The Making of the Messiah: Politics, Religion, and Law in Trump’s America

A certain form of messianism has been woven into the cultural and political fabric of the United States from the very beginning. It is within this historical framework that Trump’s making of the Messiah should be understood. The day when the Supreme Court granted Trump immunity regarding the events of January 6, 2021, represents the symbolic moment of the messianic anointing of the current president of the United States. It seems that only the Catholic Church remains to offer effective resistance to this messianic power of immunity deployed on a global scale: through the diplomatic activity of the Holy See and the fragile force of Pope Leo’s American citizenship—who, by defending the proper use of God’s name, the constitutional state, and international law, in the eyes of the Trump administration presents himself on the world stage as the Anti-Messiah. (This paper will be presented next Tuesday at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Graz in Austria during the “Political Theology” seminar led by Professor Martina Bär).

Throughout United States history, a latent self-perception of the Nation as God’s chosen people has persisted. The land discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 was gradually perceived as the promised land.

United States: The Promised Land

This concept is first codified in the 1776 Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Obviously, here “all men” refers only to certain human beings: white, male, Protestant, and native English speakers. In short, they were all equal, but not quite—and certainly not everyone.

Thus, the philosophical-legal theism of the United States’ founding period contained an element of racial and gender discrimination that would later be gradually amended through the Constitution. The question remains as to how much these amendments have changed the original orientation of the U.S. Constitution (1789)—that is, to what extent has the “original sin” of racism been atoned for, not only legally, but also in social practices and the shaping of the American legislative and political mindset?

It is a legitimate question, given that nearly two centuries after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution’s promulgation, Robert Kennedy felt the need to assert in June 1966 that “hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard—to share in the decisions of government which shape men’s lives. Everything that makes man’s lives worthwhile—family, work, education, a place to rear one’s children and a place to rest one’s head—all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity of man can be protected and preserved only where the government must answer—not just to the wealthy; not just to those of a particular religion, not just to those of a particular race; but to all of the people.”

The Two Original Religious Foundations

In today’s making of the Messiah, after law and politics, a third original aspect remains to be considered preliminarily: religion. At the time of the founding of the American nation, the latter was characterized by a strong denominational plurality in matter of religion. This plurality drew on the tradition of the Protestant Reformation and the Anglican separation from the Catholic Church. However, it was monolithic in terms of its underlying foundation—Christianity.

It is within this framework that the First Amendment (1791) must be understood: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Rather than establishing a clear separation between Church and State, the aim was to avoid in the United States the model of the mother country—England and its state church—from which it was separating.

Thus, political competition among the various Christian denominations present in the nascent American nation was therefore avoided. However, the privilege that the Christian religion enjoyed in governing the country’s daily affairs—including political ones—was not called into question. For nearly half a century, the First Amendment applied only at the federal level. It was not until 1833 that all American states had effectively achieved “disestablishment.” The resulting legal doctrine did not emerge until the 1940s, when the Supreme Court “held that disestablishment applies to state governments through the Fourteenth Amendment” (Hamilton-McCollen).

Regarding the public and political role of religion, two frameworks have existed in tension with one another from the beginning: philosophical-legal theism, which characterized some of the framers of the Constitution; and the idea of a specifically Christian Nation, which was prevalent in the country’s socio-political fabric. Throughout United States history, these two frameworks have integrated and clashed, yet neither has prevailed to eliminate the other from legal and political practices.

Bible and Slavery: Union Divided

The Christian Nation framework, in which American citizenship is an election that creates a new people of God inhabiting a land of happiness and abundance (expressed by the strength of the dollar, a true universal medium of exchange that, since the Nixon Shock of 1971, has inextricably linked the Nation’s prosperity to market confidence), began to fray in 1860. This was when President Lincoln announced his intention to fully implement the Republican Party’s electoral platform by abolishing slavery in the United States, prompting South Carolina to secede on December 20 of that year. From the country’s pulpits, the nation’s shared Christian foundation—embracing not only the same Bible, but also its sense of political principle in the governance of the United States—fractured, reinforcing (and in part producing) the split in society over slavery as both an economic and moral issue.

“On no subject was the cacophony more obvious and painful than on the question of the Bible and slavery. On no subject did the cacophony touch such agonizing depths as on the question of God’s providential designs for the United States of America” (M. A. Knoll). At the intersection of legal theism and political Christian nationalism—ground shared by both original frameworks—lies the Bible as the common foundation of the Nation and of belonging to it.

“American national culture had been substantially built by the voluntary and democratic appropriation of Scripture. Yet, following this approach to the Bible resulted in an unbridgeable chasm of opinion about what Scripture actually taught. There were no resources within democratic or voluntary procedures to resolve the public division created by the voluntary and democratic interpretation of the Bible. The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation. The nation that had embraced the Book was rescued not by the Book, but by force of arms” (Knoll).

The First Amendment aimed to prevent the establishment of a state religion, which was necessary to foster political coexistence among the multitude of Christian denominations present in the territory when the United States was founded. The religious intent of this legal principle was to prevent conflict among Christian denominations that could lead to violent confrontation. However, the role of biblical interpretation in relation to the American Civil War shows that, left to its own devices, this legal principle is insufficient to neutralize the political mobilization of the Christian Scriptures, not only regarding their conflicting interpretations on the issue of slavery at the time, but also in general until today.

In my view, this event—the founding text that risks destroying the Nation which owes to such Book its existence—does not represent a mere contingent moment in American history. Rather, it is an underlying, ambivalent force that continues to shape the United States until today. It is a force that has never ceased to permeate the construction of the American experiment, sometimes more conspicuously and other times like a karstic channel flowing through the nation’s sociocultural subsoil and permeating it even if unseen.

Biblical imagery and vocabulary have been integral to the development of the American experiment, either explicitly or implicitly. Finding them in the rhetoric of the Trump administration today should not be surprising. What should be surprising is the conviction with which the democratic-liberal political class believed it could get rid of biblical references from the public construction of the Nation once and for all. This left the “Christian discourse” entirely in the hands of those segments of American society who did not identify with such supposed Europeanization of the United States. In reality, it was precisely the conservative class—both political and social—that established a hegemony centered on the Bible, gathering around it even forms of opposition to the liberal spirit of American democracy that were not religiously based.

Premises to the Making of the Messiah

In his 1966 speech, Robert Kennedy also stated: “In the last five years, we have done more to ensure equality for our African-American citizens and to help the impoverished, both white and black, than in the hundred years before that time. But much, much more remains to be done.”

What has become of this “much more that remains to be done”? The return of American messianism under the Trump administration is not merely a personal matter tied to the current president of the United States, nor is it simply a deviation or corruption of the most genuine American spirit. Certainly, large segments of the citizenry today do not identify with it, just as the other half of the American population did not identify with the secular mainstream in the past. Perhaps the America that emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960s created a distorted image of the nation’s reality. Those who believed they had emerged victorious from those battles did little to mitigate their divisive social impact and instead sought to counter the socio-cultural space that remained resistant to those ideals through law and by dominating public and academic discourse.

A whole segment of the American population was effectively left behind, believed to fade away on its own. However, this did not happen, and resentment grew in this segment of America, which was forgotten by the liberal spirit. A spirit that managed to impose its categories even when it was a minority in terms of political representation.

In other words, Trump is not a phenomenon unto himself, but rather the outcome of a long and complex social and political journey in the United States. Trump’s skill lay in uniting the diverse Americans who felt left behind by the liberal cultural mainstream. By channeling the resentment of diverse segments of the American population, the often-invisible actors who backed Trump created a Gramscian hegemony, uniting social and economic groups—even those far apart—under a single political sentiment.

Two visual icons best illustrate the heterogeneous nature of this new hegemony: the mob that took the U.S. Capitol hostage on January 6, 2021, to prevent Biden’s presidential election; and Elon Musk with a chainsaw, ready to behead the American federal bureaucracy. Behind these two icons lies Trump’s messianic aura as the great liberator of the Nation from all the yokes that had oppressed it until then.

Immunity

A decisive role in making the Messiah was played by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States (July 1, 2024). This ruling granted Trump immunity from charges of conspiracy and fraud related to his “support” to the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Without delving into the technical details of the ruling, it is characterized by a formal analysis of presidential acts, regardless of their content or the consequences they might have had on the constitutional and institutional structure of the United States. The ruling then distinguishes between acts that must be considered official and those that do not fall under this category but still enjoy “presumptive immunity.” The Supreme Court’s interpretation significantly expands the scope of presidential acts that fall under the official exercise of the president’s constitutional mandate.

More important than the text itself is the fact that the ruling has created a political imaginary in which the American president can act against the Constitution with complete immunity. Thus, even the second great founding text of the American experiment—after the Bible during the Civil War—turns against the experiment itself.

Trump has used this ruling to anoint himself during his second term, exercising the U.S. presidency in a messianic way. The Messiah is simply immune and able to exercise power without constraints from the other branches or congressional approval, a yoke that is poorly tolerated when partially reintroduced by the same Court that had proclaimed his immunity. This happened recently in the case of tariffs, which is, however, marginal compared to the prerogative of declaring a “holy war” against Iran. Constitutionally, this would fall to Congress, not the president.

Since being anointed with immunity, Trump has gradually adopted a more religious presidential rhetoric than during his first term. An image created with artificial intelligence of Trump in papal vestments, posted between the death of Pope Francis and the election of his successor, reveals the extent to which Trump intends to extend his messianic immunity as president: absolute jurisdiction, leaving behind any modern democratic separation of powers.

Pope Leo: The Anti-Messiah

The Trumpian machine for making the Messiah has encountered unexpected and paradoxical resistance in the least democratic global institution today: the Catholic Church. Every election of the Roman pontiff has geopolitical consequences, but many have also been decided for geopolitical reasons. In this respect, the election of Pope Leo is similar to that of John Paul II. In the latter case, the communist bloc led by Russia was involved; in the former, the global disorder brought to light and then orchestrated by Trump’s America was the matter of concern by the cardinals.

Trump has been not so much the architect of the dystopian world order inherited from the end of the Cold War as he was its irreverent revelator—another operation that falls within the Christian messianic order.

Cardinals from Eastern and Southern regions felt the need to elect an American pope to counter a theory of global chaos as the driving force of a new world order that could reactivate economic and financial gains for a narrow elite at any cost (a theory favored by Silicon Valley representatives and magnates such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk).

In a few short months, Pope Leo has emerged as a defender of God’s name, opposing any religious justification for war and violence. He has also become a defender of the democratic order, the constitutional state, and international law. This clearly positions him as an Anti-Messiah in relation to many Trump administration policies. If one reads Thiel’s description of the Antichrist alongside Pope Leo’s statements regarding the actions of the American administration under President Trump, one can see that Pope Leo occupies precisely the role of the Anti-Messiah.

However, his status as an American citizen has protected him from any openly accusation of divine lèse majesté by the MAGA world. Behind the scenes, however, things are different.

For example, an event occurred that was entirely unprecedented in the history of relations between the United States and the Holy See. Last January, Elbridge Colby, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican ambassador to the United States at the time, to the Pentagon for a closed-door meeting attended by other Trump administration officials.

Reportedly, they intended to lecture the Holy See on the strength of America’s military power, which they claimed enabled the country to do whatever it wanted in the world. The warning Colby and his colleagues issued to the Holy See was that the Catholic Church would do better to align itself fully with the Trump administration’s policies. Evidently, Cardinal Pierre voiced his dissent on behalf of the Vatican when one of those present stood up and took a 14th-century weapon, evoking the Avignon submission of the Catholic popes to the French Crown.

This gesture, which goes beyond all diplomatic decorum, reveals the current U.S. administration’s intolerance toward any alternative power that challenges its actions. However, it also demonstrates the effectiveness of Pope Leo’s anti-messianism and the Holy See’s diplomatic efforts, as the U.S. administration perceives them as a sort of “rogue state.”

In a paradoxical reversal, much of today’s new world order depends on the clash between the fragile immunity of citizenship, personified by Pope Leo and the Holy See’s diplomatic activity, and the power of messianic immunity, embodied by Donald Trump. In other words, today more than ever, the fate of the world is also a theological challenge—the facts now prove it.

The problem is that, presently, we probably lack a theology capable of addressing these facts, even though democracy, international law, and the constitutional state owe far more to theology than is commonly thought. Pope Leo’s Anti-Messiah stance is defensive, akin to the katechon seeking to slow the overall collapse of civilization as we know it. However, he cannot limit itself to this if he also wishes to create something new. The fragile strength of citizenship’s immunity is destined, sooner or later, to succumb to the power of messianic immunity. The former can avoid capitulating to the latter only by becoming proactive and generative, assuming temporary global leadership to guide the world through its current storm. Ultimately, this constitutes the messianism of Jesus.

Jesus’ Messianism and the Time That Remains

Jesus’ messianism is transient and takes the form of a religious critique, within Israel, of the institutional status quo into which YHWH’s covenant with his people had been transformed into an instrument of power and domination. On this basis, Jesus than initiated a conflict with the Roman Empire over God’s proper place in the world. He challenged the identification of the divine with the emperor by representing a God who wants only to be unconditional love for humanity subjugated by established powers. Jesus dedicated his life to expressing God’s way of being through acts of care and compassion.

Jesus’s messianism produces a hollowing out of God’s proper place in the flow of human events, declaring the illegitimacy of any political power (religious or worldly) that claims to establish itself in that place and act in God’s name. Until his return, Jesus denounces every messianic figure who seeks to usurp God’s empty place for their own dominion.

Therefore, it is precisely the figure of the Anti-Messiah who presides over the true way of being God within human history in “the time remaining” (G. Agamben). However, time does remain, and it must be organized and made livable in a way that honors our shared humanity—for which God sacrificed himself without asking for anything in return.