Trump Just Exposed Every MAGA Influencer & Politician in One Post

They're all bootlickers.

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I’m going to say something a little controversial, which is that I appreciate the days when Donald Trump does something so ridiculous that it captures the nation’s attention. That doesn’t mean I enjoyed yesterday’s scrambling by the White House and the MAGA movement to justify and explain away Trump posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ healing the sick. I did not. As a practicing Catholic, I was as offended by it as every other American.

But the one good thing that came out of it is how much it exposes this administration—and the influencers and politicians who cling to Donald Trump in order to get access to money, power, and influence. Yesterday was a perfect day to expose the worst of the worst in MAGA land.

Incidents like this cut through the white noise and force a level of attention that makes it harder to ignore the bigger problem we’re dealing with and just how deep it goes. They show who’s willing to defend it and who isn’t willing to own the disaster they’ve created.

And let’s start with Donald Trump himself. Yes, he attacked the Pope. And very few of his MAGA influencers were willing to come to the defense of tens of millions of Catholics who were offended and upset about Trump attacking their faith leader. Yes, Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus. What was most revealing was how he tried to explain it away.

Trump then proceeded to take questions from the press, which were mostly focused on his attacks on the Pope and the AI-generated image. His explanation for it was, basically, “I don’t understand why the media is so offended. It’s an image of me as a doctor healing the sick”—an image of Donald Trump as a doctor healing the sick. In fact, he said he was a Red Cross worker, I believe, because we all know Red Cross workers are frequently depicted wearing flowing robes, halos, and fighting demons with glowing hands that can heal whatever ails you.

It goes to show you how stupid Donald Trump thinks the American people are. That’s how dumb he thinks his own supporters are—and how highly he thinks of himself—that he can say something like that and expect it to pass without question. He knows there are people in his orbit who will immediately go sell that lie, and it’s unbelievable. Or it’s something worse: that Donald Trump is so sick and dementia-ridden that he doesn’t even remember what he posted.

And what’s more concerning—because it’s bad enough to have an older member of Congress who can’t remember where they are half the time—it’s another thing entirely for the leader of the free world, with access to nuclear codes and currently engaged in a war in the Middle East, to be that disconnected from reality. And let’s be honest, Donald Trump on his best day was more than a little disconnected from reality.

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But then there’s JD Vance, the most online vice president ever, who goes silent and has nothing to say in defense of the Catholic Church or the Pope against his own boss’s attacks. Then he goes on Fox News and gets asked about Trump depicting himself as Jesus Christ, and he says it was a joke—just a harmless joke.

This is cancel culture, is basically what he argued, which is ridiculous.

So I’ll pose the question: is it a joke? Or was Donald Trump posting a harmless image of himself as a doctor to highlight how he “heals” people in this country? And if it was just a joke and people shouldn’t be offended, why did they delete it? Why give in to the very “cancel culture” they claim to oppose?

They deleted it because Trump upset a lot of evangelicals and Protestants, and he can’t afford to lose them at a time when he’s bleeding support across the country. And why delete the AI-generated image of Trump as Jesus but not his offensive attacks on the Pope? Because they view Catholics in the MAGA movement as expendable. They’re not as important as the Christian nationalists placed throughout Trump’s government. They can’t afford to lose those people.

Then you get to these MAGA influencers. To their credit, most were willing to call it out for what it was, even if it was a bit mealy-mouthed. But plenty of them still carried water for him. The minute Trump lied and said he was depicting himself as a Red Cross doctor, many either bought the lie and started selling it or leaned into the idea that he was just confused and made a mistake. That MAGA money must be real good if you’re selling this bullshit.

It’s amazing how tightly he’s got these people wrapped around his finger. And the ones who were willing to criticize—like Michael Knowles, who’s Catholic—called out the attacks on the Pope and said it was wrong, but it was still weak. It was like telling a child they were wrong and still giving them a candy bar. It’s the best they could do.

It was disturbing to watch these guys roll over for a president who has no respect for their faith—if their faith is even legitimate in the first place. So many of them use religion to validate and protect themselves from the things they want to do to women, to trans kids, to anyone who disagrees with them. And yet they fold the second he pushes back.

What’s amazing is that Donald Trump continues to disregard them anyway. I mean, hell, Riley Gaines is basically a creation of the MAGA movement. She’s done everything that’s been asked of her. She said she was uncomfortable with the post, and Trump immediately turned on her—and then she folded again.

At a certain point, it stops feeling like belief and starts feeling like performance. These people have no character except for the characters they create to profit off the MAGA movement. Frankly, we don’t mock them enough, and we don’t pity them enough for what I have to imagine are miserable lives.

To defend this man, to put up with being treated this way—it’s depressing. I honestly feel sorry for them. What a hollow existence that must be: not really believing in anything, just jumping from one absurd moment to the next because your “king” demands it. Why? So you can get invited to the White House once in a while? Maybe land a podcast deal from the MyPillow guy? Is that really it?

Instead of creating something meaningful, improving their communities, taking care of their families, contributing anything of value—this is what they choose to do with their lives.

And that’s the point. That’s what I appreciate about these moments. Trump’s behavior stretches so far beyond the norm that it forces clarity. You get a real look at who these people are. Every now and then, you see flashes of depth from people who push back—maybe from Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens—maybe. You can almost see something there.

But for so many others, there’s nothing. They’re scared, they’re trapped, and they have nowhere to go. They can’t turn away, whether it’s self-interest or delusion.

JD Vance, of course, was the clearest example—unable to articulate why Trump’s attacks on the Pope were wrong, unable to acknowledge how offensive the image was. And you can’t help but think there’s something deeply empty about that. At some level, they know what they’re doing. You can see it.

So many of them just seem… hollow. When I debate them, whatever conviction they once had is gone. They’re just going through the motions, trying to drag this thing over the finish line in the hope that maybe they’ll get something out of it in the end. It’s absurd.

And we cannot allow the Democratic Party to be taken over in the same way by people like this. We just can’t. I won’t become that. And if I ever do, I hope the people reading this call me out, because I couldn’t live with it. I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror. I wouldn’t be able to look my son in the eyes the way these people do every day.

At a certain point, this isn’t about party anymore. It’s about accountability. It’s about basic humanity—how we treat people, what we excuse, what we normalize, and what we allow to happen in this country.

So yeah—thank you, Donald Trump. Because moments like this strip everything down and show it for what it is. They make it impossible to ignore how broken things have become—and how much has been tolerated to get us here.

And that kind of clarity matters. Because if anything is going to change, it starts with seeing the problem clearly.