Trump posts image of himself as Jesus Christ; Mainstream media do not report this development

Trump was apparently up all night posting on Truth Social.

I can find no acknowledgement anywhere on the websites of the Times or the Post or CNN that the first post in the list below actually happened.

9:49pm (AI Jesus photo)

9:50pm (Trump tower on moon)

10:10pm (dumb meme)

10:32pm (news clip)

10:53pm (news clip)

12:43am (announcing Hormuz blockade)

2:35am (article about Biden)

2:36am (article on naval blockade)

2:37am (article on Rep. Swalwell)

2:37am (posted the same article about Biden again)

2:38am (article on his ballroom)

4:10am (article on Iran)

All between 9 pm and 4 am.

Here’s the image referenced in the first post in what, if I didn’t know better, appears to be the cognitively crepuscular internet activity of a paranoid dementia-ridden drug-addicted insomniac.

So many questions here. Let me throw out a couple;

How do people know this image is AI-generated? This is a sincere question, so please no OK Boomer comments.

What’s up with the vaguely trinitarian image just above the left side of his coiffure? Is that Satan with a couple of backup singers? I mean what the hell?

Besides the whole inchoate feeling of terror that is elicited by having a demented madman as the apparently completely unchallenged or controlled head of the world’s most powerful military, I want to put the bloggy snark and the moody brooding aside for a moment, and just note how utterly disgusting this all is. I’m not a religious believer, but I have enough respect and fellow feeling for the billions of people who are to be viscerally horrified by this sort of obscene blasphemy.

My reaction in this regard is shaped in part by having just read this piece (gift link), in which a morally and intellectually serious Christian — in other words, the exact opposite of both Trump and his supporters — discusses his beliefs:

The greatest epiphany for me came when I was translating the New Testament. I’ve been reading Greek most of my life. I’d read the New Testament in Greek many times, but I was still hearing it through the doctrinal inheritance to some degree, even when I thought I wasn’t. But having to grapple with the text and realizing just how strange, just how uncannily different this is, not only from anything else going on in the Late Antique world, but from received institutional understandings of Christianity, or just our commonplace man-and-woman-in-the-pews understanding of Christianity, became much more intense for me.

I became much aware of this and especially the absolute centrality of the social. When we talk about Christ threatening damnation, this is the indignation of someone who loves the most despised and ignored people of all. And that more and more becomes the center of my faith. “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

And especially at this moment politically and culturally in which the name Christianity in this country and in other parts of the world has been conscripted yet again, but with even more brazenness, into a justification for cruelty, bigotry, violence, murder even, the waging of war, the persecution of those seeking refuge. The New Testament is pretty clear on strangers in our midst. You’re going to be judged by how well you treat the strangers in our midst. For me, that’s maybe 80 percent of my faith now, just this burning sense of obligation to those whom this man loved. And in calling him God or calling him the revelation of God, I realized that that love is absolutely incumbent on me.

One of the most remarkable things for me about the transition from the pre-imperial to the post-imperial church is how the language of the Didache and the New Testament in these early Christian documents was preserved fairly late. Figures like Basil of Caesarea or John Chrysostom as Patriarch of Constantinople condemning wealth not in a mild way, not saying, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t misuse it, you should use it responsibly,” but condemning it altogether and doing this in the heart of the empire while the emperor and the empress are present.

Any riches you have in excess of what you need is food stolen from the hungry, clothing stolen from the naked. There’s no quarter given.

What also amazes me in later Christian tradition is the way the Sermon on the Mount is translated or the Lord’s Prayer. These are originally very concrete documents about the poor, mostly. The last part of the Lord’s Prayer is about the poor and about those being robbed by the rich. A whole set of things have been sanitized — first by doctrinal convention, but then by conventions of translation

We think that the Lord’s Prayer asks that God won’t lead us into temptation or will deliver us from evil or give us just our daily bread, whereas what the original Greek is saying is something much more radical. “Forgive us our trespasses” — there’s no word “trespasses” in the Greek. The word is opheilēmata and it literally means debts, and not moral debts. It’s during a debt crisis, and Jesus is saying pray to me that your debtors will relieve you so that you can’t be taken by the bailiff and put in prison because you’ve been dragged into a court, dragged into trial, not “led into temptation,” and reduced perhaps to slavery.

We’ve turned all that into very anodyne and rather nebulous moral councils that a rich person can recite without feeling the irony. But that’s not what the Greek says. And having to translate that word-for-word-for-word made me aware with an acuteness that until then, I hadn’t felt just what was actually going on here.

To encounter someone who who talks and thinks like this and then to confront once again the actual total depravity — not the fake Calvinist kind — of the man that millions upon millions of actually existing American Christians (we will not indulge no true Scotsman fallacies here) worship is a vertigo-inducing experience. As, indeed, is so much of reality and/or its simulacra, on these mornings when I awake to find that once again my rock awaits me, in the form of the apparently infinite editing of a certain text I’ve been fated to write but never complete.

. . . The Times finally reported this more than ten hours after Trump posted it.