A prominent conservative Catholic columnist at The New York Times is sounding the alarm for President Donald Trump's religious base, warning that his escalating blasphemy is a harbinger of things to come that true believers should not ignore.
Ross Douthat, a conservative Catholic opinion writer who is not known for being a Trump critic, wrote Tuesday that the president's weekend social media rampage — which included a profanity-filled Easter post, an attack on Pope Leo XIV, and an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus Christ — represents something far more serious than typical Trumpian excess.
"The compounding offense isn’t against religious identity or papal dignity. It’s a violation of the first and second commandments, where the offended party is Almighty God," Douthat wrote Tuesday.
Douthat was careful to acknowledge that popes are not infallible on political matters, and that conservative Catholics have legitimate grievances with the Vatican's leftward tilt. But he argued that Trump has simply never made a coherent moral case for the Iran war, leaving the pope with a valid reason to call it unjust.
In a striking passage, Douthat directly addressed Trump's believing supporters.
"If you are a secular observer who assumes that blasphemy is a sin without a real object, that escalation matters mostly as a window into the president’s second-term state of mind.
"If you’re a believer, though, then Mr. Trump’s entire political career — his catalyzing role in liberalism’s crisis, his movement from power to exile to power once again — exists under providential power. In which case a turn to presidential blasphemy is a warning for his religious supporters about potential conclusions to the story, and the spiritual peril of simply sticking with him till the end."