My first thought is that the Trump meme at the heart of l’indignation du jour, the one depicting the President as healer, a nurse by his side, surrounded by soldiers and veterans, doesn’t offend me because I’m not religious. Not being religious (and I include in this category quasi-religious doctrines like gender identity) unburdens a man from having to be offended by memes and satire.
Let’s put aside that the offensive meme doesn’t depict what people think it does (nowhere in the New Testament does it say Jesus wears a white tunic with a red cape—that’s Catholic fashion—or that the laying on of hands is forbidden). We’ll assume that it’s what they say it is for the sake of the point of today’s essay.
My second thought is that, even if I were a Christian, I can’t imagine Trump’s meme offending me. Now, if I were a Muslim and believed Trump was mocking Islam, I would be offended, because my religion infantilizes me. It regresses me to a childlike state in which I throw a tantrum anytime somebody pokes fun at Muhammad, the most perfect man in history. But Christianity? Shouldn’t the religion of reason yield reasonable adults?
The answer is no—albeit not uniformly. I should’ve expected some Christians to respond this way after witnessing the row over Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. The clergy missed the point of the film. Especially in the UK and the US, Christian organizations protested, arguing the film was blasphemous. The film was even banned or restricted in parts of the UK, Ireland, and (of all places) Norway. The public thought otherwise and embraced it. The Life of Brian was commercially successful and became one of the most popular comedies of its era. (It still holds up, and is at moments prophetic.)
The hysteria over Trump’s meme (which he took down a day after posting it) is about more than hurt religious sensibilities by humorless Christians; outrage is being manufactured to achieve a political end: the delegitimization of a US president. For what purpose does this end exist? The global elite must thwart the populist reclamation of the sovereign nation-state.
Global elites are livid that Trump degraded Iran’s capacity to wreak havoc in the region and especially that he threw a monkeywrench into the machinery of the Chinese project to project its governance model globally. Since rational thought can find no purchase in popular consciousness on the matter, elites avoid explaining why enabling totalitarian state monopoly capitalism is in the interest of the Common Man. Instead, they weaponize Christianity against the Peace of Westphalia. They selected another dogma that disregards the modern nation-state for their arsenal, as well: Islam.
It mustn’t escape memory that progressives integrated the visage of Barack Obama with Christian iconography and declared him “The Second Coming” (of what exactly they were never clear). Nor will the attentive forget that Trump portrayed himself as the Pope in a May 3, 2025, TruthSocial post. Trump shared that meme just days before the Church elected Robert Francis Prevost (who took the name Leo XIV) as Pope. There was outrage over that meme, as well. Was their outrage over Obama’s usurpation of religious imagery for political gain? You will have trouble remembering any because there was so little.
It must be frustrating for elites. So much hysteria targeting the President has been manufactured that many are desensitized to the man’s memes and opinions. So, like a man developing tolerance to a drug, they have to keep upping the dosage for each fix.
I was never sensitive about Trump’s X posts in the first place (there was one several months ago that I thought did him no good, but I have forgotten the particulars like the rest of America). I recognized long ago that Trump is the same man who descended the Gold Escalator on June 16, 2015, and announced he was running for President. The world changed on that day. And elites are desperate to change it back.
freedom and reason 