Columnists
Trump’s AI Pope Posting: Ridiculous; Nearly Insane
From the Outside Looking
From around the world, there was a near-unanimous condemnation, especially from the Catholic Christians, of President Donald Trump’s posting of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) picture of himself, garbed in papal attire. He even re-shaped it on his Truth Social media and posted it from the White House, saying, he “would like to be Pope.”
It is apt to refer to Italy’s former Prime Minister, Mr. Matteo Renzi. He condemned it as, “This is an image that offends believers, insults institutions and shows that the leader of the right-wing world enjoys clowning around.” Father Gerald Murray, of the Archdiocese of New York, where Trump has millions-dollar properties, characterised the Catholic sentiment
when he said, “Silly. You don’t [say] do that.”
The comments by cardinals must represent what the whole 1.4 billion worldwide Catholics feel. And they were diplomatically correct in their utterances. Filipino David Cardinal Pablo Virgilio said, “Not funny.” Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, was more critical and said, “Well, it wasn’t good.”
Trump’s AI posting came at a bad time, when there was an assembly of cardinals to vote for the replacement of late Pope Francis. And there were still groups of Americans at the Vatican after this. What they thought gives a good idea of the 23% of the US Catholics feel. Their reactions ranged from “absurd” to “typical.” But it was Italy’s media through its daily newspaper, La Repubblica, that gave a good gut-feeling of most of the Catholic billion population. They wrote that it was “Infantile”, and they referred to Trump’s action as “pathological megalomania.”
Wanting to be pope is one thing; getting to be pope is an extremely different matter. For Trump, it is completely outlandish. In the first place, he is not a Christian, far less Catholic. To be a pope, one has to go through several priestly stages, and it takes a lifetime. And then one has to be elected by a conclave of the world’s cardinals who represent more than one billion people. Trump thinks that coming from a constituency of 340 million Americans, he can easily ascend to that electorate, not even on his say-so. So for him to use his far-right accumulation of power in the US to claim certain Catholic accreditations is unimaginable!
It is safe to assume that Trump is looking at the global power that the US has as something he can use to transcend American politics. And he reckons that the global numbers of the Catholic community can be his playing field, just as he has so far used the White House powers to attack the world on the issue of tariffs. And he has used his Truth Social to unload lies on the global readership and his US supporters.
Just recently, he said that his first 100 days were the best any American president had ever experienced. This is contrary to all the evidence; it shows that his first 100 days were the worst any president had gone through. His rating is the lowest of any president at this point.
He wants to translate the 22nd Amendment of the US Constitution, which says that nobody can be elected president more than twice. Yet Trump recently, in his staccato manner of speaking, said that he was already serving his third term. He told a Michigan crowd of Trumpists, “Well, I already served three, but – if you count – but remember – I like the victories; I like the three victories, which we had – I just don’t like the results of the middle term.”
His two victories have been in the 2016 and 2024 elections. And yet he claims that even the Biden Administration was his win, what he terms as his “middle term”. La Repubblica is right about this “pathological megalomania.” Only that the AI posting has shown the weirdness of it all. It has gone far: the man now imagines himself as “Pope Donald O”.
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