Jesus Christ never made hush money payments to an adult film star, bragged about grabbing women's genitals, or incited a deadly riot after telling his supporters falsehoods about the results of a presidential election.
Despite this, reports Vice News, many Christian Trump supporters are now explicitly drawing comparisons between former President Donald Trump and Jesus Christ, as they see the looming indictments hanging over the former president as the same kind of persecution that Christ suffered at the hands of the Romans.
Reacting to the news that Trump could soon be indicted for making illegal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels in 2016, MAGA influencer Reanna Dilley warned the former president's enemies that "Rome tried to silence a peaceful leader via political persecution, and ended up creating the most pervasive and permanent religious figure in all of world history."
Trump-loving lawyer Joseph McBride, meanwhile, posted an all-caps tirade on Twitter in which he declared that "JESUS LOVES DONALD TRUMP. JESUS DIED FOR DONALD TRUMP. JESUS LIVES INSIDE DONALD TRUMP. DEAL WITH IT.”
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Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University, tells Vice News that Trump has picked up on his supporters' view of him as a Christ-like figure and has incorporated language appealing to that belief into his speeches.
“This language is just going to keep reinforcing the narrative that your cultural and religious enemies are politically persecuting you,” he explained. “Trump is an exemplar of how ‘your political enemies are persecuting you, we have to do something about it.'"
