A CNN panelist tore into Donald Trump’s “sacrilegious” AI post of himself as Jesus Christ and says it’s time to “call a spade a spade” on the president’s accelerating decline.
“We’re not clearly acknowledging the fact that it‘s getting worse,” Bakari Sellers, who served four terms as a Democrat in the South Carolina House of Representatives, told CNN on Monday night.
“I have two concerns. One is that the president, I believe, lacks discernment, and I think that‘s getting worse,” he went on. “The second thing is you won’t call a spade a spade,” he added, addressing fellow panelist and former Republican finance chair Hal Lambert.
“The fact that if you can‘t call what he did sacrilegious, which is clearly the definition of sacrilegious, I think that would be my second problem,” Sellers concluded.
The former representative’s comments come after Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ on Truth Social shortly after criticizing Pope Leo XIV, the head of the Catholic Church.
Trump’s rage-posts followed a CBS 60 Minutes segment highlighting all of the criticisms Leo has made of the president’s second administration since assuming the papacy last year.
The pontiff has repeatedly criticized the president’s ongoing war with Iran, as well as his invasion of Venezuela earlier in January and his nationwide deportation drive, under which two American citizens were shot dead by federal immigration agents that same month.
In his 334-word screed about the pope, Trump blasted Leo by claiming the pope believes “it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” and insisting that the pontiff, who is the first American pope in history, would not have been elected “if I wasn’t in the White House.”
He then followed up with the image of himself as Christ, laying radiant hands on an ailing hospital patient in an apparent effort to heal the man, flanked on all sides by American flags, adoring MAGA supporters, nurses, bald eagles, fireworks, and the Statue of Liberty.
The post, which comes amid mounting concern over the 79-year-old leader’s cognitive health, sparked widespread backlash that spread to the president’s support base. Otherwise stalwart MAGA voices denounced the image as “blasphemous,” “outrageous,” and “reprehensible.”
“Why? Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this. Is he looking for a response?” conservative commentator Riley Gaines posted on X. “Does he actually think this? Either way, two things are true. 1) a little humility would serve him well 2) God shall not be mocked.”
“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” Megan Basham, culture reporter for right-wing site The Daily Wire, wrote on X. “But he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”
Sellers further told other panelists Monday that watching the fallout of the post, which the president has now deleted in a rare, if tacit, acknowledgment of the backlash, had reminded him of dealing with an ailing elderly relative.
“I had a great aunt, Jenny Marie. She was the matriarch of our family, and she was 88 years old and still driving,” he explained. “She used to come to church and park in the front, and then the day she hit the pastor‘s car, my dad had to go take away the keys, right? Because it just… it just progressively got worse.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
