President, Extremely Normal Brain-Wise: Pope Weak On Crime, Also I’m Dr. Jesus Christ

A little while later, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, healing by touch a guy who looks an awful lot like Jeffrey Epstein while a crowd of uniformly white people gaze on in wonder. What else. Oh right. Also, toward the end of last week, Trump announced that the United States would begin blockading the Strait of Hormuz, which the nation of Iran has been blockading ever since the U.S. attacked that country illegally and without provocation at the end of February. For those catching up, Trump has spent the past several weeks desperately attempting to browbeat the rest of the world into opening the Strait by force on his behalf, while also continually insisting on his social-media website that the Strait is of no consequence and also that the U.S. military could open it at any time. Keen students of history may recall way back in double-aught-one week ago, when Trump threatened to destroy the entire civilization of Iran if it did not open the Strait within a few hours. A lesser tactician might observe that responding to a blockade of the Strait by blockading the Strait is the equivalent of punishing a guy for punching you in the face by also punching yourself in the face. What this analysis fails to apprehend is that, in war, you cannot be defeated if, whenever anything happens in the war, you say that it was no big deal and also everybody else's fault and also good actually and due to your genius. OK back to the AI image of Trump as Jesus Christ. As one might imagine, Trump's choice to propagate this image has not gone down super well with whole huge swaths of the populace, including many of the types of people who, while politically conservative and otherwise sympathetic to many of Trump's hatreds and resentments and perhaps before now proud to have voted for him, are sensitive to what my colleague David Roth called red-letter Antichrist Shit, and so get a little itchy when an elected world leader A) starts an elective war in the Middle East, and B) portrays himself as the Messiah. In fact, many of those people spent much of the past 36 hours calling him the Antichrist, right there on his own website. Trump deleted the image at some point around midday on Monday.