If Only People Actually Believed These Trump-as-Jesus Memes

After Donald Trump’s recent guilty verdict, the internet has seen a meme deluge analogizing Trump to Christ on the grounds that they both experienced trial, conviction, and criminality. This meme template actually dates back to Trump’s civil fraud trial last year, when Trump himself shared courtroom-sketch-style fan art of Jesus seated next to him. Another meme, this time referring to Trump’s guilty verdict, features Jesus standing behind a seated Trump with his hands on the president’s shoulders above loopy script reading “It’s okay. They called me guilty too.” Another captions a diptych of Trump’s mug shot and the portrait Christ Crucified by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez with the text: “If you don’t think you can vote for a convicted criminal, remember that you worship one.”

It would be simple to dispose of the matter this way: The meme makers are wrong because Trump is guilty and Jesus was innocent. (In that case, all that the meme makers are saying is that Trump is innocent.) Or maybe they’re saying that Trump is factually guilty of what is only a pretextual crime, meaning he did nothing morally wrong even though he’s technically classed as a convicted criminal. Maybe the whole thing is no more than trolling and nobody really cares about the implications of conflating Trump and Jesus.

But I care. If all it is is a thin notion of Trump-as-Jesus, that doesn’t amount to anything interesting. But it seems to me that there’s some accidental radicalism here, a case of insight without intention, and that meaning flows from the association of Christ with criminals.

Scripture certainly makes that association plain. Jesus is said to have spent his time with criminals and outsiders—people such as tax collectors, who were at the time notorious thieves. Tradition holds that the apostle Mary Magdalene was a former prostitute who found a place at Jesus’s right hand. The prophecy that Christians believe Jesus carried out predicts that the Messiah “will be numbered among the transgressors,” which was evidently fulfilled in Jesus’s execution with two thieves at his side, his death among the criminals. And in the narrative of the sheep and the goats, Christ famously declares that the righteous will serve him by serving others, saying, “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” Jesus is especially close to those who need him.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

I wonder if the denizens of Trump’s online fandom realize how explosive this idea really is. If Christ is present even in those who’ve done the greatest evil and made the worst mistakes, that means there’s an indelible value inside of people that can’t be abraded by wrongdoing. It means people who’ve committed even the most egregious of crimes are worth the same as anyone else, and deserve the same dignity and human decency that we all do.

Some of Trump’s evangelical advisers seem aware of this. They were among the supporters of the First Step Act, a bill signed into law by Trump in 2018. In theory, the law was meant to reduce recidivism, credit prisoners for good time served, improve conditions for some prisoners (for example, pregnant and menstruating ones), and lessen some mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent crimes. But Republican critics resented the act, blaming it for rising crime during the COVID era. Then Trump himself turned on the legislation, angry that he’d signed it and that he’d listened to those who had pushed it.

As for evangelical prioritization of criminal-justice reform, the journalist Megan Fowler writes in Christianity Today that “practicing evangelicals are … slightly less likely than fellow Christians to say an elected official’s stance on criminal justice reform would influence their vote,” and that “less than one in four (22%) evangelicals report that their churches have engaged in raising awareness about criminal justice in the past six months. By comparison, 65 percent of evangelicals say their churches have raised awareness of the sanctity of life, and 46 percent homelessness.” According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals also favor capital punishment by a higher margin than any other religious group, with 75 percent in support. Trump has called for more executions and public executions, and he put to death 13 federal prisoners at the end of his first term in office, an effort he means to continue if reelected.

Members of Trump’s religious contingent should embrace a broader and more radical vision of their memes. That any of this will ever happen is doubtful, but the following exhortation is worth making just to complete their logic: If they believe what they say, they should press their electoral weight behind complete prison overhauls, shifting the intent of incarceration toward rehabilitation and reentry. They should take up urgent projects such as restoring voting rights for prisoners, as well as those of ex-prisoners. They should make criminal-justice reform a top priority in the way that they have so-called culture-war issues; they should demand the elimination of mandatory-minimum sentences so that judges can take individual factors into account. And they should shun the death penalty, which is the most extreme form of dehumanizing a prisoner. If Trump indeed wins the 2024 presidential election, he’ll have more discretion than ever to execute federal prisoners at will, something evangelicals ought to punish him for electorally if he goes ahead with his plan. If the lives of prisoners are as valuable as Jesus suggests, then everything must change.