Thoughts on Donald Trump, self-evident truths, and political idolatry

The first half of April 2026 has provided a number of examples of the danger of political idolatry in the United States. Events in early April have also reminded us Catholics that our political or national commitments must always be chastened by the claims of the Church.

On Wednesday of Holy Week, a woman claiming to be a Protestant pastor of some sort expressly compared President Donald Trump to Jesus. Speaking in the Oval Office, Paula White-Cain, said to the President:

You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us…. On the third day, He rose, He defeated evil, He conquered death, hell, and the grave. And sir, because of His resurrection, you rose up. Because He was victorious, you were victorious.

She went on to say that God is using Trump to “awaken the church, to harvest the nations” (whatever that means), “and to bring a worldwide revival.” She told the President that he is the “greatest champion of faith” and “no one has paid the price like” him. God told her to tell Trump, White-Cain asserted, “because of [Jesus’] victory you will be victorious in all you put your hands to.”

On Divine Mercy Sunday, the President ran with the theme, posting a meme on his privately held social media platform in which he is portrayed as Jesus laying his hands on a sick or dying person, presumably to seal his entrance into heaven if not heal him. The meme is replete with American political symbols and militaristic images surrounding Trump. Soldiers and fighter planes hover over his head, as do bald eagles, the American flag, and the Statue of Liberty. In the meme, Trump is portrayed as a divine savior. [Editor’s note: Late on April 13th, it was reported that Vice-President JD Vance said the post was meant as “a joke” and it had been removed.]

Also on March 12, the president posted a long rant, attacking Pope Leo for his critiques of any foreign policy that puts war before diplomacy. And the president asserted that Pope Leo only became pope because of, you guessed it, Donald J. Trump. “If I wasn’t in the White house,” the president asserted, “Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” Like White-Cain’s Oval Office speech, the meme is, in a word, obscene and blasphemous idolatry.

In theory, we Catholics should be reflexively repulsed by such speech and images. They are not only a very bad take on politics and religion, but injurious to our souls. This is especially the case when the president is a man who invokes—or promotes people who invoke—repulsive comparisons of himself to Jesus. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, such spectacles are likely to increase. It’s useful, therefore, to revisit problems related to nationalism, partisanship, and even “patriotism.”

As a threshold matter, at least at the time of its founding, the United States of America was not, properly speaking, a “nation” or “patria.” In what might have been unique in world history, the U.S. was founded on a set of political ideas, flowing from a particular and precise political philosophy. The U.S. is not an organic nation composed of a common ethnicity, linguistic community, racial identity, or any other demographic characteristic. To be an American, therefore, is not to describe ethnic, linguistic, racial, or any other demographic. Rather, to be “American” is to be committed to a set of political ideas. At its founding, the United States became a “state” without a nation.

This is in contrast to virtually every other established nation-state in the world. The typical pattern is for a state to emerge from a nation. For example, the modern German state was established in 1871 by uniting loosely connected federations of ethnic Germans into a formal state. Similarly, in 1861, Victor Emmanuel II became the king of a United Kingdom of Italy, creating a “state” from the disparate Italian ethnic nations in what we now recognize as the modern nation-state of Italy. In both cases, the state emerged from a common ethno-linguistic heritage. The state gives form to the already-existing nation of ethnic and linguistic identity.

The United States, by comparison, was not created by erecting a set of structures to politically unite an organic group of people. Rather, the U.S. was founded on an express set of political ideas. There was no ethnic nation to be united into a state. Rather, a state was created by words, and those words became the American identity. One might argue that the U.S. has become a nation-state over 250 years of living under this idea. The point is arguable, and perhaps even persuasive. But even if that is the case, the “nation” part of the arguably U.S. nation-state is emerging from the political ideas that created the “state” part, not vice versa.

Both styles of forming a united political entity are prone to the danger of idolatry, of course. One need only refer back to my examples of Germany and Italy to see how nationalism can become idolatry. The U.S. is not more prone to confuse transitory politics with eternal truths than any other modern nation-state. But the kind of confusion in the U.S. is perhaps more dangerous because it is more subtle. This is because many people—many Catholics included—hold the political theory of the U.S. founding to be some sort of transcendent, mystic, settled truth to which any other claims of truth are to be submitted and tested.

We Americans tell ourselves that “We hold [certain] truths to be self-evident,” including the “truth” that we are “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” If we are defined by collectively holding certain truths as self-evident, how can such truths be tested or judged by other truth claims?

They cannot.

By declaring them to be self-evident, we place these alleged truths outside the possibility of judgment. Rather, they become the non-negotiable starting point of a united political identity, belief in which defines us as America and Americans. Thus, these alleged truths sit in judgment over whatever other claims we hold to be true. If other truth claims are in tension with these “self-evident truths,” those claims must be judged by the central claim of the Declaration of Independence, which claim is itself immune from judgment.

It’s a logical step from saying certain truths are self-evident to saying that a politics that institutes such truths itself has some sort of transcendent or even divine quality. The state that upholds “self-evident” truths is “self-evidently” a state that transcends any rival claim to truth. All other truth claims are subject to the judgment of the self-evident ones upon which the state is founded.

When we perceive that someone is an unqualified champion of these transcendent, unquestionable truths, it is natural for that person to take on the same kind of divinely endorsed identification as the truths themselves. The speaker of prophetic truth is a prophet. While Paula White-Cain uttered this blasphemy expressly, it is implicitly held by many Americans, including many American Catholics. And when that person is already a narcissist, all the pieces fall into place. The U.S. is divinely ordered, and its president is its divinely appointed champion.

This is idolatrous blasphemy, of course. But the temptation toward such idolatry is organic to the very notion that the U.S. is founded on self-evident—read, unquestionable—truths. If we do not see a way to test these “self-evident” truths, we have clearly lost our way. While we might not endorse the blasphemy of the President and Ms. White-Cain, we have embraced the political theory that leads, ineluctably, toward the blasphemy.