Vance still worshipping at the Church of Trump

What does JD Vance – US vice-president, Catholic and one of the most God-fearing men to have entered the White House in recent history – make of Donald Trump’s latest harebrained social media post and scrap with the Vatican?

Trump this week posted an AI-generated image on Truth Social depicting himself as the Son of God before attacking the Pope, the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, as “WEAK on crime”, “terrible for Foreign Policy” and a man who “wouldn’t be in the Vatican” were he not president.

Following a backlash caused by the president apparently claiming to be an omnipotent deity, Trump did eventually remove the image, insisting it did not depict him as Jesus Christ but “a doctor making people better” because “I make people a lot better”.

Vance, unlike Trump – who has described the Bible as his favourite book but failed to cite a single verse – takes his Christianity seriously, even scholarly.

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Catholicism, he wrote in a 2020 essay entitled How I Joined the Resistance: On Mamaw and becoming Catholic, is “obsessed with virtue, but cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor of the world without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive.

“And above all: a faith centered around a Christ who demands perfection of us even as He loves unconditionally and forgives easily.”

So he must have been furious when Trump posted the image in seemingly direct contradiction of Exodus 20:7 (“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”)? Er, no.

“Of course, the president was posting a joke and he took it down because he recognised that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humour in that case,” Vance explained to CNN.

“I think the president of the United States likes to mix it up on social media, and I think that’s one of the good things about this president, is that he’s not filtered, he doesn’t send everything through a communications professional, he actually reaches out directly to the people.”