The Divine Right of … Presidents?

 

Opinion

David French

The Divine Right of … Presidents?

 

April 19, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/opinion/trum-christ-pope-image.html

David French

By David French

Opinion Columnist

 

In January, 2024 Donald Trump supporters made a video called “God Made Trump.” It was in the style of Paul Harvey’s famous speech “So God Made a Farmer.” It even included a simulation of the legendary broadcaster’s voice, and it began like this:

 

“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.”

 

For more than two minutes, the video waxes eloquent about Trump’s alleged virtues, and then it declares that he’s a “shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave nor forsake them.”

 

Trump liked the video so much he shared it from his Truth Social account.

 

At a White House event on April 1, a few days before Easter, Paula White-Cain, an evangelical Christian pastor and the president’s chief spiritual adviser, told him to his face that he was the “greatest champion of faith that we’ve ever seen in a president,” and then she compared his story to Jesus Christ’s. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused,” she said, “It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us.”

 

“And sir,” she continued, “because of his resurrection, you rose up.”

 

I’ve picked out two prominent examples of Trump supporters’ comparing him to Christ, but they’re drops in an ocean of similar analogies. As my friend Skye Jethani, a Christian writer and former pastor, said on the Holy Post podcast, for the last 10 years Christians have been comparing Trump to various biblical figures.

 

So it should have come as no surprise to anyone that last Monday he finally made the comparison himself. He posted an image on Truth Social that depicted the president as Jesus healing a sick man, with worshipers looking on in adoration, a flag of the United States waving in the background and mysterious figures floating in the sky.

 

The image was clearly blasphemous, and I was gratified to see a number of people whom I’d consider MAGA Christians strongly criticize the president. For example, a popular right-wing commentator, Cam Higby, posted: “I support Trump, and I spend 8 hours a day defending him. I will not defend blasphemy.” Riley Gaines, a college swimmer turned conservative podcaster, tweeted to her 1.6 million followers on X: “Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this. Is he looking for a response? Does he actually think this?”

 

But it’s too little, too late. Rather than offering the absurd explanation that he thought he was posting an image of himself not as Jesus but as a physician (“I thought it was me as a doctor,” he said. “I make people better.”) he could have simply pointed at a host of his most loyal Christian followers and said, with his trademark sneer, “You started it.”

 

Much of the commentary after Trump’s blasphemy has been directed at the church. Will Christians condemn what he did? How can they continue to support a man who brazenly violates the Ten Commandments. (“You shall have no other gods before me.”) How much has evangelical support for Trump damaged the church? Is there anything he can do that will break the bond between evangelicals and the president?

 

But there’s another vitally important question that hovers in the air. How much is Christian zeal for Trump damaging America, and the world?

 

When the church abandons its rightful role as the conscience of the state and instead seeks to curry favor with the state, there is a real-world consequence. If you take an already grandiose man (whose commercial brand is his own name) and fill him with a sense of divine purpose, you can uncage a tyrant.

 

To consider the contrast between the biblical model of religious conscience and the actions of Trump’s Christian loyalists, recall one of the most famous confrontations with power in the Old Testament, between a prophet named Nathan and King David.

 

To conceal his sexual exploitation of a married woman, Bathsheba, David ordered her husband, Uriah, into the thick of combat, effectively murdering him. Nathan confronted David with an allegory of a rich man who stole a lamb from a poor man.

 

When David expressed anger at the rich man, Nathan revealed the key of his allegory and opened the door by saying, “You are the man.” In a moment of courage that has echoed for thousands of years, he said to the divinely ordained king of Israel: “You had Uriah the Hittite killed in battle. You took his wife as your wife. You used the Ammonites to kill him.”

 

In the biblical story, David repents immediately and writes one of the most memorable psalms in Scripture. “Have mercy upon me, O God,” it begins, “According to Your lovingkindness; According to the multitude of Your tender mercies, Blot out my transgressions.”

 

Now let’s look to the words of Franklin Graham, one of the most prominent evangelicals in America — and one of Trump’s most zealous supporters.

 

In a public statement after Trump posted the image of himself as Jesus, Graham pretended to believe Trump’s absurd explanation of the image, writing, “I’m thankful the President has made it very clear that this was not at all what he thought the AI-generated image was representing — he thought it was a doctor helping someone, and when he learned of the concerns, he immediately removed the post.” But Graham didn’t stop there. He lashed out against Trump’s critics, “I think his enemies are always foaming at the mouth at any possible opportunity to make him look bad,” he wrote.

 

Someone else is always to blame.

 

One gets the feeling that if Graham were alive in King David’s era, he’d be defending David, telling him that Nathan was “foaming at the mouth,” falsely accusing him of murder. I can hear the defenses now.

 

“Can you really be blamed when a soldier of yours dies in combat?”

 

“That would never hold up in court.”

 

“The Ammonites killed Uriah, not you! They’re the criminals here — and, besides, this thing with Bathsheba and so forth is nobody’s business.”

 

As a thought experiment, ask yourself how a president would behave if he believed he was clothed with divine purpose? Wouldn’t he try to expand his power beyond all previous limits? After all, he’s on a mission from God. Or maybe he thinks he’s like God? It’s hard to type those words, but that’s exactly the meaning of the image Trump shared.

 

Wouldn’t he feel free to start wars based on his judgment alone, based on his command alone? What is Article I of the Constitution compared with the will of the Almighty?

 

And wouldn’t such a man be jealous of his religious rivals in the battle for the hearts and minds of American Christians? I don’t think it’s possible to separate Trump’s public fight with Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church from his own sense of divine authority.

 

Pope Leo’s pleas for peace are hardly unprecedented. I distinctly remember Pope John Paul II’s strong objections to Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet an American president has never responded to a pope with personal attacks and lies as Trump has.

 

And when he did, Vice President JD Vance, a relatively recent convert to Catholicism, responded (incredibly enough) by scolding the pope. “In the same way that it’s important for the vice president of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy,” he said, “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

 

One pernicious effect of Trump’s attacks is to stir up long-buried divisions between Catholics and Protestants. Papal conspiracies have a long and sad history in Protestant Christianity, and oceans of blood have been spilled in the wars between the different strands of world Christianity.

 

In fact, this second Trump term has been one long experiment in what happens when a president and a movement discard the wisdom of the founders. A man like Trump was supposed to be hemmed in by a combination of law and morality.

 

As I’ve written before, presidents were put in a Madisonian box, meaning that he was constrained by both the language of the Constitution and the example of a person, George Washington. Washington could have grasped total control, but instead he limited his authority. He demonstrated forbearance against his enemies. In many ways, he defined what it meant to be the leader of a republic.

 

Trump sees it differently. “My own morality,” he told us. “My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” And his own morality includes imagining himself as the Son of God in a social media post.

 

The American system was built to contain personal power, to prevent religious strife and to limit the nation’s ability to go to war. Trump blows through the constraints on the executive branch, stokes religious conflict and sends the world’s most powerful nation to war based on his judgment alone. To make matters worse, he’s full of divine purpose. He’s told the world that he was “saved by God to make America great again.”

 

When you dismantle a system that was intended to prevent ancient evils from destroying the new world, you can help unleash those evils back on the world. Catholics and Protestants feud once again. A world leader who is infused with religious purpose picks a fight with the Vatican. And the great powers inch toward conflict, with a president of the United States who refuses to recognize any moral or legal limits on his power at all.

 

David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).