I usually like Bob Russell’s articles but his latest article about President Trump potentially thinking that he is Jesus needs some attention. In this case, Pastor Russell is not incorrect that pride is a problem for people who rise to leadership. Russell’s numerous citations of Scripture passages affirm this. But he goes on to assume that President Trump has committed a sin of pride when the evidence for that is not at all clear. Russell has accused him of potentially accepting worship as a god which would be a very serious religious matter. But is it true?
In Donald Trump’s case, he has so many accomplishments behind him that it’s not really an issue of “pride” or much less a view of himself as Jesus or accepting worship. All of my life I’ve heard people say, “It’s not bragging if you can do it.” President Trump has done it. He has all of the reasons from his substantial amount of past successes to push his concept of WINNING and he is by nature a do-gooder. He really wants to help people. Indeed, he has helped people in the past by paying off bills, giving them employment, and other acts of charity. As President, he believes his policies are helping people now. The President is also a builder by trade and builders rely upon getting proper results. Builders live in a world of reality that many others do not. Their lives are brick and mortar, lumber, and finishing projects that last. You can’t build a skyscraper and then have it fall down from shoddy construction. So there’s a lot of planning and strategy that goes into the task. That’s what makes this administration so great. Trump has assembled a team of people around him who are dedicated to various facets of success in this administration and they feed him all manner of advice. He is strategic. Victor Davis Hanson recently said, “Almost EVERYTHING that Trump is doing that seems herky-jerky has an ultimate strategic purpose: to diminish the power of the Chinese — and to turn Russia and China against each other. There is a plan. And it’s WORKING!” This is strategic thinking to accomplish goals based on a lifetime of accomplishing goals. There is nothing particularly prideful in pointing to your successes.
Christian Sensitivity
Unlike Bob Russell and some of my more sensitive fellow Christians, I was not the least bit offended by the image that has disturbed them. Never once that I think the President was claiming to be Jesus. Never once did I view it as blasphemous or an insult nor did I see it as prideful or accepting any kind of worship. We have a country that was on the verge of collapse when President Trump won both of his elections. And it’s only through his intervention, powered by his voters, that we have stayed that off and turned the course. To portray him as someone with healing powers to a sick country is not the least bit controversial in my mind. It is a fact of life. His approach and his policies have reshaped the world as well as the country. We’re seeing that play out with the rearrangement of world power right now with Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and the twin evils of China and Russia. The Middle East is on a historic path that should bring a lot more peace and prosperity. Arab countries are fighting alongside of Israel against another Islamic country. It’s astounding and it is genius and it takes nerves of steel to do it. He clearly has something that other presidents have not had.
Claims that the image had his hands glowing as some symbol of divinity were overlooking the fact that artwork is symbolic and artists depict powers of various sorts through such imagery. Jesus is portrayed with a halo to indicate his divinity but so are saints and apostles. It is not that the saints and apostles are divine in the same way that Jesus was divine but it is to set them apart as being, in some sense, holy people. In fact, all of the imagery in the original picture is of Americana. The picture that Trump reposted had been modified by someone to turn one of the soldiers in the background into a demonic-looking figure which he doesn’t seem to have been aware of at the time. Only Trump’s being dressed in a robe with a sash could be confused as being related to Jesus and that is simply our cultural indoctrination. When we as Christians think of miraculous healing we most naturally think of Jesus and yet nothing in the image suggests that Trump is performing a miracle. He is healing the nation but that is simply artistic expression of the result of his policies.
History of Affirming God
Nothing in President Trump’s life or public statements indicate that he has the audacity to think of himself as Jesus or worthy of worship. In fact it’s quite the opposite. He has appealed to Jesus for support in his public speeches. He has very often appealed to God and he believes that the God saved him from assassination in Butler Pennsylvania. He believes God has a plan for him. Consider just this smattering of recent statements.
“America is a Nation of Believers. We need God, we want God and, with His help, we will make our Nation Stronger, Safer, Greater, more Prosperous, and more United than ever before.” (Easter 2025 and similar in 2026)
“As I have often said, to be a great nation, you must have religion, and you must have God.” (Good Friday message, 2026)
In a CBN interview he said,
“I would say that the office is so powerful that you need God even more.”
Then for Holy Week of 2026 he also said these things:
“This Holy Week, I’m proud to join with Christians across the country and around the world to celebrate the most glorious miracle in all of time — the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” then also, “As it says in Gospel of John, for God so loved the world that He gave His only son, for whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life,” Trump said. WFMD
These are not statements made by a man who thinks that he is Jesus. The President has been very clear that he believes in Divine intervention and the guiding hand of Providence (that is God). My fellow Christians really have to be a bit obtuse or uninformed not to remember at least some of the statements that he has made about God, Jesus and the importance of the Christian religion to so suddenly attribute some “Jesus complex” to him over a simple repost of an image that he did not create nor comment on.
Evangelical Misreadings
President Trump is also not an Evangelical Christian like so many of us in the South are and that’s where a lot of this criticism, like Russell’s, comes from. He does not think of the world the way in which we think of the world. It’s perfectly plausible that he never thought of himself as Jesus in that picture. In fact, the creator of the image did not see him as Jesus either. So it’s no surprise to me that President Trump was surprised when it caused the kind of uproar that it did. In fact, Trump thought it was the media that caused the problem. He was still unaware of why some Christians might find it offensive. In deference to them, he took the image down. But that’s not satisfactory for some people and they still want to whine and cry about it. They still want to attribute motives to him that were never there and are in no way indicated by any public statement he made or any comment he wrote about the image.
Pastor Russell writes,
“I don’t know whether the president genuinely missed the religious imagery there. I can’t see his heart. But I can speak to what was on the screen — and what was on the screen was just flat out wrong.”
Is it? As I said, the President doesn’t have the mind of an Evangelical Christian. He wasn’t raised that way. Bob Russell should consider that Jesus was not the only one who did healings in the ancient world or in Bible. The prophet Elijah and the prophet Elisha did healings and other miracles. Moses did many things including saving the Israelite people from slavery in Egypt. And if you look at the outfit that Trump is portrayed is wearing it’s actually more akin to ways in which you see Moses portrayed in the Ten Commandments movie with Charlton Heston. Only the creator of the image could tell you if he had anything like that in mind. If you do a Google search for “images of ancient doctors” you will find them in Egypt, Greece, Rome, and China and most of them are wearing robes. So there is nothing outlandish about President Trump saying that he thought the image was of him being portrayed as a doctor.
Russell further declares,
“Christ alone is to be worshipped. No president, no party, no pastor — and no preacher, either — stands in His place. Any meme, picture, or portrayal that depicts someone else as Christ is offensive.”
I would not disagree with the part about accepting worship that belongs to God, but he goes a bit far when he gets into depictions. People routinely create humorous depictions of figures as Jesus or even have Jesus saying things that he would never say for the purposes of humor. There is a whole branch of “Things Jesus Never Said” memes out there. This past week someone portrayed Donald Trump as giving a beatitude as if it was the Sermon on the Mount for its humorous effect. It is far from clear that these things are wrong as humor is usually to point out a truth.
Many Christian supporters of the President are also trepidatious enough that when he says anything that could be perceived as “controversial” then they will rush to condemn him without doing the research first. This is related to our cultural sensitivities of being “nice” or “non-controversial” even if it means skirting the truth in favor of perceived or expected emotional reactions. They don’t want to have to deal with the fallout of such controversies. When I saw the image I chuckled. When I saw that people were upset about it I began to research it and post my thoughts. But I did the research first.
Proper Offense
In the end all this is Much Ado About Nothing. I’m a Christian minister in the same brotherhood as Bob Russell. I am not a Muslim so I’m not offended if you draw a picture of Jesus. I’m not even offended if you have certain attributes that were shared with Jesus attributed to a human character. It’s not the same thing as a salvific crucifixion of the Son of God, which no one can equal. People often talk in terms about “resurrection” such as a person has “resurrected” their career and yet we are never offended by those things. People will casually talk about someone being a “savior” because they saved a business or a country or an industry or a person from death. And yet, we don’t get offended by these things. This is a hypersensitivity which I find ridiculous since it ignores all the evidence to the contrary. It is a knee-jerk, pearl-clutching, hand-wringing response of people who are acting emotionally and not taking the time to fully process the situation. A simple Grok search would turn up the original image, its creator, Nick Adams, and a clear statement that President Trump is doing God’s work by healing the nation, see @nickadamsinUSA on X. Those of us who are ministers owe our congregations a better form of evaluation than an unvetted, emotional response laden with assumptions.
In the 1980s we had people who got upset because other Christians would use a pen or highlighter to underline passages in their Bibles. To such people it was “defacing the Word of God”. They attributed a “holiness” to the physical Bible that not even Scripture declares. These were people with a shallow view and knowledge of how Scripture has been transmitted and marked up in the past without any objection. Most people rejected those objections and continued to mark up their Bibles for easier reference. Personally, I am fundamentally well enough grounded that you can’t offend my sensibilities even if you tried. If you dressed like Jesus and burned a truckload of Bibles in front of my house I would just think you were an idiot and keep the fire extinguisher handy. Things that actually offend me are substantively related matters such as people misusing the Bible’s passages. Those who tell me that the Bible supports homosexuality or same-sex marriage will cause me to react. Proof-texting passages such as Jeremiah 29:11 or Philippians 4:13 will get my attention. Telling me that “Judge not lest you be judged” means that I can’t tell you that something is wrong will get me going. Telling me that the Bible supports abortion or telling me that Christians should avoid being involved in politics will rile my sensitivities. I’ve written and spoken and preached on all these topics.
The President is not one who shirks away from saying what he thinks, facing controversy, or causing controversy. The rule of thumb for anything that seems “outrageous” regarding President Trump should be to wait 12 to 24 hours and do some online searching using AI to flesh out the content and context of what seems disturbing. The day that this post occurred on Truth Social it was amusing to me to watch people react. But after the facts emerged that neither the creator of the image nor the President viewed it the way the reactionaries did, it should have quickly died down. The second day and beyond is simply people who either refuse to accept the simple explanation or just hate President Trump so vehemently that they won’t let it go. Neither approach is rational, charitable, logical, or sound.
Concluding Remarks
Bob Russell’s approach to the issue is cautious in the end but he exhibits this form of trepidation. Trump makes him nervous. He doesn’t like his language. He thinks Trump is prideful.
Readers of this blog know that I have been critical of Donald Trump because of his pride. Over the years I’ve warned that it hurts him — and that it hurts the cause he says he serves. This week’s incident is one more reminder. Scripture calls us to honor the office God has entrusted to a leader, but not to follow him into every place he goes. Those are two different things, and we lose something important when we let them blur together. Supporting a leader well means honoring the office and telling the truth when something is off. – Bob Russell
Like many pastors, Russell is a mild-mannered, unoffensive character so his reaction is not surprising. But Russell ignores the fact that Trump has stated on numerous occasions that he has to tell people about his accomplishments because the media doesn’t tell them. He also has to remind people of these things for political reasons. His enemies daily disparage him. People have short memories. They think gas is high now but it was higher under Biden. We are very often persuaded by the present and forget a historical perspective. Nothing about reposting this particular image was “prideful”. In fact, we all have accomplishments that we are proud of: graduating college, enjoying the success of our children, business accomplishments. Having some measure of pride is not a sin. As Christians, most of us already factor in God’s blessings when we achieve things. Russell is steeped in Southern Christianity with historical sensitivities to anything potentially offensive. In this case he has let these things cloud his judgment a bit and accuse the President of a sin which is not at all obvious that he committed.