Trump gets crazier and crazier.

Trump shares image of Jesus embracing him, continues to lash out at Pope Leo.

Vice President Vance also criticized the pontiff, telling him to "be careful."

President Donald Trump on Wednesday shared another possibly AI-generated image, this time depicting him being embraced by Jesus in front of an American flag.

"The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!," Trump wrote on his social media platform.

The president's post included a screenshot of another user's post, which contained the image of Jesus with his arm around Trump's shoulder.

Another possible Ai image re-posted to President Donald Trump's social media account showing a depiction of Jesus embracing the President. @realDonaldTrump/Truth Social

The post comes after Trump continued to criticize Pope Leo XIV overnight and shared online what appeared to be defenses of his now-deleted social media post that depicted him as Jesus Christ -- a characterization that Trump rejected on Monday.

In one instance, Trump shared a post from a user on X showing old posts from an X account that belonged to the pope prior to his papal election, when he was Robert Prevost -- including some criticizing Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

"It's fascinating to see what social media reveals about a person before they become the Pope," the shared post read. "Before he became Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Prevost was on Twitter trashing Trump, criticizing Vance, calling for open borders, promoting COVID vaccines, endorsing stricter gun control, and tweeting after George Floyd."

"Not good!!!" Trump wrote in his own post.

Vance on Tuesday also spoke about the pope, saying at conference of young conservatives in Athens, Georgia, that the pontiff should "be careful when he talks about matters of theology."

"If you're going to opine on matters of theology, you've got to be careful, you've got to be sure it's anchored in the truth and that's one of the things that I try to do and that's certainly something I would expect from the clergy," Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, said at the event.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Wednesday spoke out against Vance's comments.

"When Pope Leo XIV speaks as supreme pastor of the universal Church, he is not merely offering opinions on theology, he is preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ," Bishop James Massa, the chair of the conference’s Committee on Doctrine, said in a statement.

Vance's criticism followed a back-and-forth earlier this week between the president and the first American pope, who has called for an end to wars, including the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

"Enough of war," Leo said on Saturday during a peace vigil in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.

Trump on Sunday described the pope as "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy."

The pontiff on Monday responded, saying he had "no fear" of the Trump administration. "That's what I believe in," Leo added. "I am called to do what the church is called to do."

When the pope's old social media account surfaced, shortly after he was elected pope in May 2025, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt brushed it off, saying, "The president made his reaction to Pope Leo's announcement yesterday very clear. He is very proud to have an American pope."

Leo has been a strong messenger for global peace since the start of his papacy.

He has repeatedly called for the parties involved to engage in negotiations, including saying on March 1 that he was making "a heartfelt appeal to all the parties involved to assume the moral responsibility of halting the spiral of violence before it becomes an unbridgeable chasm." He has said that "God does not bless any conflict."

Trump said in a social media post on Tuesday that the pope needed to be informed that Iran had killed tens of thousands of protesters, and that it was "absolutely unacceptable" for Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

"Will someone please tell Pope Leo that Iran has killed at least 42,000 innocent, completely unarmed, protesters in the last two months, and that for Iran to have a Nuclear Bomb is absolutely unacceptable," Trump wrote.

The AI-generated image posted by Trump on Sunday depicted him as a Jesus-like figure in red-and-white robes with light coming out of his hands. The president removed that post on Monday amid criticism.

Trump on Monday denied that the deleted post had any connection to Jesus at all, and was, in fact, supposed to be him as a doctor.

"I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with Red Cross -- as a Red Cross worker, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one," he said.

Vice President Vance claimed Trump was joking when he posted the image.

"I think the president was posting a joke and, of course, he took it down because he recognized that a lot of people weren’t understanding his humor in that case," Vance said in an interview on Fox News' "Special Report with Bret Baier." (ABC News)

The latest mad tweet from Trump.

Veteran church observers say an open war of words between a pope and a U.S. president is unprecedented. (The Washington Post)

This will not end pretty. (Annette Niemtzow)

The red walls keep tumbling down.

House defies Trump on immigration with move to shield Haitians

The vote to advance a bill extending protections for Haitians marks the first time Republican lawmakers have voted this term to oppose Trump’s immigration policy.

People attend a candlelight vigil Feb. 3 in Miami for Haitians living in the United States under temporary protections.

Several House Republicans joined Democrats to oppose President Donald Trump on his immigration policy Wednesday, forcing a vote to advance a measure to reinstate temporary protections for some 350,000 Haitians living in the United States.

Six Republicans voted with 212 House Democrats and one independent, reaching the threshold to force a vote on the bill, which would keep Haitians eligible for temporary protected status (TPS) for three years. The program is intended for foreign nationals from countries facing dangerous conditions, such as armed conflict and environmental disasters.

The vote was forced using an increasingly popular legislative tool called a discharge petition that allows 218 or more representatives to circumvent the House speaker to bring a vote to the floor. Final passage of the bill in the House is expected Thursday or Friday.

“I have one of the largest Haitian populations in the country in my district,” said Rep. Michael Lawler (R-New York), who voted Wednesday to push the bill to the House floor. “… If you end [temporary protections] without addressing work authorization, it will cause a huge crisis in our health care system, especially in an area like mine, where a lot of our Haitian TPS holders are nurses.”

The measure to reinstate temporary protected status for Haitians was first introduced by Rep. Laura Gillen (D-New York), along with Lawler.

“Without this protection, they will be forced to return to the horrors in Haiti,” Gillen said in a statement, noting the bipartisan support behind the measure.

The move to help Haitian immigrants faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, but the House vote demonstrates rare Republican willingness to break with the White House. It is the first time GOP members have voted to invalidate Trump’s tougher immigration policies this legislative term.

Discharge petitions have found increasing success this Congress. At least five have received the required 218 signatures — including one this past fall to release the FBI’s records on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Only two received sufficient signatures in the last Congress from 2023 to 2025.

Sarah Binder, a governance studies expert at the Brookings Institution, said Democrats in this Congress have pursued this process on “big, salient political issues,” but this was the first time on an immigration policy.

“This goes straight at one of the Trump administration’s key deportation tools, which is to cancel this protected status for immigrants from particular countries,” Binder said.

The Trump administration announced an end to temporary protections for Haitians in June, arguing that conditions in Haiti have improved since the establishment of protections after the 2010 earthquake and calling the country “safe.” But lower courts stepped in, pausing the termination of the protections, which the Trump administration has appealed to the Supreme Court. The high court will hear arguments on April 29.

Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, speaks in front of the Supreme Court last month.

Immigration advocates say gang violence and civil unrest could pose serious danger to Haitians forced to leave the U.S. Meanwhile, the elder care and health care industries, which rely heavily on Haitians with temporary protections, have also lobbied against the ending of the program.

“We cannot afford to lose the very people staffing our hospitals and nursing homes,” said Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition, which lobbies for employers on Capitol Hill. “The success of the Haitian TPS discharge petition shows that economic reality is finally breaking through partisan gridlock.”

Republican Reps. María Elvira Salazar (Florida), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania), Don Bacon (Nebraska), Carlos A. Gimenez (Florida), Nicole Malliotakis (New York) and Lawler voted to advance the bill.

Malliotakis said that she’s heard from nursing-home employers in her district.

These are Haitian immigrants who are working, paying taxes and contributing to our economy and fulfilling a healthcare need,” she said in a statement to The Post. “To strip them of their status and deport them to a country in peril would be uncompassionate and misguided.”

Trump has repeatedly criticized Haitian immigrants over the years. Last week, Trump shared on social media a video of a fatal attack by a man who the administration says is from Haiti on a woman at a Florida gas station, saying that Democratic policies led to the alleged killer gaining temporary protections in the U.S.

The effort to strip legal protections for Haitians is part of a wide-ranging effort by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security to end the program for more than a million people, including Venezuelans, Hondurans and Afghans. (The Washington Post)

Tillis holds the cards in Trump Fed clash — and won’t fold.

The outgoing North Carolina Republican isn't relinquishing his leverage as he pushes the DOJ to drop its investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

Donald Trump has a growing Thom Tillis problem. The administration’s actions this week are doing nothing to solve it.

As the president flirts with trying to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and dismisses Tillis as “no longer a senator,” the retiring North Carolina Republican shot back with his own message to the administration Wednesday: “I’m not dead yet.”

“I’m not very tauntable,” he told reporters. “That’s part of growing up in a trailer park — you kind of get used to this stuff.”

Tillis is blocking Trump’s Fed chair nominee, Kevin Warsh, until the Justice Department drops an investigation into Powell. And the stalemate is leaving him in limbo with no clear off-ramp in sight.

The Senate Banking Committee, where Tillis holds a deciding vote, is holding Warsh’s nomination hearing next Tuesday. And Tillis is leaving the door open to using even more of his leverage, including his Senate Judiciary vote in the event the panel considers a successor to former Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Some of Tillis’ fellow Republicans privately acknowledged Wednesday they don’t understand the White House’s current strategy, which they believe risks antagonizing Tillis and empowering Powell. And publicly, a growing chorus of Republicans are calling on the DOJ to end its investigation into whether Powell lied to Congress about cost overruns at the Fed’s Washington headquarters. Powell, who denies wrongdoing, has said the investigation is a pretext to target him for not lowering interest rates as aggressively as Trump wants.

“[Tillis has] made it very clear, his position on it,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who sits next to Tillis on Senate Banking. “This is easily resolvable.”

Tillis denied any personal bad blood between himself and the president Wednesday, noting they’ve spoken in recent days about other issues. But he didn’t pull his punches when asked about Trump’s threat to fire Powell or a visit that officials from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office made to the Federal Reserve’s headquarters this week.

“It’s kind of like, guys, what are you doing?” he said. “You’re watching too many cop shows thinking that that’s cute — go up there intimidating a witness. For goodness sake — that’s so bush league. … They’re upping the pressure, but they have nowhere to go.”

He suggested that DOJ officials are only digging themselves into a deeper hole and advised them to “take the shovel out of their hands.”

Trump has shown little interest in seeing the DOJ end its probe, which focuses on statements Powell made to the Senate Banking Committee during testimony last year.

“Whether it’s incompetence, corruption, or both, I think you have to find out,” the president said on Fox Business Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Trump is ratcheting up his conflict with Powell, saying he would seek to oust the Fed chief if he stays on after his term as chair ends next month — a growing possibility as Warsh’s confirmation remains stalled amid the Tillis stalemate. Any move to fire Powell would kick off a major legal clash, and the Supreme Court has signaled opposition to the president exerting control over the Fed.

“I’ll have to fire him, OK? If he’s not leaving on time,” Trump told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business.

Tillis is warning that moving to fire Powell would ultimately backfire.

“He won’t have the right to terminate him, and all we’ve done is wasted time that could have otherwise resulted in a new chair and a new Fed board member under this president,” he said.

Even as the administration digs in over the Powell probe, Senate Republicans are making clear that they don’t expect Tillis to fold.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Wednesday that he believed the administration should wrap up its investigation. He said Republicans are “excited” about Warsh, but he’s basically stuck until they resolve the standoff with Tillis over Powell.

“I think at some point they’re going to have to deal with the committee, and they’re going to have to deal with Tillis,” Thune said of the administration.

It’s not the only committee where Tillis has leverage. Over on Judiciary, he’s warned that he will block any attorney general nominee who has dismissed the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump’s supporters at the Capitol violently interrupted the formal counting of the electoral college results. And he’s not completely ruling out making the Fed probe a litmus test for AG nominees if it continues.
“If we keep letting this go on, I have to consider other options for really amplifying my concern,” Tillis said of his Fed fight. “I don’t see myself tying it to it now.” (Politico)

Republicans worry White House ‘nonsense’ is hurting midterm prospects.

Trump’s weaves and fights come at an increasingly inconvenient time for a party clinging to razor-thin margins in Congress.

President Donald Trump speaks to the press during an event outside the Oval Office of the White House on April 13.

Republicans keep hoping the Trump administration stays on track. The president isn’t making it easy.

A sputtering economy, high gas prices, a fight with the pope and a pair of foreign policy setbacks — in Pakistan and Hungary — have left many White House allies newly exasperated as they try to navigate what was always going to be a difficult midterm year.

“Everything is made more difficult by the nonsense coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” said a Republican operative close to the White House.

“I was surprised at the number of strong Trump supporting evangelicals who were willing to criticize him,” said Erick Erickson, a conservative radio host and an influential voice with evangelical voters central to the MAGA base. “The problem ultimately is as he becomes a lame duck more and more people start to move beyond him. If he wants to minimize people looking to 2028 past him, he can’t do stuff like this. It minimizes the ability to keep the focus on him and his policies as people finally get tired of it. That’s bad for the midterms and bad for his ability to advance his agenda.”

Taken together, a growing number of White House allies are resigned to losing the House and fear that the Senate is also in play.

“Everyone is focused on doing what we can to hold the Senate because people are very worried about that,” said a second GOP operative. “It’s crazy,” that there is serious concern about the Senate now, the operative said.

A White House spokesperson pushed back on the idea of an unclear message and argued the president will tout his economic achievements “in the months ahead.”

“President Trump has always been clear about temporary disruptions as a result of Operation Epic Fury, but America remains on a solid economic trajectory,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai.

RNC national press secretary Kiersten Pels said the midterms will be decided by a contrast between Trump and the “damage” from “four years of Joe Biden.”

“Voters remember record inflation, crushing rent, and gas prices that made everyday life unaffordable,” Pels said.

“While Democrats double down on the same failed agenda, President Trump is delivering results, unleashing American energy, cutting taxes, raising wages, and rebuilding a strong economy.”

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said the midterms are going to be about what the president has done, not what he has said.

“Lots of those policy choices have been great,” he said. “Some have been not so great. Picking fights with the pope [is] not helpful today, but the election is a long time away. And the Democrats have been mostly hostile to the church on basic issues like life and death. So we will see how this all plays out, but I am not as negative as some other pundits out there.”

Like others in this story, the person was granted anonymity to discuss political calculations.

The latest diversion came Wednesday morning when President Donald Trump, during what was supposed to be a friendly interview to highlight his success in lowering taxes for Americans, threatened again to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell, a promise that diverted attention from his more populist message and angered key senators who the administration needs to confirm Kevin Warsh, his nominee to replace Powell.

The administration had hoped Wednesday, Tax Day, would be devoted to a simple message: Trump puts more money in Americans’ pockets. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke during the White House press briefing alongside Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler to tout larger refunds, and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett is sharing that message around Washington. But, not surprisingly, Bessent had to field questions about Powell, fodder from Trump that muddied the message.

“The road to victory runs through a consistent economic message,” said Bryan Lanza, a senior adviser to Trump’s 2024 campaign. “Unfortunately, President Trump ignores the road map.”

Trump’s weaves and fights are nothing new. But they come at an increasingly inconvenient time for a party clinging to razor-thin margins in Congress. Polls show Trump’s handling of the economy at career lows. A significant number of Republicans don’t support the war in Iran, and the White House spent part of Monday defending and then deleting a meme of Trump as Jesus Christ that infuriated many MAGA warriors.

One advantage Republicans hope will help them overcome the headwinds is their massive war chest. The coalition of political groups supporting the president and Republican candidates has more than $375 million in its coffers.

But the polls continue to be rough for the GOP. Support for the war remains low, with just 38 percent of Americans backing the U.S.'s military strikes on Iran, according to a new POLITICO Poll conducted April 11 to 14. Nearly half of all respondents think Trump has spent too much time focusing on international affairs instead of on domestic issues, including 20 percent of self-identified MAGA Trump voters. And more than half of respondents — 53 percent — have a negative opinion of Trump.

“People are a little bit worried, because what did he do? He ran on, we’re going to get rid of the endless wars — and he’s not going to do an endless war, it’s not in his DNA,” said a person close to the White House. “He knows it’s not in America’s best interest. He ran on lowering gas prices.”
The president on Wednesday struck an optimistic tone — perhaps a new effort to get back on the economic track — saying the war is “very close to over” and reiterating his hope that gas prices would be “much lower” by the midterms.(Politico)

This ‘n That.