What words could I offer to express my dismay and revulsion for Mr. Trump’s post on his Truth Social account, picturing himself as Jesus Christ, healing a sick man in a hospital?  The president says “I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor and it had to do with Red Cross.”

But of course Red Cross workers don’t typically wear white robes with red sashes, aren’t typically surrounded by glorious aureoles, and don’t typically have light radiating from their left hands.  They aren’t typically surrounded by adoring, prayerful figures, and aren’t typically backdropped by flying warrior angels.

No.   The president was depicting himself as the Christ.  What’s more, He was depicting himself as the Risen Christ:  He who was crucified, died and was buried; who descended into hell, and on the third day rose again from the dead; who ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty; who will come again to judge the living and the dead.  The messianic iconography of Mr. Trump’s AI-generated image was more lavish than that which the North Korean regime uses to promote the cult of Kim Jong Un.

Without in the least diminishing the shock and filth of this blasphemy, allow me to offer a reminder that we have a history of presidents comparing themselves to Christ and of allowing others to do so.  One would think that after the fall of emperor worship, we in the West would have got over that sort of thing.  Unfortunately, no.  As belief in the real God has waned, the urge to make gods of other things -- our rulers and ourselves included – has waxed.

Have we already forgotten the messianism of the Barack Obama presidency?  Jesse Jackson said that the man’s nomination was so significant that “another chapter could be added to the Bible to chronicle its significance.”  A contributor to the left-wing website Daily Kos said in reference to him, “What if all of the religious nuts were bashing the second coming of their Christ and they didn't even know it?”  Numerous bloggers on the left wrote that he was “no ordinary man” and that he “communicate[d] God-like energy.”  Whenever they could, photojournalists framed their shots in such a way as to make his head appear to have an aureole of holy light.  At Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey, teachers made up a song about him for the students to sing, borrowing words from the traditional children’s hymn “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”  At a gathering sponsored by the Gamaliel Foundation in Washington, D.C., the crowd chanted not the traditional litany “Hear our cry, O Lord,” but “Hear our cry, Obama.”  Mr. Obama himself reveled in messianic language.  After securing his party’s nomination, he exulted that “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

But political apotheosis didn’t begin with Mr. Obama either.  Bill Clinton went so far as to call his political platform the New Covenant, which is the term Christians use for the new relationship among God and His people which was made possible by the atonement of Christ.  Then he misquoted scripture for support.  "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has imagined what we can build," he boasted in his convention speech.  This was an obscene misquotation of 1 Corinthians 2:9 (itself a quotation from Isaiah 64:4), which reads in the original, "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him."  The Biblical passage gives sovereignty to God.  The modified language still sounds Biblical, but gives sovereignty to man.

In fact, the messianic urge in presidential politics begins even further back than that.  Abraham Lincoln, a reverent man, would have firmly resisted any comparison between himself and Christ, but not all of his admirers were so restrained.  The lyrics of Julia Ward Howe’s stirring Battle Hymn of the Republic proclaim, “I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: ... Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel.”  The burnished rows of steel are the steel swords of soldiers.  The image of the Hero born of woman who crushes the serpent with His heel is taken from Genesis 3:15, which Christians regard as the first messianic prophecy.  Biblically, the serpent is a symbol of the tempter, but politically, it depicts the Northern supporters of the Southern cause, who were called “Copperheads” after a variety of poisonous snake.  Between the lines, Howe was saying that the war president, Lincoln, was an image of the divine redeemer, Christ, and a precursor of His second coming.

I hope that today’s godless politicians would be more like Lincoln, the keynote of whose Second Inaugural Address was not vaunting human pride and vanity, but humility for both the country and himself.  Whatever one may like or dislike about their policies and political deeds, sometimes Messrs. Clinton, Obama, and Trump have seemed as though they were trying out for a different role.

The notorious “God is dead” thinker Friedrich Nietzsche is supposed to have remarked that he felt as though he were a new pen that some power was trying out.  We are beginning to see a lot of those pens.