President Donald Trump is backing away from a social media post depicting himself as Jesus — but not from the broader war of words he’s nonetheless waging in opposition to Pope Leo XIV.
Trump on Monday deleted a picture of him as Jesus from his Truth Social account amid intense backlash, telling reporters that he thought it was meant to painting him as a physician.
“I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross,” he mentioned outdoors the West Wing. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better. And I do make people better.”
Yet pressed on whether or not he additionally disavowed a separate post through which he slammed the pope as “WEAK on Crime” and accused him of “catering to the Radical Left,” Trump stood his floor.
“Pope Leo said things that are wrong,” Trump mentioned, including that he wouldn’t apologize for his social media post. “We believe strongly in law and order, and he seemed to have a problem with that, so there’s nothing to apologize for.”
The pope first earned Trump’s ire final 12 months over feedback seen as vital of the administration’s mass deportation insurance policies. Leo has since clashed with Trump over the US and Israel’s battle with Iran, urging the sides to search a peaceable decision after which extra explicitly rejecting the president’s threats to wipe out “a whole civilization” if Tehran didn’t bend to his calls for.
Trump’s tensions with the papacy come regardless of the president surrounding himself with a number of outstanding Catholics, together with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and first girl Melania Trump. Vance and Rubio met with the pope final 12 months but haven’t taken any public steps to ease relations between Trump and the Vatican in current days.
Still, Trump appeared to understand that the depiction of him as Jesus — which he first posted Sunday — went too far. The picture exhibiting him in white and crimson robes and composed within the fashion of non secular artwork prompted criticism from a number of Republicans and conservative commentators who noticed it as anti-Christian.
“I cannot understand why he’d post this,” Riley Gaines, a conservative activist who has served as a key cheerleader for the administration’s restrictive insurance policies on transgender athletes, wrote on X. “Either way, two things are true. 1) a little humility would serve him well 2) God shall not be mocked.”
The post was passed by Monday morning, with the president later telling reporters that “I just heard” concerning the controversy and acknowledging that he made the preliminary determination to put up the post. It was a relatively uncommon and speedy walkback for Trump, who regularly reposts a spread of AI-generated movies and pictures to his Truth Social platform and has beforehand dodged duty for his or her content material.
In February, as an illustration, Trump shared a racist video depicting former President Barack Obama and first girl Michelle Obama as apes, which remained on-line for almost 12 hours earlier than it was deleted. The White House in the end blamed a staffer for the post and Trump declined to apologize.