It's obviously not great that the US president is insane or that he is leading a cult. However, in the long term, the bigger problem will be how to get the country back to normal.
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When we first saw the AI-generated image of Donald Trump as pope that the president saw fit to share on social media for some inconceivable reason, we weren’t going to cover it.
First of all, it has been well established by now that he is nuts, so we can’t write about every new piece of evidence showing that Trump is quite literally crazy. More importantly, we are trying to focus less on the sideshows and more on the real damage he and his administration are doing to the country.
However, this article is less about how positively insane it is that, on some level, Trump thinks that he should be pope.
Obviously, some might say that the president is just joking or trolling, but here is the thing: He isn’t.
When I was in college, I thought about declaring for the NBA draft as a joke. I wasn’t on the team and was just an average rec league player, but all you have to do is file some paperwork, so I thought it would be hilarious to see what would happen.
It’s just a prank, right?
But you better believe that I would not have turned down an opportunity to play with the Chicago Bulls if they had drafted me.
Of course, the chance of that happening back then was just as great as of Trump becoming pope now, but you get the point.
The difference is that I did not think I was deserving of playing next to Michael Jordan — but Trump, in his twisted, narcissistic mind, is probably convinced that he should be pope.
You can’t even blame him for that because that’s just his mental illness at work.
If you tell Trump that you saw him box in his youth and that he probably would have been able to beat Muhammad Ali, you better believe he is going to mention at some future rally that he could have been a world champion boxer… even if he never picked up a pair of gloves in his life.
It’s the same if you tell him that he could have single-handedly won the Vietnam War if those pesky bone spurs had not kept him out of the draft.
So, you can’t fault Trump for thinking he should be pope any more than you can fault a toddler for “painting” the wall of a living room with crayon.
That’s not the story here.
What is the story, however, is that the White House, using taxpayer money, thought to amplify his social media post, and that no Republican has the guts to say that this is insane and probably deeply offensive to millions of Catholics.
Mind you, these are the same people who would have gone ballistic if Joe Biden, who actually is a Catholic, had suggested that he himself should be pope.
Going back to the example of the toddler, imagine visiting some friends with your three-year-old, who then gets his hands on some crayons and draws all over their living room walls.
Obviously, the proper reaction might be embarrassment and an offer to pay for the damage, but it would not be to say: “Hey, little Peter, that looks great. Why don’t you draw something on their bedroom walls as well?”
But that’s exactly what Republicans are doing by enabling Trump and never acknowledging that he is insane.
The consequences of their acquiescence down the road are impossible to predict… but they will be serious — not just for the country but also for the GOP.
At some point, Trump will no longer be the leader of his cult, and then what?
After enthusiastically underwriting every crazy thing he did, how can those supposed “adults in the room” return the Republican Party to a state of normalcy?
And who are these adults?
Certainly not Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).
I was excited to hear that President Trump is open to the idea of being the next Pope. This would truly be a dark horse candidate, but I would ask the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility!
The first Pope-U.S. President combination has… pic.twitter.com/MM9vE5Uvzb— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 29, 2025
After World War II, it took a massive denazification effort of the allies to cleanse West Germany of the Nazi ideology (and the blind allegiance to Adolf Hitler) that had permeated every part of the country for 12 years.
They were largely successful, and West Germany became a solid democracy and a productive member of the global society.
In East Germany, however, no such effort was undertaken by the occupying Soviet Union, and that bill is now coming due… 80 years after the war ended.
Here, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which the federal office for the protection of the constitution this week declared to be an extremist organization that must be monitored, is thriving, as this pairing of maps shows.
Photo credit: Erinthecute/ Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The party’s stronghold is the entire area in which no denazification took place.
There is a similar example in US history.
After the Civil War, the victorious North failed to effectively weed out the racist, pro-slavery ideology predominant in the South (this isn’t to say that there was no systemic or individual racism in the North, but it took place on a much smaller scale and there were at least some efforts to address it.
The result is that remnants of a Confederate mindset still prevail in the South, and this “us vs. them” mentality between Black and white people continues to hold back the entire region in terms of prosperity, education, health, etc.
To keep something similar from happening again, there needs to be a strategy to bring the country back together once Trump is gone. If not, his lasting legacy will be that he irrevocably divided the country along ideological lines.
Those on the right point to a “woke mind virus” and “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as the prevailing mental illnesses in the country. And they are not entirely wrong.
There are certainly those who are pushing radical solutions to complex problems related to issues like sexuality and equality that are not yet workable and are dividing the country. Conversely, there are also those who would never give Trump credit for anything, even if he happened to do something beneficial for the country.
Operation Warp Speed, which likely saved millions of lives during the COVID pandemic, comes to mind.
However, the intentional and methodical brainwashing of conservatives, both byTrump and the modern iteration of the GOP and by the right-wing propaganda network led by Fox News, is a far bigger problem.
For the country to move forward and not slide back a few decades in nearly every way, there will need to be a deMAGAfication at some point in the future… and we have no idea what that might look like or if it could ever be successful.
In fact, we shudder at the prospect because there is something un-American about it.
Going back to Germany and the AfD, the country now finds itself at a similar crossroads as it faces the problem of a popular far-right party that could (and perhaps should) be outlawed. But how do you reconcile that with democratic principles?
It will be the same in the US. Trying to “re-educate” millions of MAGA extremists is at odds with America’s founding principles and is perhaps even unworkable in light of how (mis)information is being disseminated these days.
However, in our view, not trying it could lead to the end of everything that makes America America.
