Trump's divine portrayal: a bold confession of imperial power

On a Sunday night in April 2026, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself on Truth Social. He is robed in white. Light emanates from his fingers. A soldier, a nurse, and a praying woman look on in adoration. American flags and eagles fill the sky. He is unmistakably rendered as Jesus Christ. This image was posted an hour after Trump had spent 334 words on the same platform calling Pope Leo XIV "WEAK on Crime" and "terrible for Foreign Policy". The sequence is not incidental. It is a confession. An American president who has just threatened that "an entire civilisation will die tonight" (his words about Iran) has declared himself the divine authority and the Pope a nuisance. From the Global South, we have seen this before. We know this script by heart. The costume changes. The logic does not.

Trump's fury at Leo XIV was sparked by the Pope's refusal to remain silent. At a worldwide peace vigil at St. Peter's Basilica, Leo denounced what he called a "delusion of omnipotence" driving the war in Iran and said that God "does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them." Trump's response was swift, personal, and revealing. "I don't want a Pope who criticises the President of the United States" he wrote, "because I'm doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do."

There it is. Not a foreign policy disagreement. Not a theological dispute. A demand for submission. The most powerful man on earth, commanding the most powerful military in human history, telling the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics to be quiet because a landslide election has placed him beyond moral accountability. The Global South has been receiving that message; in different envelopes, with different postmarks, for 500 years. 

Leo refused. Boarding a papal plane to Africa, already a geopolitical irony of the first order, he told reporters: too many innocent people are being killed, and someone has to stand up and say there is a better way. He pledged to continue speaking out loudly against war, to promote dialogue, and to insist on multilateral solutions. Trump responded by falsely claiming that Leo supports Iran having a nuclear weapon, a claim rated categorically false by every independent fact-checker. The Pope has consistently called for global nuclear disarmament, signed theUN's Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and has never said anything remotely resembling what Trump alleged. The lie did not matter to Trump. It never does.

What mattered was the punishment, the public diminishment of a voice that would not yield. From the Global South, we must be clear about what the Iran war actually is. It is not a confrontation between civilisation and its enemies, as the Trump administration's theological theatre would have us believe. It is a war prosecuted by Western powers, American and Israeli, in a region the Global South shares a civilisational, economic, and geographical border with, over strategic interests the Global South was never consulted about, at a cost the Global South will disproportionately absorb. When the Strait of Hormuz is blockaded, it is not Wall Street that pays the highest price for disrupted oil flows. It is Lagos, Nairobi, Karachi, Jakarta, and Caracas. When a war of this scale destabilises the Middle East, it is not the suburbs of Washington that receive the refugees. It is the Global South's cities, borders, and already-strained social systems that bear the weight of displacement. The bombs fall elsewhere. The consequences spread here.

Trump warned that "an entire civilisation will die tonight". He said this about Iran, a nation of 90 million people, one of the oldest continuous civilisations on earth, with cultural, intellectual, and trade roots that run deep into the fabric of the Global South's own history. The threat of civilisational annihilation, issued casually on a social media platform, tells us everything we need to know about how the Global South is valued in the calculus of American imperial power. We are not lives to be protected. We are variables to be managed. And when a moral voice rises to say that this is unacceptable, that no election victory, however large, confers the right to threaten the extinction of a people, the response is to post yourself as Jesus and call the Pope weak.

This is where the Global South must resist the temptation to resolve the Trump-Leo clash by choosing a side. Leo XIV is not our pope in the political sense. His arrival on African soil this week, welcomed with ceremony, while the continent he visits carries the unresolved weight of a colonial evangelisation that his institution prosecuted and from which it has never fully reckoned, is a reminder that moral courage in the present does not settle historical debt. We note his courage. We do not surrender our critical faculty in response.

But that critical faculty must be directed with precision. The target, here and now, is Trump. What Trump has done in this exchange is not merely to attack a religious leader. He has attempted to establish the principle that American imperial power answers to no moral authority, not to international law, not to the United Nations, not to the leader of the world's largest Christian denomination, not to the voices of the Global South, dying under the economic and military consequences of his decisions. The demand for Leo's silence is the demand for everyone's silence. It is the logical endpoint of a politics that has confused electoral mandate with divine right, which is, of course, exactly what the Jesus image was saying all along.

The Global South is not neutral in this moment. Neutrality is a position available only to those whose lives are not on the line. We are not neutral. We are, however, sovereign in our analysis. We do not require Washington's permission to name a war criminal's logic. We do not require the Vatican's blessing to stand against imperial violence. We stand against it on our own authority, the authority of those who have lived longest and most intimately with the consequences of the world order that Trump is now prosecuting with messianic fervour.

Leo XIV, speaking from a papal plane above the African continent, said that someone has to stand up and say there is a better way. He is right. But the Global South has been saying it longer, at greater cost, with less applause, and without the cushion of institutional power. We have been saying it from the ruins of colonial extraction, from the receiving end of IMF conditionality, from the borders where displaced people arrive with nothing, and from the markets where the price of a war we did not start lands on the plates of families who cannot afford it. We do not need to be told there is a better way. We have known it. We have been punished for knowing it.

What is new is not the Global South's position. What is new is the spectacle of empire's internal contradictions playing out in real time, a president calling a pope weak, posting himself as a saviour, threatening civilisational death, and demanding that the world applaud. The mask has not slipped. It has been thrown away deliberately, as a show of strength. That is what impunity looks like at its most advanced stage. From Soweto to Lagos to Tehran to Port-au-Prince, the answer to impunity is not silence. It is the calm, unrelenting insistence that power is not legitimacy, that a landslide is not a licence, and that no amount of divine costuming changes the nature of what is done in the name of civilisation to the people the powerful have always considered expendable. Someone has to stand up and say there is a better way. We have always been that someone. We are not finished.