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Last Sunday night, President Trump did something shocking, even for him: He posted an A.I.-generated image that plausibly depicted him as Jesus, mantled in red and hovering over a sick person, light beaming forth from each hand, surrounded by symbols of American power. The post came on the same evening that the president posted a text block on TruthSocial slamming Pope Leo, calling him “WEAK on crime,” after Leo critiqued the war in Iran. The fallout was immediate: Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson have turned on the president of late, so it wasn’t surprising to see them condemn these posts, but nothing else Trump has done has gotten the kind of negative response from far-right pastors and influencers that the A.I. Trump Jesus meme provoked. One even called him “demon-possessed.” Trump’s hubris had, for once, gotten the better of him. This fact is not itself surprising, but the specifics of the misstep that brought him here went beyond prediction.
Or did they? All this unfolded in the real world mere days before an eerily similar storyline started to play out on TV, in Episode 3 of the fifth and final season of The Boys. Just as the real-life president was doing damage control, claiming he thought the A.I. Trump Jesus image depicted him as a doctor and not the son of God, The Boys viewers watched a scene on Prime Video in which the Trump-y, villainous, blond superhero Homelander (Anthony Starr) has a vision that convinces him he is going to experience a real-deal apotheosis.
In this waking dream, Homelander’s former mother figure and mentor, who he killed back in Season 1, floats through parted curtains, so that she’s framed by the red-and-white stripes of the American flag and surrounded by billowing clouds. Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue), who used to allow the love-starved superhero to drink her breast milk, tells Homelander he’s about to “ascend”: “Who is more loved than Jesus? And why should he have more love than you?” Then she opens her top, light beams forth from her breasts, and Homelander swoons. The whole scene bears a distinctive visual resemblance to Trump’s A.I.-generated image, giving the comparison both thematic and visual resonance. We see that the inside of Homelander’s brain, where the image originates, looks more than a little like a MAGA grandpa’s Facebook feed. (Boys fans provide: I saw at least one meme of the Trump Jesus image substituting Homelander for Trump.)
In its final season, The Boys, which also features a plotline where dissidents are dragged out of their houses and their arrests recorded as fodder for Vought social media, finally feels like the oracle it’s long been rumored to be. The rest of this season, which wrapped filming last year, will see Homelander, who already controls Vought International and the White House, try to reach into people’s hearts and displace no less a figure than Jesus. In Episode 4, which dropped today, the superhero tasks his flunkies with finding ways to convince humanity that he is their god. He delivers the news to Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a superhero with a Christian background, who hesitates and prevaricates, “There is no higher calling than serving the Lord.”
“Serving the Lord?” Homelander scoffs. “Being the Lord! I am the Messiah. The savior of the world.”
Homelander is absolutely certain this can be accomplished, because he’s a maniac with no theory of mind. His team isn’t so sure, though, and in a meeting in this episode, his branding people try to work it out by brainstorming. “He could part the Red Sea and send some refugees back where they came from?” Firecracker proposes. Or, a consultant in the meeting proposes, he could fly into holy sites and take pictures with pilgrims. “Selfies with God!” Firecracker celebrates. The puppet vice president, former Vought publicist Ashley (Colby Minifie), who’s a Homelander follower only out of self-preservation, isn’t so sure this will work. “For the record,” she says, “Homelander is 100 percent God. But won’t some people say he’s not?” Turning to a snap poll, the consultant agrees, noting only 22 percent would immediately accept Homelander as Lord and Savior, while ideally, he’d need numbers in the 70s to make this work. (Ah, that hard-line 20-ish percent. The Boys strikes again.)
Firecracker’s big idea, at the end of this scene, is to reframe Christianity into an America First religion. “Jesus was a great man. The things he preached, turning the other cheek, taking in foreigners, caring for the poor … that shit don’t sell no more,” she says. “Now what we need is a church that preaches American. America is God’s government and we are his chosen people. Manifest destiny from sea to shining sea, and shit!” Of all the ideas any of them have floated, we, the audience, know this one is the most likely to work.
A.I. Trump Jesus Week was a weird time to be a person who’d seen screeners of the upcoming episodes of The Boys—I can’t imagine how much weirder it was for those who made the show. They have had years of experience in satirizing Trump-era America, a project well suited to the show’s profane tone and its story’s location in the worlds of politics and media, but one that’s sometimes proven to be difficult to pull off. It’s tough to be a satirist in this frantic, ridiculous time, when memes expire before think pieces analyzing them can be commissioned, and a person running an X account with the handle @catturd2 acquires political influence. Typically, The Boys arrives a little bit behind the news cycle, pulling stunts like casting the superhero A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) in an in-world equivalent of Kendall Jenner’s famous Pepsi ad, or making The Deep (Chace Crawford) into a manosphere podcaster. Sometimes, this stuff is funny; sometimes, you wish the show didn’t so often remind you of the way politics was 18 months ago.
But this past week, the two ships—The Boys and capital-R reality—came the closest they’ve yet come to colliding. Perhaps it’s cope on my part, but I find it something of a minor relief to consider that Trump, unlike Homelander, seems to have gotten the message that he’s not a god. After the real-life president mollified his more religious supporters with his flimsy explanation of the A.I. Trump Jesus, he posted another image, this one picturing Jesus giving Trump a cuddle. “The Radical Left Lunatics may not like this, but I think it is very nice!!!” he wrote. Thank the Lord, we don’t yet live in a Prime show adapted from a comic book—or do we?