The president of the United States posted a photo depicting himself as Jesus. Fox & Friends, a morning show known for its embrace of Christian values, said absolutely nothing.

No outrage over blasphemy, no condemnation for blurring church and state, no basic questioning of judgment or morality. From the loudest Christian voices in conservative media and politics — silence.

The details here matter. Earlier Sunday, Trump had taken to Truth Social to attack Pope Leo XIV, calling him “WEAK” on crime and suggesting the Catholic Church had essentially installed him as pontiff to manage the American president. It was an unhinged bit of writing, even by Trump’s over-the-top standards to which wev’e all become numb.

Forty minutes later, he posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ. Robes. Holy light. A healing hand extended over a sick man in a hospital bed. An American eagle overhead. Fighter jets rendered as angels. An ICE agent among the apostles. This is not some sick joke — it actually happened, on a Sunday night, during an active war, while the president of the United States was feuding with the Pope.

I mean, what the actual fuck?!

Fox and Friends is the most watched morning show in cable television, and inarguably, the most wiling to signal the virtue of their beliefs. Ainsley Earhardt, one of its longtime co-hosts, has written a memoir built around her Christian faith and three faith-based children’s books. Fox News has formalized her religiosity into an entire programming vertical called Fox Faith, with Earhardt guiding viewers through the life and teachings of Christ. On Monday morning, her co-host Carly Shimkus delivered a 40-second reader on Pope Leo’s Africa trip, noting his response to Trump’s foreign policy criticism. She did not mention the Jesus image. Not once. Editors made that call deliberately.

Its not just the conservative media world pretending to look the other way. Speaker Mike Johnson has described himself as a “biblical” lawmaker who says his faith is functionally inseparable from his governance. The Republican Party has made Christianity a cornerstone of its political identity for well over four decades. Fox News has dedicated more airtime to outrage over department store holiday signage than any network in the history of cable television. As of Monday morning, none of them had managed a statement.

I was raised to keep my spiritual life private and to be deeply skeptical of people who don’t keep theirs that way. In my experience, the louder someone advertises their faith, the more likely they are to be full of shit. Not all the time, but the exceptions are rarer than the rule. Sunday night did nothing to complicate that view.

Here is what’s actually interesting about the reaction. Pro-Trump MAGA media figure Michael Knowles stepped up on principle and said delete it. Outkick’s Riley Gaines said God shall not be mocked. The Truth Social comments section, of all places, erupted. These are not people with any history of crossing Donald Trump, but to their great credit have revealed a threshold. Republican elected officials, the ones who show up to the National Prayer Breakfast and put Bible verses in their email signatures, have thus far not been able to find their standards.

So let’s do the time-honored exercise of illustrating the bizarre double standards at play. Obama once used a selfie stick to take a photo in the White House mirror. Conservative media covered it for days as evidence of his fundamental unseriousness, his disrespect for the office, his clear and present unsuitability for the presidency. He wore a tan suit to a press briefing about ISIS and it became a week-long referendum on his character. These are not embellishments. These things actually happened and were treated, on the right, as legitimate windows into who Obama was as a man and as a president.

Now imagine Obama had posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ, healing the sick, forty minutes after attacking a sitting Pope during an active war. Take a moment with that. There would not have been a news cycle. There would have been a constitutional crisis. Impeachment would have been the starting point of the conversation, not the extreme end of it.

That gap, between the tan suit and the Jesus image, is the whole story. It is a precise measurement of what these institutions actually believe versus what they have spent years loudly claiming to believe.

Pope Leo boarded a plane to Africa on Monday and told reporters he had no fear of the Trump administration. He was on his way to Algeria for a ten-day tour.

The president who’d spent the previous evening in robes was back on Truth Social.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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