Por Vuk Bačanović
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There is something at once profoundly demonic in its cynicism, deeply unsettling, and almost burlesque in Donald Trump’s latest AI-crafted spectacle: a man who spent decades socializing with Jeffrey Epstein—whom he once described as a “terrific guy” with a taste for “younger women”—now reappears as a messianic healer, a kind of white, Protestant-Zionist “Christ,” as though resurrected from the visual grammar of Nazi propaganda about the blond Aryan Übermensch. With an outstretched hand he bestows light upon the afflicted, while in the background loom eagles, fighter jets, and hovering figures that resemble anything but the traditional iconography of Christian angels.
In truth, it is disturbing only to those for whom this performance marks something new in Trump’s repertoire—and to those who fail to grasp that pathological cults are merely one layer of the cultural superstructure of deeply pathological societies. Societies, in this case, profoundly de-Christianized, however loudly the ruling MAGA sect may invoke Christ and the Gospel.
For if, within the classical Christian paradigm, the central figure is the Incarnate God who declares that “one cannot serve both God and Mammon”—that is, translated into the language of our age: God and capital—then it becomes evident that the heart of contemporary American political theology is not occupied by Jesus of Nazareth. On the contrary: if He was ever truly at its center, He has long since been expelled as subversive, impractical, scandalous, and, in essence, a profoundly dangerous presence for public morality. In His place arises an altogether different divinity—a kind of deified consumer, wearing a MAGA cap in lieu of a halo, whose spirituality is measured by stock indices, whose asceticism has been replaced by junk food, and whose contemplation has dissolved into an unbroken stream of pornographic and reality-driven stimulation.
Put more plainly: the American god is the quintessential brute—a neighborhood madman, a predator, a thief, a wife-beater, a killer.
If one were to compare him with his kindred from the ancient register of bloodthirsty deities, one would find a peculiar syncretism at work: something of the Old Testament Baal, something of Moloch, and something darker still—the Aztec Huitzilopochtli, a god who can sustain neither himself nor the world unless he devours human beings on a daily basis, above all those bred for that very purpose in cages. Only, in this modern variation, hearts are no longer torn out with obsidian blades, but with financial instruments, media apparatuses, and social mechanisms that ceaselessly generate new victims: exhausted workers, shattered communities, atomized individuals, and the bomb-ravaged poor of the Third World.
Incidentally, the Aztecs organized so-called “flower wars,” waged solely to capture a sufficient number of human beings for sacrifice to ensure the survival of the cosmos. Any resemblance to wars fought to sustain an economy founded upon the mass production of weapons is purely coincidental. Or perhaps not coincidental at all.
The cosmos such a deity sustains is not a natural order, but an artificial system—upheld by unceasing violence and the relentless conditioning of consciousness—in which monstrosity is no deviation at all, but rather the very condition demanded of the faithful as the price of “salvation.”
Within this framework, Donald Trump emerges as the typologically perfect medium and high priest of the American god. His public biography—from business, through media spectacle, to war-inciting politics—already contains within itself all the essential elements of that cult: the accumulation of capital, performance, domination. Even his documented social ties to the pedophilic monster Jeffrey Epstein are, in this sense, not an aberration but a symptom of a broader ecosystem in which power, money, and commodification mutually reinforce one another. The decisive question, therefore, is not one of individual guilt, but of structural belonging—which leaves us alone with a more unsettling inquiry: what kind of society produces such relations, and then aesthetically refashions them into something meant to resemble a religious pattern?
A society, in other words, that enabled believers like Epstein to possess their own island—and upon it, a structure that reports themselves have described as a temple.
And indeed, it was a fitting temple for the island of pedophiles—a religion without transcendence, yet with a remarkably well-developed marketing department. There is no desert within it, no ascetic struggle, no moment in which a human being must confront himself and the Satan who offers him all the kingdoms of this world in exchange for submission—precisely because that submission has never truly been called into question. Thus, in Donald Trump’s AI “Transfiguration,” what we encounter is pure scenography: lighting effects, symbols of power, carefully calibrated counterfeit compassion, and, of course, a divine hierophany—one that demands of the believer nothing but the renunciation of his own soul, promising in return that precisely through what he already is—a consumer, a social Darwinist, a spectator of perverse reality spectacles, and a man who “minds his own business”—he shall (sur)vive in paradise.
Such a model of religion perfectly suits a society that cannot afford genuine transformation, for such transformation would entail its own dissolution. Every real change would call into question the very foundations of the system: its mode of production, the distribution of power, the structure of desires, and the examination of their presumed normality. It is far simpler—and far more profitable—to produce a religion that leaves all of this untouched, merely elevating it aesthetically to the level of the “sacred.” Thus emerges a closed circuit: the system generates suffering and despair, religion explains that suffering and despair, and then there appears the miraculous leader sent by the MAGA god, who promises to manage that suffering—as though it were the only attainable joy in the universe.
And here we arrive at the central truth of Trump’s AI hierophany: it only appears to be a scene of healing, when in fact it is an act of persuasion that nothing is wrong. The patient in a coma is not there to recover, but to confirm that the system functions, that it is healthy, and that it is in good hands.
In this sense, this visual artifact is more than an act of blasphemy against Christ; it is a precious ethnographic record of a perverse and deeply ailing civilization. It reveals what that civilization deems sacred, what it accepts as normal, and—perhaps most crucially—what it is no longer capable even of imagining: a religion in which salvation would mean something radically different from that which it has already attained. And which it so desperately seeks to preserve that it is willing even to be tormented and humiliated by a perverse figure such as Trump. But that, too, is merely the obligatory ritual of union with him.
Vuk Bačanović edits the Montenegro-based political magazine, Žurnal.
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