Trump depicts himself as Jesus healing the sick in AI image after locking horns with Pope
text_fields
After locking horns with Pope Leo XIV, whom he derided as weak and aligned with the “Radical Left”, the US President Donald Trump, who had described the war with Iran conflict in Christian religious terms, shared an AI-generated image portraying himself in a Christ-like form, casting his own likeness within the spiritual hollow of Jesus and depicting himself as healing the sick, a move that has ignited fresh controversy.
The AI image, disseminated on Trump’s platform Truth Social, surfaced amid an intensifying war of words between the president and the pontiff, whose recent remarks urging restraint in the ongoing Iran conflict had been widely interpreted as a veiled rebuke of the US’s military posture and rhetorical brinkmanship.
Escalating his rhetoric in a lengthy social media post and subsequent remarks to reporters, Trump castigated Leo as ineffectual on crime and inept in foreign policy, while asserting that he did not want a pope who tolerated the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.
The president further personalised his attack by questioning the legitimacy of the Pope’s elevation, suggesting it was politically engineered and opportunistically linked to his own presidency, while contending that Leo’s American origin had been instrumentalised as a strategic counterweight to his administration; he went so far as to claim that, absent his presence in the White House, Leo would not have ascended to the papacy.
These remarks followed the Pope’s recent homiletic interventions, in which he warned against a “delusion of omnipotence” driving the conflict and invoked scriptural admonitions to condemn the moral bankruptcy of war.
While the Vatican has refrained from issuing an official response, the unprecedented directness of the exchange has laid bare profound fissures over war, migration, and the entanglement of religion with statecraft, marking a rare and deeply polarising rupture between a sitting American president and the papacy.