Spin Control: Image from Trump post more like what Jesus, not a doctor, would wear

As the debate over WWJW – What Would Jesus Wear? – swirled around one of President Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts last week, I was reminded of the admonition at the beginning of “The Great Gatsby.”

“Whenever you think of criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in the world haven’t had all of the advantages you’ve had.”

Despite the president coming from a well-heeled family and attending excellent schools, I realized that Trump didn’t have one of the advantages I’ve had – 12 years of parochial school education – when he posted an AI-generated picture of himself wearing a red mantle over a white tunic, with beams of light coming out of his hands.

He said later he thought it was portraying him as a doctor and only the fake news media would suggest it was Jesus. But he took it down anyway.

Any 7-year-old in a parochial Catholic grade school, however, would likely say it’s clearly a Jesus suit.

Students who have been good at some point during the school year have probably been awarded a “holy card” that would show it’s what Jesus wears. The light beams coming out of his hand are another tipoff. And if he’s a doctor, why is there no stethoscope around his neck?

Holy cards – which were sort of like baseball cards, albeit without the bubblegum – feature scenes from the Bible and images of various saints. Jesus’s mantle is always in red. Mary’s is always in blue. The colors can vary for Joseph and the apostles, but the tunics are always bright white.

This is not to say that’s what people actually wore while traveling around Judea back in 30 A.D. Being a desert, it was almost certainly a very dusty place. The tunics put on fresh in the morning probably didn’t stay white much past breakfast and one-hour Martinizing was a couple of millennia and a few continents away.

Even without the benefit of a parochial school education, the president might have made the connection based on the many Renaissance paintings of Gospel scenes that feature the mantle and tunic motif for its subjects. But it’s possible he skipped Art Appreciation 101 in college because he had to focus more on courses in business and finance.

A passing familiarity with Renaissance art would have taught him that many artists stuck the faces of their contemporaries on the people in their paintings, just as AI put his face on the Jesus suit. Sometimes artists did that to honor the patron who was paying for the painting, other times they did it to get revenge on people who had angered or annoyed them. Hard to say what was on the mind of the person feeding requests into Grok or Chat GPT.

This is not to suggest the picture was art akin to something from the great masters. It’s a confusing mashup of themes, with an American flag, eagles, soldiers and fighter jets, plus a hard-to-decipher shadowy image near the top that might be a Transformer or a Nazgul from “The Lord of the Rings.” One of the main focal points seems to be using the beams coming out of his hands to heal a man (who some say looks suspiciously like the late Jeffrey Epstein), which could again be a biblical allusion to Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

While the laying on of hands is a biblical tradition, a 12-year-old in parochial school would probably know that raising Lazarus didn’t involve a laying on of hands. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus just told Lazarus to come out of his grave, and Lazarus did.

Although Trump sells Bibles, he may not be well-versed in that portion of the good book. He has said his favorite part of the Bible is “Two Corinthians,” so he may be at a disadvantage compared to parochial school kids who were drilled on catechism and had to attend Mass on a regular basis. So while other people are criticizing him for posting the image, I’m willing to chalk it up to his education being slightly disadvantaged in some areas.

One other thing that years of parochial school lessons could have taught the president is that it’s a bad idea to argue with the pope on what’s in the Bible, because one is unlikely to win. But that’s a discussion for a different post.