A Christ-Shaped Hole

Trump, Pope Leo, and the Machine the President Reached For on Easter

Byzantine mosaic showing Jesus Christ, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul

On Orthodox Easter Sunday, April 12, 2026, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ.

The image shows Trump standing in a white robe with a red sash, his right hand placed on the forehead of a man lying in a hospital bed. Light comes off the hand. Behind them are a nurse, a uniformed soldier, a waving American flag, bald eagles in flight, the Statue of Liberty, and fighter jets. The composition is a healing icon. It is the visual grammar of every Christ-heals-the-sick painting in Western art, restaged with an American flag instead of a temple and an Air Force jet instead of a dove. A generative model trained on the entire corpus of Christian art knows exactly what that composition is, and it produced one on command. Trump posted it.

When challenged, Trump said he thought he was depicting himself as a Red Cross doctor. “Only the fake news could come up with that one,” he told reporters. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.” White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt called the image “doctored,” using the word in the sense of altered. It was not altered. It was generated and had no prior image to be altered from. Trump reposted it knowing what it was, and when the image produced the reaction it was always going to produce, he denied what the machine had unambiguously produced.

Three days earlier, on April 10, the first American Pope, Leo XIV, had written: God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs. He was speaking to Chaldean bishops in Rome, from a continent where his own parishioners are being bombed, and he did not mention Trump, because he did not have to. Trump took it as an attack, issued a long Truth Social diatribe calling the Pope weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy, and then, on Orthodox Easter, posted the image.

The President used a generative AI model to depict himself as the Prince of Peace, on Orthodox Easter, in retaliation against the Pope, who had just said that those who drop bombs are not on the side of the Prince of Peace.

I want to explain what just happened, because the piece most of the coverage has missed is that this Pope, specifically, is the Pope whose entire papacy is framed around exactly this machine. Leo XIV is not incidentally critical of AI. He chose his papal name for this reason. The administration did not accidentally reach for the one blasphemy most pointed at this particular Pope; it reached for exactly that one. The machine they used is the machine he took office to oppose. That is not a coincidence. It is the story.

The Pope Who Named Himself for AI

Leo XIV is named Leo because of artificial intelligence. In his first address to the College of Cardinals, on May 10, 2025, two days after his election, he explained the choice: “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.”

His namesake, Leo XIII, wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891 as the Church’s response to industrialization. Leo XIV has spent the year since his election signaling, in every major address, that his pontificate is the Church’s response to AI. He has told a youth conference in Indianapolis that AI “can process information quickly, but it cannot offer real wisdom.” He has told the priests of the Diocese of Rome not to use AI to write their homilies. He has warned political leaders that “our personal life has greater value than any algorithm, and social relationships require spaces for development that far transcend the limited patterns that any soulless machine can pre-package for us.” The Vatican’s thirty-page document Antiqua et Nova, released in January 2025, sets out the theological case: AI operates through pattern recognition and lacks the creative, spiritual, and moral dimensions of human thought. Paolo Carozza, President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, has described Leo’s concern as the worry that technologies like AI are “very quickly displacing fundamental human capacities of reason, freedom, judgment, discretion and choice, our understanding of truth and falsity.” Not replacing them. Displacing them.

This is the Pope Trump attacked, with a machine, on Easter.

And this is not the first time Trump has used AI to stage himself as a figure of Christian authority. In May 2025, just before the conclave that would elect Leo, Trump posted an AI image of himself dressed as the Pope. That image is still on Truth Social. He has had the habit for a year. On Wednesday, April 15, after the Easter image was deleted, Trump reposted a second AI-generated image: Jesus embracing him at a podium in front of an American flag, with a caption suggesting that God might be “playing his Trump card” by elevating Trump to expose “satanic, demonic, child-sacrificing monsters.” He did not apologize; he escalated, using the same machine to produce a second theological claim. On April 13, the Iranian Embassy in Tajikistan posted an AI video of Jesus punching Trump in the face. The generative machine has become a medium of transnational theological combat. Everyone reaches for it. Theology is the payload.

I want to be exact about what has happened. The President of the United States is using AI-generated religious imagery, at a rate the secular press has not yet metabolized, to stage himself as the central figure of Christian salvation history. He is doing this while attacking the Pope, who picked his name to warn about this machine. On Easter, the President used that machine to depict himself as the savior the Pope had just said is never on the side of those who drop bombs, in the middle of a war the Pope has called unjust. When caught, he said the machine was depicting a Red Cross worker.

To understand why this is not a gaffe but the entire argument, you need one idea from Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas and the Christ-Shaped Hole

In the Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 48, Aquinas argues that evil is not a thing. Evil is a privation — a lack, not a substance that exists alongside good, but the absence of a good that ought to be there. Cold is the absence of heat. Darkness is the absence of light. Blindness is the privation of sight in an eye that ought to see. Sickness is the privation of health. Evil is the absence of a good that should be present. “Evil is distant both from simple being and from simple not-being,” Aquinas wrote, “because it is neither a habit nor a pure negation, but a privation.” Augustine had made the move a thousand years earlier, in the Confessions, and C. S. Lewis translated it for modern readers in Mere Christianity: “Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.” Evil is a parasite. It cannot generate; it can only corrupt something that is.

This is the tradition Leo XIV is Pope of. It is the tradition Vance claims to be inside. It is the tradition that the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, in paragraph 2309, when it codifies the just war doctrine. And it is the tradition that tells you, with precision, what the Easter image is.

The image is a privation of an icon.

A real icon of a healing Christ is not a painting. It is, in the Orthodox theological tradition Trump posted over, a window — the icon depicts the saint or Christ not as a likeness but as a presence made visible to the viewer. The iconographer does not sign. The iconographer fasts, prays, and writes the icon inside a tradition that places authorship in the communion of the Church across centuries. A real icon has, constitutively, an author, a tradition, a discipline, and a theological claim the iconographer is answerable to. None of those things is optional, and removing any one of them does not produce a diminished icon. It is to produce an icon-shaped privation of an icon.

The generative image has every one of those things removed. There is no author, because the model is the composite ghost of billions of images; no single painter decided to place the hand there, to angle the light that way, to position the flag behind. No one can be asked to account for any specific element. There is no tradition, because the model has no communion — it has a dataset. There is no discipline, because the model does not fast; it samples. And there is no theological claim the producer is answerable to, because the producer is not the model but the poster, and the poster, when asked what claim he had made, said he was posting a Red Cross worker.

Every constitutive element of the icon, in other words, has been removed, and what remains is the composition alone. The visual surface of a healing Christ. The specific grammar the viewer’s eye recognizes. The halo is absent because the composition is the halo. A generative privation of the icon, produced at speed, deployed on Easter, denied on Monday.

This is what Pope Leo is naming when he says AI “cannot offer real wisdom.” He does not mean the model lacks IQ. He means that the model cannot participate in the tradition it is imitating, and therefore its outputs, when deployed in the tradition’s forms, are constitutionally hollow. A homily written by ChatGPT is not a shorter homily; it is a homily-shaped absence of a homily. An image generated to look like Christ healing is not a diminished icon; it is a Christ-shaped absence of Christ. The model is very good at producing these absences because that is what it was trained to do. It is not malfunctioning when it produces a blasphemy; it is functioning exactly as designed. The designer did not intend blasphemy. The designer intended a machine that reliably produces plausible surfaces. The surface is all the machine has. The substance has to come from somewhere else.

Now you see why Trump reaches for it. Not because he knows any of the above, but because generative AI produces the only kind of theological claim an administration like his can make without exposure — a claim with no author, no tradition, no discipline, no answerability. A claim you can post, retract, deny, and reissue, because nobody, including you, can be pinned to any of its specific elements. The Red Cross worker defense is not a retreat from the image; it is the feature for which the image was deployed. Generative artifacts launder theological claims through the deniability of their production. That is why the administration is reaching for them again and again. The Pope image in May, the Jesus image on Easter, and the Jesus-embracing-Trump image three days later are not three gaffes. They are the operation.

The Prayer Was Generated Too

Pete Hegseth, at a Pentagon worship service on April 15, prayed a prayer that had been lifted from Pulp Fiction. The first half of the prayer is the movie monologue — the one Samuel L. Jackson delivers before he shoots somebody — with “the path of the righteous man” swapped for “the path of the downed aviator.” The last two sentences borrow from Ezekiel 25:17, with one edit. In Ezekiel, the speaker of the final line is the Lord. In Hegseth’s version, the speaker is “Sandy 1,” the radio call sign of the A-10 combat search and rescue aircraft that pulled a downed US airman out of Iran. The religion journalist Brian Kaylor of Word and Way caught it.

I want you to see that this prayer is doing the same operation as the image. The prayer has the surface of scripture and none of the substance. It was almost certainly not produced by a large language model — it was written by a human, perhaps a chaplain, perhaps a staffer. The mechanism does not matter; the logic is the machine’s logic. Take a sacred text. Remove the Lord from the sentence. Substitute a military call sign. Keep the cadence, keep the vocabulary, keep the authority the original had over the listener’s ear. The prayer has been hollowed out. What it prays for — great vengeance delivered on behalf of a military unit — is the opposite of what Ezekiel prays for. Yet the cadence is preserved so faithfully that the congregation said amen. The Pentagon spokesman, when asked, said anyone who noticed the substitution was “peddling fake news and ignorant of reality.”

This is what I mean when I say the theology and the AI stack are running the same operation. A large language model is, at a mechanical level, a substitution engine. Token by token, it replaces. It produces the surface of meaning without the substance, because it does not know what a word means, only what word usually follows. Hegseth’s prayer is that the operation performed by a human who has learned to think the way the machine operates. The image is that operation performed by the machine for a human who has learned to deploy its output. Same logic, same product: an authored surface with the author removed, used for purposes the real author would have refused.

Vance and the Inversion of Aquinas

The third instance of the same move happened on Fox News and at a Turning Point USA event in Athens, Georgia, on April 14. JD Vance, a Catholic convert of seven years and the second Catholic Vice President in US history, told Bret Baier that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality” and let the President dictate American public policy. Later that night at the Akins Ford Arena, in a room Morning Joe described as about a quarter full, Vance told the audience the Pope should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” A young man shouted from the back that the US was bombing children. Vance told the heckler he would get to his point. He did not get to it.

Here is what Vance was doing, and what the generous readings have been dancing around. Vance does not have a shallow grasp of the just war tradition. He has the inversion of it.

In Summa Theologiae II-II, Question 40, Aquinas established the just war framework that the Catechism now codifies: legitimate authority, just cause, right intention. Augustine, a thousand years earlier, had set the tone in City of God, Book XIX: “the wise man will wage just wars. As if he would not rather lament the necessity of just wars, if he remembers that he is a man.” Earlier in the same work, Book IV: “to carry on war and extend a kingdom over wholly subdued nations seems to bad men to be felicity, to good men necessity.” Not good, necessity. A privation of peace. Peter Lombard, writing a century before Aquinas, held that a soldier who killed in a just war still owed penance, because the act remained a privation even when permitted.

Vance, speaking on the TPUSA stage, said: “Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis? I certainly think the answer is yes.” He said taking away Iran’s nuclear capability means innocent lives will be saved. He spoke, in the register a seventeenth-century Protestant chaplain might have used, as if the Iran war were a positive good, righteous, blessed, on God’s side.

That is not what the tradition says. The tradition says even a just war is a necessity, a privation of peace, a thing whose combatants owe penance. Vance has kept the tradition’s vocabulary while inverting its content. The Bishops had to say this out loud, in writing, on April 15. Auxiliary Bishop James Massa of Brooklyn, chairman of the USCCB Committee on Doctrine, wrote: “When Pope Leo speaks as supreme pastor of the universal Church, he is not merely offering opinions on theology, he is preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ.” Massa cited the Catechism at paragraph 2309, which opens: “the strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration.” Strict consideration, rigorous conditions — a checklist, the tradition was designed specifically because it wanted to find a way to say yes and still could not say yes lightly.

Run the Iran war through that checklist, and the war scores zero. There was no legitimate authority; Congress never declared war. It was not a last resort; airstrikes began during active negotiations. Proportionality collapsed when Trump threatened, on Truth Social on April 7, that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” a sentence Amnesty International called a potential threat of genocide. Right intention failed through six distinct public justifications within the same administration. Reasonable chance of success failed when the administration, losing, picked a public fight with a seventy-year-old cleric to change the subject. Zero out of eight.

Elizabeth Anscombe saw this move, in different clothes, seventy years ago. Her pamphlet, Mr. Truman’s Degree, written in 1956 to oppose Oxford’s award of an honorary degree to the man who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima, is the most relevant document in modern Catholic moral philosophy to what is happening now. Anscombe argued that the root problem of Hiroshima was not the bomb; it was the unlimited objective. The Allied demand for unconditional surrender had produced a situation in which Truman could always claim that if only the Japanese had done what he demanded, he would not have been required to bomb them. The unlimited objective, Anscombe saw, is what licenses atrocity. Trump’s stated objectives in Iran have been unlimited from the beginning — regime change, destruction of missile capacity, civilization-ending threats if Iran does not capitulate on the Strait of Hormuz. When your adversary resists unlimited demands, you can always blame them for what comes next. That is the move Anscombe named, and she had a different word for what it produces when combined with attacks on civilians. She used it about Truman. I do not need to retype it here.

Anscombe also observed, in Intention and War and Murder, that the twentieth century had developed the habit of disguising intentional killing of civilians with consequentialist language. “The targeted elimination will result in significant collateral damage” is a way of saying “bombing our target is going to kill innocent people.” The words change; the act does not. This is exactly the substitution the administration is running, at every level. Trump’s image substitutes Christ for president. Hegseth’s prayer substitutes the Lord for a call sign. Vance’s theology substitutes Aquinas for a slogan. Language is doing the work of killing attention, in order to make killing people easier.

The Christians Being Bombed While Vance Talks

One of the facts the administration’s framing has to route around is that there are Christians inside Iran. Not abstract ones. Real ones, with parishes and bishops and addresses, located beneath the ordnance.

Around 20,000 Catholics, according to US State Department estimates, mostly Armenian and Chaldean, with about 2,000 Latin-rite Catholics led until recently by Cardinal Dominique Mathieu of Tehran, who has fled to Rome because his cathedral was closed. The Armenian Church and the Assyrian Church of the East have recognized status in Iran. Beyond them is an underground church, mostly converts from Islam, which, under Iranian law, is apostasy. Open Doors surveys have placed the Christian population as high as 1.5 percent of the country — more than 1.3 million people, if you count the ones the state refuses to count. Human rights groups documented 254 arrests of Christians in Iran in 2025, double the previous year. That was before the bombs started falling.

Cardinal Sako, the Chaldean Patriarch in Baghdad, has told Vatican News he fears for the 50,000 Christians on the Nineveh Plains. The Iraqi Christian population has fallen from 1.3 million in 2003 to 150,000 today, a ninety percent collapse across two US wars. The Chaldean bishops Leo was addressing when he said God does not bless any conflict were speaking to him from inside the blast radius.

This is the context in which Vance told the Pope to stick to matters of morality, in which Trump accused the Pope of wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and in which the President of the United States posted an AI image of himself as the savior of the exact people Leo was trying to protect. The Pope is the bishop of the Armenian priest in Tehran, the Chaldean bishop in Erbil, the convert in Isfahan who cannot say her name out loud. On Easter, the President generated an image of himself as her healer.

Lewis Saw the Conditioners Coming

In 1943, C. S. Lewis delivered three lectures at the University of Durham that he later published as The Abolition of Man. The book is usually read as a defense of objective moral value against mid-century subjectivism. It is also eighty-three years early, the single best description we have of the machine the Trump administration reached for on Easter.

Lewis’s argument, in brief: once a society surrenders belief in objective value — what he called the Tao, the common moral inheritance of Eastern and Western traditions alike a class of people will arise who position themselves outside it. They will produce values rather than discover them. They will condition other people into whatever shape they prefer. Lewis called them Conditioners. “The man-molders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall at last get a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”

Omnicompetent state. Irresistible scientific technique. Read that phrase twice. Lewis wrote it in 1943, before the transistor, before the computer, before the internet, before a photograph could be faked by anything more sophisticated than a darkroom. It is the one-line description of the 2026 alliance among the American administrative state, the commercial generative AI industry, and a theology hollowed out to serve both.

Lewis’s punchline is the one I want to end on. “It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.”

Read the Easter image again. A man in white robes, composed by a machine, posted by a president, denied as a doctor, deployed against a Pope, on a day sacred to a tradition the man posting has never been inside. Every element of it, the robes, the light, the hand, the flag, the jet, the eagle, is an artifact in Lewis’s sense. Seventy-three years early, he gave us the word. The image is not a failed icon; it is a successful artifact, which is different. An artifact is made to do a job. This one did its job. It substituted the President for Christ in the eye of a viewer scrolling at speed, and when the substitution was named, it retreated into generative deniability. It was a doctor. It was a Red Cross worker. It was a joke. It was not meant that way. Pick one.

Trump did not invent this, and the machine did not invent this. The alliance between them is what is new. The commercial AI industry, as currently configured, is in the business of producing surfaces without substance at scale. The administration, as currently configured, is in the business of needing such surfaces. The administration’s war cannot be defended on the merits, the just war checklist produces zero out of eight. The administration’s theology cannot be defended on the merits — its Vice President inverts Aquinas on television. So the administration reaches for the machine that can produce theological-looking artifacts with plausible deniability built into their production. The machine produces, the administration deploys, the critic objects, the administration denies. Repeat.

Pope Leo has named this. He named it on his second day in office. He named it when he told priests not to use AI to write homilies. He named it when he said AI cannot offer real wisdom. He has been naming it, in public, in homilies, in addresses, for a year. On April 10, he named it again: God does not bless any conflict. Two days later, the administration posted an AI image to prove him wrong. Leo’s entire papacy, by name and by doctrine, is a rebuke of the exact machine used to rebuke him. They cannot possibly have missed that. They chose it.

What the Audience Is Being Asked to Lack

Here is the part I want you to hold onto.

Every substitution the administration has performed this week depends on a prior privation, a privation in the viewer, in the listener, in the scroller, in the electorate. The whole operation only works if the audience has lost the capacity to notice a substitution in progress. Lewis called the missing thing a chest. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.” We make viewers without attention and expect of them the recognition that the image on their phone, composed to the last pixel in the grammar of a healing icon, is not a Red Cross worker.

The commercial AI industry, as currently configured, is in the business of removing the friction. Fewer prompts, faster outputs, less review, more confident one-sentence answers to two-thousand-year questions. Every friction removed is a noticing the audience will not perform. The administration has learned to deploy the industry’s outputs for exactly this reason. A president cannot plausibly claim, on his own signature, that he is a Christlike healer of the American sick. He can, however, generate that claim, post it, and then deny he generated what the machine obviously generated, because the machine provides a deniability layer no human author ever could. The machine is the cover. The machine is the escape hatch. The machine is the plausible-enough-to-defend, deniable-enough-to-retract production of theological claims on command. That is why the administration reaches for it, and that is why they will keep reaching for it.

I build these machines for a living. I am not telling you to stop using AI. I am telling you that what happened on Easter is a use case the industry has not named, and Pope Leo has. The use case is this: generative AI allows public figures to make claims, including theological claims, that they could not otherwise make without exposure, because the machine authors the surface and the human authors only the post. The President of the United States posted an AI image of himself as Jesus on the holiest day of the Orthodox calendar, in retaliation against the Pope, who had criticized his war, and then denied the image meant what it obviously meant. No previous technology would have let him do this. The machine is new, the operation is new, and the one major institution on earth that has, on the record, with its namesake choice, organized itself around opposing this operation is the Catholic Church under Leo XIV. He is the figure the administration attacked, with the machine, on Easter. That is not a coincidence. That is the story.

Hold the attention. That is what the Pope is asking. That is what Lewis asked eighty years ago when he called it a chest. That is what Augustine asked when he said even a just war is grief. That is what Anscombe asked when she refused to let Truman’s honorary degree pass without a name. That is what Aquinas asked when he told us evil is a privation, and to look for what is missing from the thing in front of you.

The image is what is missing from the image. No author, no tradition, no theology, no answerability, a Christ-shaped hole into which a president inserted himself on Easter and then pretended he had not. Do not let it pass. Do not scroll past it. Do not let the machine’s deniability do its job. Say what it is. Say it slowly. Say it with citations. That is the whole job.

Leo is doing it. The Bishops are doing it. Anscombe did it in 1956. Augustine did it in 410. Aquinas did it in 1270. Lewis did it in 1943, before any of the machinery existed. The capacity is not extinct; it is being eroded on purpose, by an alliance of omnicompetent state and irresistible scientific technique that Lewis named before any of these actors were born.

Do not let them have it. That is what the Pope is asking. That is what I am asking, as someone who builds the machines. The machine cannot counterfeit the noticing. It is the one thing we still own.

Keep it.