Critical thinking on Trump’s recent PR stunt.
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I feel that something desperately needs to be said about Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself as the new pope on Truth Social. But what, exactly, can we say at this point?
By desecrating the image of the papacy just after the death of the last pope, Trump shows us that he considers nothing — no tradition, no office, no moral principle — untouchable to his will or his caprices. He drops the image just after he made a sad spectacle of himself — the only world leader who appeared in a blue suit, snoring away at the pope’s funeral. Trump does this just as he is getting away with corrupt crypto-grift on a monumental scale — facing no Congressional oversight or reprimand.
A few days ago, The New York Times reported on how a wealth fund backed by Abu Dhabi is “making a $2 billion business deal using the Trump firm’s digital coins.” The Trump family has a crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which just issued what is called a “stablecoin,” indexed to the dollar, named USD1. World Liberty has announced that this made-up USD1 will be used by the Abu Dhabi-backed investment firm MGX to fund a $2 billion minority stake acquisition in Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
The deal is immediately worth hundreds of millions for the Trump family and is an utterly brazen act of corruption. There is zero reason the Abu Dhabi fund would use USD1 except to pump up the value of the Trump family’s speculative asset.
Trump’s pope post is an audacious form of trolling, one that subliminally reinforces the dominance-based cult dynamic he has instituted with his followers, including his political and religious supporters. This cult dynamic has ratcheted up in recent weeks — a trajectory that should deeply concern all of us. A few days ago, Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee stopped responding to Democrats when asked if they agreed that the federal government can’t deport US citizens without any form of due process. Republicans are, in many cases, simply no longer answering queries from Democrats in Congress — even though the country has 10 million more registered Democrats than Republicans and Trump lost the popular vote.
Trump is not parodying the Holy See: He is absorbing the papacy into his brand, collapsing irony and self-worship, demanding fealty and obedience to his ongoing outrages. Trump’s pope post — taking it as an artwork, we might call it “Trump Pope Troll” — is yet another dare to his groveling followers: Will they step out of line and criticize him, even as he ridicules or blasphemes anything they once pretended to care about or hold dear?
The answer is, resoundingly, no. JD Vance “converted” to Catholicism from avowed atheism five years ago at Peter Thiel’s instigation, most likely to further his political ambitions. Vance has since become identified with the secretive Catholic organization Opus Dei, which worked closely with Franco’s regime in Spain and Pinochet in Argentina. Responding to a question by former neocon hawk now “Never-Trumper” Bill Kristol of The Bulwark, Vance responded: “As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen” as Politico reports.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) continued the toadying fun, writing: “Glad to report there is very positive reception and strong momentum for President Trump to be the next Pope. But I will be first to admit there has been some resistance!” Graham wrote. “Must keep your head down and plow forward — can’t let the naysayers win the day. Next week is crucial as the papal conclave convenes. … More updates to come!” Is this ironic or not? — or who even knows at this point?
Trump often employs a tactic of defilement to disrupt societal norms and values. As an attention-seeking narcissist, he clearly enjoys taking anything considered by anyone to be sacred, solemn, or at least meaningful and valuable, and symbolically denigrating and mocking it, to attract more media coverage. It is widely known that when he was younger, Trump specialized in having sex with his friend’s wives. He bragged about it on Howard Stern and elsewhere. He said this was “one of the things that made life worth living.” This was a way to assert power and show his contempt for these so-called friends.
With his latest art piece, Trump Pope Troll, Trump asserts dominance while he reinforces a worldview rooted in contempt for others and transactional nihilism. Trump certainly deserves to be the high priest of a completely transactional religion, where power, money, capital are the only “gods” left to a debased humanity on a disintegrating planet.
We should reasonably worry that Trump’s mocking, cheapening, and degrading of anything sacrosanct is a prelude to mass violence: After all, in a world where nothing means anything, why not exercise your most base and brutal instincts? Particularly if nobody is stopping you.
We are also seeing a rapid decline in Trump’s mental abilities, as many commentators have noted, analyzing the meaningless “word salad” he mixes together in his latest interviews with Time magazine and ABC. This isn’t surprising, as he has guzzled gallons of Diet Coke every day for years. Diet Coke contains Aspartame which causes dementia.
I had to ask myself why Trump Pope Troll strikes me as so different from many iconoclastic art works such as Andres Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ, the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” (“God save the Queen, the Fascist regime…”), or shock attempts by Lady Gaga, Madonna, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and so on. Long ago, I wrote about Koons’s Banality exhibit, where he presented kitsch versions of religious icons next to sculptures of cartoon figurines. I think, even with Koons, I had a queasy intuition that this kind of emptying out of values could lead to fascism eventually.
In the past, I appreciated when artists “took the piss” out of religious and government institutions. I do think there is a useful angle on Trump that sees him as a kind of artist — a performance artist — even if his “message” is grift, greed, and corruption. But Trump’s AI-generated self-image as pope is strikingly different from previous iconoclastic artworks because he is not critiquing power from some outside or marginal position: He is making a bid for total power by normalizing subversion, corruption, and desecration.
When Serrano submerged a crucifix in urine or the Sex Pistols mocked the monarchy, the provocation worked as part of what philosopher Theodor Adorno called “negative dialectic.” The artist sabotaged inherited totems and symbols to expose how they were hollow and complicit in structures of domination, revealing invisible faultiness in society.
These provocations retained the ethical core of critique — making visible the violence of institutions by violating their images. In contrast, Trump Pope Troll doesn’t critique religious authority: Trump parasitically appropriates it. As the leader of an American cult of purely transactional and nihilistic values, Trump puts himself at the center of the altar. If this isn’t an Antichrist move, I do not know what is.
What Trump is doing is a well-known technique in cult dynamics: Leaders demand not just loyalty, but complicity in taboo-breaking, and they keep upping the stakes. Those who object reveal themselves as insufficiently loyal. Those who go along with it will find it harder and harder to turn back and admit they were wrong.
Where punk iconoclasm and postmodern art played with blasphemy to deconstruct political and religious power, Trump’s gesture is something different. He demands people worship power itself, without question. In this sense, the blasphemy isn’t against God or religion. It’s against the very idea of thinking critically. The ongoing onslaught of cultural, political, economic, and anti-environmental Trumpism is meant to make us uncomfortably numb, passive spectators unable to respond to each new outrage. I am very afraid that it is working.
A version of this piece was originally published in Daniel Pinchbeck’s Newsletter.
