Audio only:
Joe examines how Trump’s blasphemous meme actually points to a more serious problem spiritually in our culture today, and it’s a problem that most of us struggle with.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and this Easter season has been a wild one for American Catholics, particularly in terms of the clash of church and state. On Easter Sunday morning, President Trump tweeted to the Iranians threatening to attack power plants and bridges and to open the bleeping straight, or they would be living in hell, signing off with a mocking praise be to Allah. Now, former Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson quickly jumped on this and called it out as a mockery, not only of Islam, but also Christianity.
CLIP:
No, this is a mockery not just of Islam, it’s a mockery of Christianity. To send out a tweet with the F-word on Easter morning, promising the murder of civilians and then saying, “Praise be to Allah. Without explaining any of it, you are mocking me and every other Christian because we’re Christians.”
Joe:
And on Divine Mercy Sunday, the octave day of Easter, President Trump attacked Pope Leo the 14th, claiming he was weak on crime and saying that he doesn’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States. Because Trump says he’s doing what he was elected to do, the crime is down and the stock market is up. Just a few hours later, he then followed this up by tweeting out an image of himself as if he was Jesus, healing the sick. Now, this time, the outcry from Christians was so strong that Trump actually took it down eventually, offering as an explanation this. Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?
CLIP:
Well, it wasn’t depicted. It was me. I did post it and I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross as a Red Cross worker there, which we support. Right.
Joe:
Now, that is a confusing explanation for anyone who has seen either a picture of a doctor or a real doctor or a picture of Jesus. And look, on the surface, the president’s behavior appears baffling even by the standards of things he’s done in the past. After all, President Trump is facing a tough midterm election. He’s waged in unpopular war that’s divided his face, which doesn’t appear to be going well. He badly needs the support of conservative Christians right now. And yet in the span of just eight days, he sends out a vulgar Easter morning tweet, apparently threatening war crimes. He repeatedly attacks the Pope by name, and he tweets out an image of himself that looks to outsiders, at least like blasphemy. But I would suggest that from a Christian perspective, there’s a way of making sense of all of this. If you just grant one premise, namely that the president appears to all appearances to be in the throes of the sin of pride.
And I know there’s always a danger in suggesting somebody else is guilty of any kind of sin. We cannot know one another’s hearts, but that Trump thinks and speaks and acts in a prideful way is a point that both his critics and his supporters seem to agree upon. Now, you might describe it euphemistically saying he’s got a healthy sense of self-esteem, or you might play armchair psychiatrist and say he appears to be a narcissist, but the basic facts are there for anyone with eyes to see. After all, the president appears incapable of not making everything about himself. To take just one example, when Rob Reiner and his wife were killed by their son, the President of the United States tweeted out that Rob’s death was reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive unyielding and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as Trump arrangement syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS.
Rob Reiner’s death had absolutely nothing to do with President Trump, but Trump felt a need to make it about himself, mocking him in the most tasteless and crassway imaginable. And less than an hour after saying Pope Leo was soft on crime, before tweeting himself as Jesus, Trump was posting AI slop of a giant gold building on the moon with his name on it in giant letters. So just assume with me, even for the sake of argument, that Trump is a man who seems to be under the sway of the sin of pride. Would that thesis explain his behavior? It would. C.S. Lewis makes an important and often overlooked point in mere Christianity. When he says that what we have to get clear is that pride is essentially competitive. Is competitive by its very nature? While the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident.
What that means is this. Other vices might lead you into conflict and competition, two greedy people fighting over money or two lustful people fighting for the sexual interest of some woman, so on. But those conflicts are just incidental to the vices themselves. But with pride, the need for conflict is baked into the sin itself. As Lewis points out, it’s not enough to be rich, clever, or good looking. You have to be richer, cleverer, better looking than others. And if everybody else became equally rich or clever or good looking, there’d be nothing left to be proud about. So pride at its heart is always about competition and conflict. More precisely, it’s about imity, a desire to build yourself up and to place other peoples beneath you to tear them down. Once you grasp this simple insight, it changes the whole way we think about the world.
Greed and a desire for comfort might make you work to try to become a millionaire, but what makes people give up most of their waking life to work to become billionaires? Greed doesn’t seem to be the root cause. As Lewis points out, you’re striving for money that is more than you can even enjoy in your life. All the material comforts you want, you’ve already got them. Why are you still pursuing more and more and more? That looks more like pride than it does like greed. And Lewis warned in particular about this vice and political leader since he recognized what it would mean in terms of the imperious posture of a nation led by someone under the sway of pride. He asked, “What is it that makes a political leader or a whole nation go on and on demanding more and more?” Pride again. Pride is competitive by its very nature.
That is why it goes on and on. If I’m a proud man then, as long as there’s one man in the whole world more powerful or richer or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy. But ultimately pride isn’t just about enmity between man and man, but enmity to God. That’s the terrifying conclusion of C.S. Lewis’s argument. Why does giving into pride ultimately turn us directly against God? Well, Lewis explains. “In God, you come up against something which is in every respect, immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that and therefore know yourself as nothing in comparison. You do not know God at all. As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people, and of course, as long as you were looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
“This is why Lewis can rightly describe pride as demonic. In his words, it was through pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of mind. Now, Lewis’s argument here is squarely within the Christian tradition. St. Thomas Aquinas called pride the most grievous of sins. And as Pope Francis pointed out back in 2024, the early Christian monks called Pride the great queen of all vices. And Francis rightly observed that within the evil of pride lies the radical sin, the absurd claim to be like God. We see that radical sin in Adam and Eve reaching for the fruit, desiring to be God-like on their own terms. I would suggest we see that radical sin when we find the most powerful politician on earth wanting more and more and more, wanting even to be seen as Christ himself.
Now, if that analysis is right, it’s terrifying not only for what it says about President Trump or about the psychological and spiritual reasons behind our current foreign policy, but also for what it says about us as well. Because as Lewis reminds us, even people who present themselves as very religious can be quite obviously eaten up with pride. And Lewis warns that this means that they’re worshiping an imaginary God, a God of their own invention that won’t challenge their prideful delusions. And that’s Jesus’s own diagnosis as well. When the Pharisee goes into the temple to brag, pray about what a great person he is, Jesus says that he prayed thus with himself. So when we see the sin of pride run rampant in others, leading them to make war against God, our response shouldn’t be, ” God, I thank thee that I’m not like other men as if we are going to be immune from these temptations.
It should be like the tax collector in the parable, God, be merciful to me a sinner. “For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.