when politics begins to borrow sacred authority. Minorities are never safest when leaders are treated as providential. They are safest when power remains ordinary, accountable, and unsacralized. The moment criticism begins to sound like desecration, minorities cease to be protected by law and start to depend on the emotional weather around a cult. That is never stable. It is only flattering right before it turns. The growing Christian-national fusion around Trump’s movement, documented by AP and Reuters, should therefore be read not as harmless enthusiasm but as a warning sign. 

The reactions now make that danger impossible to dismiss. The image drew condemnation not only from opponents but from religious conservatives and clergy. At the same time, media and political reactions moved beyond offense toward constitutional alarm, including public discussion of removal and the 25th Amendment. Whatever one thinks of those demands, they show that the issue has already crossed from taste into regime form. Once a president cycles through king, pope, and savior, while his ecosystem wraps war in religious language and his critics begin talking about constitutional incapacity, the problem is no longer style. The problem is that politics has entered a zone where sacralized power and constitutional panic now belong to the same sequence. 

Jews should ask themselves a harder question than whether the image is offensive. They should ask what kind of order is taking shape when a leader can be staged as monarch, pontiff, and healer while the surrounding movement treats that not as intolerable but as usable. Because once power starts dressing for the altar, it is not seeking admiration. It is seeking permission. Permission to rise above law. Permission to moralize war. Permission to turn loyalty into devotion. And every time politics acquires that permission, death and suffering follow behind it, not as an accident, but as the price paid by those who were foolish enough to think liturgy could restrain power. 

Trump does not approach the sacred with conviction. He samples it politically. Christ for elevation, kingship for authority, papal imagery for symbolic office, and even Islamic language when it suits the moment. This is not faith. It is instrumental sovereignty dressed in borrowed holiness. And that may be the most dangerous part: not that he believes too deeply, but that he treats the sacred itself as usable material — something to post on Truth Social on Orthodox Easter, absorb the backlash, delete, and move on as if nothing happened. But the image remains. The sequence remains. The permission is being tested in public.

For Jews, the lesson of history is brutally clear. Minorities are never safest when power begins to occupy the place of the altar. They are safest when power remains ordinary, accountable, and unsacralized. The growing Christian-national fusion around this movement, even when it speaks warmly of Israel today, should be read not as harmless enthusiasm but as a structural warning. Once criticism starts to sound like desecration, protection shifts from law to the emotional weather of the cult. And that weather can change.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)