You hear such a lot from Maga Republicans about how liberals think Trump voters are stupid. But not nearly enough about the far more salient point: that Donald Trump thinks Trump voters are stupid. Naturally, nobody deplores his own people as passionately as a populist, but even by those exacting historical standards Trump really does regard his supporters as a honking great throng of halfwits. How else to explain his seemingly retrofitted claim yesterday that the AI picture he posted of himself as Jesus was “me as a doctor”. Er, no. After it incensed leading figures in the Christian right, which makes up a large part of his voter base, the US president later deleted it, lamenting of these idiots that he “didn’t want anybody to be confused. People were confused.” Yeah, people are stoopid.

Alas, as you’ve no doubt seen, controversy still attends this image Trump shared on his Truth Social/True Sociopath platform. It depicts Trump in Jesus robes and holding a glowing orb of something – presumably heavenly light or radioactive material he omitted to tell Congress about – which he is transmitting restoratively into the forehead of some midwestern Lazarus. I’m sure we’d all love to know how the AI prompt for it could be “show me Donald Trump as a doctor”, or indeed how the LLM of choice would react when called out on its subsequent error. “You’re right – I overstated that. I shouldn’t have implied the US president is a benign deity who can raise the dead. To clarify – he’s a malignant narcissist and a tumour on the world. Thanks for catching that.”

Even were we to take someone widely seen as one of Earth’s leading liars at his word, the Trump of this image would surely be the most terrifying medical professional you could possibly conceive of, finally supplanting Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers. I don’t know if you’ve seen that 1980s bodyshock classic, but Irons plays psychopathic twin gynaecologists who commission a metallurgical artist to create them their own bespoke surgical instruments. Shudder. Yet, as indicated, I would infinitely rather have those guys do my smear test than wake up to find Donald Trump “making me better” under the adoring gaze of … hold on, let me squint again at this iconic image … some US service personnel, a daytime soap nurse, a heavenly host of war dead and some kind of F16 flypast. I’ve always wondered precisely what goes on at the fabled Walter Reed medical centre in Maryland, which seemingly boasts an army of doctors in white coats who are willing to testify to the fact that Trump weighs less than Timothée Chalamet and has the arterial health of a man 50 years his junior. But maybe this nutso image is filling in a lot of the gaps.

Given his status within the godhead, perhaps it was inevitable that Trump should also unleash a drive-by on the pope while his deranged war of choice in the Middle East continues to destabilise the world. Cleanup has once again been left to the supposedly hardcore Catholic JD Vance, who I feel has never met a position he couldn’t sell out, and who could last night be found pontificating that the pontiff should “stick to matters of morality”. In which case, his holiness may well have further legitimate questions of this degenerate administration.

All in all, these should be long nights of the soul for a set of media thinkers I have come to think of as the Whisper-Its. It goes without saying that “whisper it” is one of the industry’s naffest stylings. Whisper what? You’re writing it in a newspaper, you daft brush. But you might have come to notice that it tends to be deployed by people who are self-cast as political sages, yet genuinely failed to understand that Trump always leads – and can only lead – to chaos and dysfunction. And failed to realise it in his second term, no less. But don’t take my word for it; let’s see the Whisper-It set in action. “Whisper it quietly,” instructed the Sun on the eve of his taking office last year, “incoming president Donald Trump might actually do a good job.” “Whisper it,” advised the Telegraph last May, “but it’s just possible sanity is returning to US diplomacy.” “Whisper it quietly, peace in the Middle East?” asked the Spectator archly last October. “Whisper it,” the Telegraph whispered that same month, “but Trump could be in line for a Nobel peace prize.”

Please don’t feel the need to whisper it, but all this is and always was the most sensationally obvious utter bullshit. Yet there are reams and reams of this stuff, building from a surge around the inauguration to an absolute torrent in the first 100 days of the presidency. And as detailed here previously, it was still going on almost seven weeks ago, when Trump launched his “four-week” war on Iran on Israel’s coattails.

What drives the Whisper-Its? Is it naivety or blind hope or the desire to serve only the very hottest takes? Or is it just a genuinely staggering inability to see that an obviously dreadful man will obviously do dreadful things, and do them again and again? Is it an inability to simply listen to the words Trump says, watch him pose a daily and indefensible threat to a more decent way of life, and conclude that he is quite obviously emotionally, intellectually and morally incontinent? Who knows, but let’s just say: Jesus Christ, they could not be more wrong. Never feel the need to whisper it.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist