An image of a literally radiant doctor, donning a white robe with a red sash draped over it, his hands emitting a divine light and one of them gently touching the head of a sick man, was posted online by the leader of the free world last Sunday night. The doctor’s pillowy face was his, you see, and, as he explained later, he does “make people a lot better”.
I might have been tempted to note that the doctor — who seemed to have none of the usual trappings of a physician, and above whom appeared to be suspended various strange figures, including a distinctly Satanic one with spikes where his head should have been — bore a remarkable likeness to depictions of Jesus Christ, the Messiah. But “only the fake news could come up with that one”, as President Donald Trump grumbled amid a broad-ranging backlash to it the next day, which had prompted him to delete the post.
And so I shan’t. I will instead turn to the responses from Christians, because it seemed like rather a lot of them did think that Trump was casting himself as some kind of Jesus-like figure, and were not happy about that. “We are a little bit beside ourselves,” was the restrained response of John Yep, CEO of Catholics for Catholic, a non-profit that has hosted events at Trump’s private members’ club-cum-winter residence, Mar-a-Lago. “Not saying Trump is the Antichrist,” came the slightly less understated comment from conservative Catholic writer Rod Dreher. “But he’s radiating the spirit of Antichrist, no question.”