Trump may believe he is the messiah – but his attack on the pope could prove costly for JD Vance | Arwa Mahdawi

The president’s attack on the head of the Catholic church and the AI depiction of himself as a Christ-like figure have not gone down well with one of the largest groups of swing voters in the US, writes Arwa Mahdawi

Poor persecuted Donald Trump has frequently portrayed himself as a modern messiah. Some of his supporters, meanwhile, have compared him directly to Jesus. And, to be fair, while the son of God didn’t eat Big Macs on a private jet and encourage his followers to buy AI stocks, there are similarities between the two figures. Namely the miracle-working. The US president may not be able to turn water into wine, but he’s turned public office into a personal goldmine. This week, Trump also managed to transform a staunch atheist (me) into a defender of the Catholic church.

I’m not defending everything, mind you, just Pope Leo XIV’s recent condemnations of war. “God does not bless any conflict,” the pope wrote on X on Friday. “Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who … drop bombs.” During Saturday prayers, the pope also called out the “delusion of omnipotence”. While Leo didn’t name names, his statements were widely interpreted as a rebuke of the Trump administration, which has repeatedly framed its warmongering in religious terms.

The inaugural Fifa peace prize winner certainly took the pontiff’s comments personally. On Sunday, Trump, who identifies as a nondenominational Christian, attacked the pope on Truth Social, calling him “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy”. Shortly after, the president posted (and later deleted) an AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure anointing the forehead of a man who looked vaguely like a skinny Jeffrey Epstein.

Like Jesus, Trump has his disciples: Sean Hannity, Trump’s BFF at Fox News, has joined the president’s holy war. “I hate the pope,” the anchor said on Friday. Hannity then wondered out loud whether the pope had “even read the Bible”.

If I were the pope, I would not be turning the other cheek to all this. I’d be asking God to do me a solid and send a plague of locusts to eat all the grass on Trump’s golf courses. Instead, he offered a more dignified response. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Leo said on Monday, when asked about Trump’s comments. “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel.”

I know you’ve got to be good at mental gymnastics to be a Trump fan, but how are his Catholic supporters justifying these attacks on the pope? Many are not. A majority of Catholics disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war on Iran, and his stunt with the Christ-like picture of himself didn’t go down well, even though Trump insisted that the image was “supposed to be me as a doctor”.

Alienating Catholics is not the smartest move: they are the US’s biggest religious swing voters. They largely voted for Biden in 2020, but, in 2024, Trump won the group by a 10- to 20-point margin. Unless he makes good on his threat to run for an unconstitutional third term, Trump doesn’t have to worry about courting the Catholic vote again himself, but he hasn’t made life easy for his Catholic vice-president, JD Vance, who is generally seen as Trump’s successor. Vance has been very quiet about all this, causing Denise Murphy McGraw, the national co-chair of Catholics Vote Common Good, to call him out and state that silence is complicity.

Vance broke his silence on Fox News on Monday, saying: “It would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality … and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.” I know you’re desperate for your boss’s job, JD, but I think it would be best for American public policy if there were a little less dictating and a little more morality.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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