Dumped by Trump
The Riley Gaines side story from this week is just the latest reminder of how casually the president tosses aside allies.
LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER vowing to cull a “whole civilization” and just hours after spitting knives at Pope Leo XIV, President Donald J. Trump opened up his personal social media platform and posted the now-infamous AI-generated image of himself as Jesus. This is what, on the day Orthodox Christians and many Eastern Rite Catholics were celebrating Easter, he wanted the world to see: Trump-Jesus healing a bedridden man with light emanating from his palms.
The blowback was immediate, and Trump eventually deleted the post.
Pressed on it outside the Oval Office the next day during a staged DoorDash delivery meant to celebrate his “No Tax on Tips” policy, Trump claimed the whole matter was a media fabrication. The AI image had depicted him, he said, as a doctor. What’s the fuss?1
Much has been made of the AI Eastertide Event, the effects of which are continuing to ripple outwards. (Just yesterday, Trump posted a further AI-generated image, this one depicting himself and Christ as two separate people who are on very positive terms with one another.) But I want to focus on an aspect of what went down last weekend that I haven’t seen given its due.
It’s the subplot involving Riley Gaines. Fox News contributor. Prolific social media troll. Famous NCAA freestyle fifth-place finisher. Noted cisgender woman whom Trump last year personally praised as “a tremendous athlete” while signing an executive order with her standing nearby. Gaines was clearly in Trump’s good books—but she’s also a student of the Good Book, and she took to X to express her dismay at the president’s God-displacing post:
That was it. That was the extent of Gaines’s (forgive me) apostasy. She did not call Trump a raging narcissist. She did not endorse a Democrat. She did not even defend the pope. She said, in effect, Hey, maybe don’t portray yourself as the Son of God?
Trump’s response?
“I’m not a big fan of Riley, actually.”
Reading this one sentence, Gaines watched years of loyal support and advocacy go poof. All because she suggested that the president of the United States exercise a modicum of humility about his status relative to the Holy Trinity.
In response to this offhand slagging, did Gaines hold the line? Did she find even an ounce of self-respect in the moment? Did she stand by her principles and tell the most powerful man in the known universe to pound sand?
Well, no. She did not do any of that.
Instead, within hours and with slumped shoulders, she was back on social media clarifying that she loves the president oh, so very, very much, and she does not get her feelings hurt easily, and she knows it’s not personal, and she’s everlastingly grateful he’s in the Oval Office. It was an abject humiliation ritual.
This is something I wish MAGA influencers would pause and sit with for a moment. If you are a social media star in the right-wing constellation, this is your life now. Really, it is what your life has always been. This is the upshot of the Faustian bargain you made.
Offer one mild, reasonable, biblically grounded objection to your guy presenting himself as Christ and you get shamed in front of the whole country.
Get Out of the Water
WHICH BRINGS ME to the thing nobody in your world wants to say out loud: The Teflon is wearing off.
For years, the intellectual architecture of MAGA was built out over one load-bearing premise: He wins. He always wins. Are you tired of winning yet? The scandals bounce off him. The indictments become fodder for the online merch store. Nothing sticks to Teflon Don. Hundreds if not thousands of grifters built their careers on the idea that proximity to Trump would give them access to a forever growth industry.
But here’s a funny thing about Teflon that your high school chemistry teacher may have never taught you: It is more than twice as dense as water. It sinks.
And right now, the president is sinking fast. His approval rating is hovering around 38 percent.
He is prosecuting a war of choice with Iran with no exit ramp and no clear objective. He blew up the global trading order with tariffs and then with a mined, drone-swept, and now blockaded Strait of Hormuz. He picked a fight with the pope (an American pope!) and then posted an image that suggests he sees himself as a rival to the Godhead.
If you are a MAGA influencer, you must know how all this ends.
The window to get out with your reputation minimally intact is not going to stay open forever.
The mad king is drowning.
You’re got to jump before it’s too late.
You’ve got to get out.
Teflon sinks. Are you going to let him take you down with him?
Even you, Ms. Gaines, have time. But you still might want to act quickly. I know you don’t have a great track record in water.
 | A guest post by
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