Trump’s Reaction to the Jesus Flap Compounds Concerns About His Mental Acuity

Early Monday morning, President Donald Trump posted an image of himself as a robed, Jesus-like healer laying hands on a prone hospital patient. A bright golden light emanates from Trump’s left hand and from the point of contact between his right hand and the patient’s forehead. Several witnesses, including a nurse, a soldier, and a woman whose hands are tented in prayer, observe the scene with a combination of hope and awe.

After Christians objected to the blatant blasphemy, Trump insisted that he did not understand what all the fuss was about. “I thought it was me as a doctor,” he told reporters, averring that complaints about the picture were based on an interpretation that “only the fake news could come up with.” The picture made sense to him, he explained, because “it’s supposed to be as a doctor making people better,” and “I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”

As is often the case with Trump, it is not clear whether he was lying or actually believed what he said—or which would be worse. Either way, the decision to post the picture, which Trump presented on Truth Social without commentary, seems like an egregious lapse of political judgment, as Trump implicitly acknowledged by deleting it—a striking retreat for a president who rarely acknowledges error or apologizes for anything. And if we charitably attribute that mistake to honest obliviousness rather than a narcissistic disregard for Americans’ religious sensibilities, that explanation raises a familiar question: If Trump were senile, how would we know?

I have long been critical of attempts to portray Trump’s longstanding character defects as symptoms of “mental illness.” But that rhetorical trick, which gives a pseudoscientific, quasi-medical veneer to political criticism that can and should be assessed on its own merits, is distinct from the question of whether Trump, who will turn 80 in a couple of months, is suffering from the same sort of cognitive decline that forced his predecessor, then just a year or so older, out of the 2024 presidential race.

To properly address that question, you have to adjust for the impulsiveness, grandiosity, meandering speaking style, and defiance of reality that Trump has displayed throughout his political career. But several recent episodes should give pause even to Trump supporters who are inclined to view those characteristics as refreshing, entertaining, or both.

The last time I mulled this question, the precipitating incident was Trump’s erroneous but seemingly sincere belief that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran who was illegally deported to his native country last year, literally “had MS-13 tattooed” on “his knuckles.” During an ABC News interview that was painful to watch, Trump refused to abandon that delusion even after the interviewer, Terry Moran, repeatedly informed him that the gang initials in the photo to which he referred had clearly been added as a supposedly explanatory label above Abrego Garcia’s actual but more ambiguous finger tattoos.

As I noted at the time, “you can be sure that if [Joe] Biden had displayed the sort of stubborn obliviousness that was evident in Trump’s conversation with Moran, Republicans would have cited it as clear evidence of his encroaching senility.” The same goes for the president’s reaction to the flap over the Trump-as-Jesus picture.

In a CBS News interview on Monday, Trump doubled down on his explanation of that picture, which he attributed to “a very beautiful, talented artist,” although it looks like it was produced by an A.I. image generator. “I viewed that as a picture of me being a doctor in fixing—you had the Red Cross right there, you had, you know, medical people surrounding me,” he said. “And I was like the doctor, you know, as a little fun playing the doctor and making people better. So that’s what it was viewed as. That’s what most people thought.”

Trump’s recent tirade against Pope Leo, whom he called “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” likewise seemed politically ill-advised. But he had a ready explanation: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States,” he said, urging the pontiff to “get his act together” and “stop catering to the Radical Left.”

Trump was especially irked by the pope’s criticism of the war with Iran. But Trump had reinforced that critique less than a week before, when he threatened Iran with apocalyptic destruction if its leaders did not comply with U.S. demands. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he warned on Truth Social. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” After that genocidal threat, he closed with best wishes for his targets: “God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

Erstwhile allies who were already at odds with Trump over the Iran war thought that post was proof that he had lost his mind. “The 25th Amendment needs to be invoked,” Candace Owens declared. “He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness.” Former Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene had a similar take: “25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization. This is evil and madness.” Alex Jones proposed the same improbable solution, which would require the support of Vice President J.D. Vance and most of Trump’s Cabinet in deeming him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

While you might not trust the likes of Owens, Greene, and Jones to judge anyone’s sanity, Trump’s response to such criticism was not exactly reassuring. “I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!”

Maybe Trump’s unhinged threat against Iran was strategic: He’s so crazy, there’s no telling what he’ll do! It is harder to explain his strange remarks about magnets last August or his tangents during a Christmas reception at the White House in December, when he briefly confused a woman in the audience with his daughter Ivanka and spent eight minutes discussing the threat posed by poisonous snakes in Peru.

Last month, Trump delivered similarly puzzling disquisitions on the virtues of the White House drapes (at a Medal of Honor ceremony) and Sharpie markers (at a Cabinet meeting). He also seems a bit hazy on geographic terms, misidentifying Azerbaijan as Cambodia during a speech last September and confusing Greenland with Iceland while addressing the World Economic Forum in January. Between those two flubs, Trump bizarrely claimed that movie director Rob Reiner, whose son was charged with murdering him in December, had died “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”

The New York Times reports that Trump “dismissed the criticism of his mental state when asked by a reporter last week.” In fact, he claimed to be unaware of such talk. “I haven’t heard that,” he said. “But if that’s the case, you’re going to have to have more people like me because our country was being ripped off on trade, on everything, for many years until I came along. So if that’s the case, you’re going to have to have more people.”

Since that response was hard to follow, the Times asked the White House for clarification. “President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the past four years,” spokesman Davis Ingle replied. Whatever you make of that assessment, which confusingly glides over the first 15 months of Trump’s second term, the reassurance in face of contrary evidence has a familiar ring.