When US President Donald Trump and his White House on Saturday posted an AI-generated image of him seated like a baroque ornament on the throne of St Peter, papal hat, gilded robes, the kind of narcissistic fantasy that would make Mussolini blush, he was not joking. Not really. His followers thought it was funny. It was. In the same way a clown holding a nuclear briefcase is funny: until it is not.
A faction of Republican senators like Lindsey Graham, presumably suffering from long Covid of the conscience, proposed a “conclave” to anoint Trump as the next pope. Graham asked “the papal conclave and Catholic faithful to keep an open mind about this possibility!”
Meanwhile, across the Atlanic Viktor Orbán, a Trump wannabe and ever the aspiring Calvinist strongman, has been turning the Hungarian parliament into a confession box where sins are forgiven as long as you vote Fidesz.
Even in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, confessed to an interviewer some time ago that he does not believe that he could have come from a “biological body”.
And why this attempt by politicians to demonstrate their proximity to the supreme beings?
Because authoritarianism, by design, is never solely about power. It is about pursuit of divinity. It is about manufacturing belief.
Authoritarian leaders do not want to govern the people. They want to become them. They do not ask for a mandate: they proclaim miracles. Trump has never been shy about his wish to be a king and a dictator.
Authoritarian leaders are the last messiah before the apocalypse, the only surgeon qualified to remove the tumour they themselves nurtured. Their trick is simple: first break the world, then sell yourself as the only one with the sacred power to fix it.
This is beyond politics. It is performance art. Stagecraft, complete with smoke machines, ambient chants and the occasional lynching. The problem is: the audience is unruly, diverse, and often educated. Not everyone claps at the same time or all the time. The authoritarian, unable to tolerate silence, solves this by conjuring a new audience – one that is always grateful, always amazed, and crucially, never leaves the theatre.
It is a cult.
To build a cult, you need faith. To manufacture faith, you need propaganda. And to run a propaganda machine, you need something far more sinister than ideology: you need logistics. Algorithms, image consultants, nationalism in a Ghibli-style ChatGPT-generated image.
The modern authoritarian wear robes, but most exceptionally, they wear metadata. Their miracles are Photoshopped. Their sermons are pre-recorded. Their gospels are delivered not on stone tablets but in WhatsApp and Telegram groups.
And yet, the masses still believe. Because belief is never about facts. It is about the fear of unknown. It is about longing.
Longing for order. For justice. For meaning. These politicians, often men inject a sense of divine clarity, however misplaced and unreasonably illogical, into a chaotic world.
They speak in absolutes, banish ambiguity and offer certainty in an age allergic to nuance, to context, to truth. They become gods, not by ascending, but by descending, stooping low enough to lift themselves onto our shoulders, crushing us under the weight of their manufactured sanctity.
And so, while England’s Henry VIII created a church to divorce his wife, today’s authoritarians create religions to marry power. Their desire is not sated by being heads of state: they want to be prime priests, pontiffs, the supreme heads of faith.
And once the state becomes a church, a temple, a mosque, a synagogue, disagreement becomes heresy. Dissenters are no longer wrong; they are sinners. And sinners deserve excommunication.
This is not satire. This is where satire retires in despair.
Pius Fozan is a photojournalist and public policy graduate from the Willy Brandt School and Central European University.
