Less than a year after signing legislation that will pull nearly 12 million Americans off health insurance by gutting Medicaid, Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself to Truth Social on Sunday depicting him as a Jesus-like figure, with divine light emanating from his hands as he heals a stricken man in a hospital bed with a demon from hell floating in the background.

The president has since deleted the post, which also followed a lengthy tirade about Pope Leo XIV on the site the same day in which he called him “weak on crime” and blamed the head of the Catholic church for being influenced by Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod. Trump refused to apologize to the pope, saying: “He went public. I’m just responding to Pope Leo.”

Trump faced the wrath of some of his most high-profile and loyal Christian supporters, many of whom have stood by the president through multiple other indiscretions and were unable to contain their righteous fury.

Riley Gaines, a Fox News podcast host and conservative commentator, wrote on X she “cannot understand why he’d post this”.

She continued: “Is he looking for a response? 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.”

Megan Basham, a writer at the conservative Daily Wire, called the post “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy”.

“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,” she wrote. She demanded Trump “take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God”.

Isabel Brown, a host on the same outlet, said the image was “disgusting and unacceptable”.

“Nothing matters more than Jesus,” she wrote. “This post is, frankly, disgusting and unacceptable, but also a profound misreading of the American people experiencing a true and beautiful revival of faith in Christ.”

Steve Deace, a host at the rightwing BlazeTV, posted a single word: “No.”

When reporters asked Trump whether he posted a picture depicting himself as Jesus Christ, Trump said “it wasn’t a depiction, it was me”, though he insisted: “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor making people better.”

He added: “And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican member of congress from Georgia, captured a screenshot of the Truth Social post before it was deleted, and said: “I completely denounce this and I’m praying against it!!!”

The AI-generated image Trump shared, portraying him as the son of God, was not the original. The picture first appeared in early February, posted to X by Nick Adams, a conservative commentator with a history of sharing AI-generated, biblically themed Trump content. In Adams’s version, a silhouette of a US soldier stands in the background. In Trump’s version, that soldier has been photoshopped into a demonic figure with horns looming behind the president as he performs his miracle.

But the outrage was not just among high-profile media figures. Users on Truth Social – Trump’s social platform where devoted supporters almost never dissent – have also turned on the president over the image.

JD Vance, the vice-president, played down the Jesus-like image as “a joke” in an interview on Fox News on Monday.

“Of course, he took it down because he realized a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor,” Vance said of the post. Vance added it was sometimes better for the “Vatican to stick to matters of morality”.

Trump is engaged in a war of words with Pope Leo, the first US-born pope in Catholic history, after Leo suggested, without naming the president, that a “delusion of omnipotence” was driving US foreign policy, particularly surrounding the war with Iran.

Trump responded by calling the pontiff “WEAK on Crime”, and saying he was “not a fan of Pope Leo” and suggesting the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics was “catering to the radical left”. Leo, who was also outspoken about the carnage and catastrophes in Gaza, told reporters on the papal flight to Algeria that he did not fear the Trump administration and would continue to speak out against war.

“I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the church is here to do,” the pope said.

US bishops have also rallied behind him, describing Leo not as a political opponent but as a “vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the gospel”.

The condemnation of Trump’s attacks on the pope spread further: Italian politicians across the spectrum, including Matteo Salvini – the hard-right deputy prime minister and a longtime Trump admirer – said attacking the pope was neither useful nor intelligent. The Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, also condemned Trump’s “insult”, saying that depicting Jesus Christ as a vessel for political vanity was “unacceptable to any free person” and is a “desecration of Jesus”.

Trump’s AI post not only comes after that spat, but one week after Easter Sunday for Catholics, and the morning after Easter Sunday for Orthodox Christians.

The Gospel of Mark records Jesus healing the sick, feeding the hungry and casting out demons. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in 2025, will cut federal Medicaid spending by about $900bn over a decade with children’s hospitals warning the cuts will directly harm their most vulnerable patients.

One user on X, Mandy Arthur, captured the mood: “God, we might have made a mistake and accidentally elected the Antichrist. Send help.”