Deepfake Video of Trump Showing Off ‘Jesus Portrait’ Goes Viral as He Threatens to ‘Reign Hell’ on Iran in the Name of ‘God’

Donald Trump has said and done a number of notable things over the past week.

Here’s one thing he didn’t do: hang up a picture of Jesus Christ in the Oval Office.

A lot of people think he did, however, thanks to a fake/AI-manipulated video that went viral on social media over the holiday weekend. It shows Trump opening up a set of curtains off to the side of his desk at the White House to reveal a copy of Warner Sallman’s famous “Head of Christ” painting.

This type of widespread confusion is pretty much becoming a daily occurrence due to the proliferation of low cost, increasingly-powerful AI tools, so it’s impossible to keep up with more than a small fraction of it, but we feel it’s worth periodically looking at examples, studying how they spread, and learning how to better spot them.

The timing of this particular video’s appearance and virality is also notable, as Trump massacres civilians in Iran, bombs their infrastructure with his partners in Israel, and incorporates religious rhetoric into his threats of further escalation.

‘Thank you, POTUS!’

The clip in question was posted on the social media platform X by an account called “Gizmo Memes” on Friday afternoon with the caption: “Trump puts up a portrait of Christ for Good Friday. Christ is King!”

Within four hours, the post already had over 45,000 likes. As of this writing, it has over 104,000.

Here it is:

“If a democrat ever gets back in the White House you’ll never see this again,” said one user with over 146K followers. “Thank God for President Trump,” she added a couple sentences later.

“Everyone my age remembers that portrait from our childhood,” another replied. “I think that’s why he picked it.”

“This is the way! Thank you, @POTUS,” said a third, tagging Trump on his official U.S. government account on X.

The post got thousands more comments overall, many of which were from people who likewise seemed to think the video was authentic.

The real, original video — the one upon which this AI forgery is based — is from May of 2025, and Trump was showing Fox News’ Laura Ingraham a framed display of the Declaration of Independence, not Jesus:

X recently added the option to label a post as “Made With AI,” which was done by “Gizmo Memes” in this case, but it’s been clear from the reaction to this and other realistic-looking AI videos that many people are missing that label, which is positioned beneath the video in a relatively small gray font. (The label also doesn’t appear to be visible at all when a user is viewing a quote-post of the video; they have to click through to the original post before it’s even displayed. X is reportedly working on a feature that would warn users that they’re “about to share AI-generated content,” which might seem like a good idea on its face, until you realize that their AI system regularly insists that real clips are AI-generated, and that fake clips are real.)

We made a quick thread flagging this on Friday, and by Saturday it had actually been cited in a new Community Note that was attached to the original post by users on X:

The problem (or one of them) is that when a someone posts a deepfake like this and it goes viral, it almost never stays contained to just that one “labeled” and “Community Noted” post.

In this case, it didn’t take long before others on X started downloading the video and posting it themselves. Two Spanish-language accounts went viral with it hours later, for instance, and unlike the original post, neither of them labeled it as “Made with AI.”

“You might like him or not, but Donald Trump is the only president in the world with the courage to pay tribute to the Savior of history,” one of them said, per the English translation provided by X.

That post has now been Community Noted as well (citing our thread), but it took over 24 hours. By then, it had already racked up over 26,000 likes. The two posts combined now have over 96,000 likes.

A French-language account followed suit on Easter Sunday, garnering over 3,000 likes as of this writing. It, too, did not label the post as “Made with AI,” and so far has not been Community Noted.

The clip predictably did not stay constrained to X, either. It was reposted to public Facebook groups and pages like “God’s Green Earth,” whose version currently has over 23,000 likes, and “Conservative Daily News,” whose commenters showed no indication that they knew it was a deepfake.

‘Reigning Down Hell’

This comes at a time when Trump is making overt religious references as he (ostensibly) attempts to intimidate Iran, where the U.S. and Israeli militaries have already killed over 2,000 people according to Iran’s Health Ministry.

On Holy Saturday, for instance — as the “Jesus portrait in the Oval Office” deepfake was reaching millions online — Trump invoked the name of “GOD” while threatening to make “all Hell” “reign down” on Iran within 48 hours.

On Easter Sunday, Trump once again threatened to bomb Iranian power plants and bridges and turn Iran into “Hell.”

“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he said. “JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

This time he said he’ll do it on Tuesday, one day later than he implied in his message on Saturday. He followed that up with a post that just said, “Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!”

In March, Trump talked about the possibility of destroying Iran’s “electric capacity” in a way that he said would incapacitate their country for decades and take them “25 years to rebuild.”

During a primetime address to the nation on Wednesday, he threatened to bomb Iran “back into the Stone Ages” (a phrase even mass murderer George W. Bush distanced himself from when it was reported that his deputy secretary of state used it while threatening Pakistan after 9/11).

A day later, U.S.-Israeli strike hit the tallest bridge in Iran, reportedly causing many civilian casualties:

Photos show it appeared to be severed in half following the attack. In a post on Truth Social, President Trump shared a video of the explosion on the bridge and threatened that more attacks were coming.

According to Iranian media, the bridge was under construction when it was hit, and at least eight civilians were killed, and 95 were wounded. The casualties were people gathered under the bridge or near the river for Sizdah Be-dar, or Nature Day, an Iranian holiday when people gather for picnics and other outdoor activities.

“Striking civilian structures, including unfinished bridges, will not compel Iranians to surrender,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on X.

“It only conveys the defeat and moral collapse of an enemy in disarray. Every bridge and building will be built back stronger. What will never recover: damage to America’s standing,” Araghchi added.

On Monday, Trump threatened to “take out” the “entire country” of over 90 million people if the Iranian government doesn’t meet his demands by Tuesday evening.

“The entire country could be taken out in one night,” he said. “And that night might be tomorrow night.”

This reads as a possible threat to use nuclear weapons — something we, journalist Sam Husseini, and others have warned about previously.

Doing ‘God’s Work’

Trump, his administration, and his allies have repeatedly framed his presidency and wars in religious and messianic terms.

After the alleged assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, Trump said that “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” a theme that he reiterated over and over.

“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” he said during his victory speech on November 6, 2024, “and that reason was to save our country and restore America to greatness.”

In his inauguration address a couple months later, Trump once again declared that he was “saved by God to make America great again.”

When Trump expressed doubts in October about his destination in the afterlife, his HHS Secretary and former (supposed) “nemesis” turned sycophantic cheerleader Robert Kennedy, Jr. reassured him.

“I saw on the airplane the other day you said you didn’t believe that you were gonna get to heaven,” Kennedy said at the White House. “But you’re doing God’s work here. You’ve made peace in the Middle East, which is beyond anybody’s imagination.”

On April 1, the same day Trump threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” his spiritual advisor Paula White compared Trump to Jesus and said that God told her to tell him that “because of [Jesus’s victory in resurrection], you will be victorious in all you put your hand to.”

At the same ceremony, evangelist Franklin Graham said that God has “raised up President Trump” to fight “the wicked regime” in Iran, who he said “wants to kill every Jew and destroy them with an atomic fire.”

At a recent Christian worship service, Trump’s defense secretary Pete Hegseth — a “Third Temple cultist who kicked off his post-military career by starting a pro-war lobbying group funded by Israel First GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson,” per reporting by journalist Chris Menahan — prayed for “overwhelming violence” against America’s designated enemies in the “name of Jesus Christ.”

Trump has said that the Bible is his favorite book, but when he was asked during a 2015 Bloomberg interview to discuss one or two of his favorite verses and explain why they’re meaningful to him, he said he “wouldn’t want to get into it” and doesn’t “want to get into specifics” because it’s “too personal.”

He remained equally vague as the exchange continued and reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann pressed him a bit more for answers:

Trump: I don’t wanna get into verses, I don’t wanna get into—

Halperin: There’s no verse that…

Truimp: No—

Halperin: …means a lot to you, that you think about or cite?

Trump: The—the Bible means a lot to me. But I don’t want to get into specifics.

Halperin: Even to cite a verse that you like?

Trump: No. I don’t want to do that. I mean–

Heilemann: Are you an Old Testament guy or New Testament guy?

Trump: Uh, probably….. equal. I think it’s just an incredible—the whole Bible is an incredible—I joke, very much so, they always hold up The Art of the Deal, I say ‘My second favorite book of all time.’ But uhh, I just think the Bible is just something very special.

At a December 2025 White House Hanukkah ceremony, Jewish Zionist pundit Mark Levin — who Trump said he watches on TV “every Saturday” and “every Sunday” — told the audience that Trump “loves Israel” and is America’s “first Jewish president.”

“It’s true,” Trump said.

The Pope, meanwhile has recently made a number of comments directly and indirectly related to the war on Iran, including that “Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” does “not listen to” and “rejects” the prayers of “those who wage war.”

He went on to quote from the book of Iaiah, specifically Isaiah 1:15: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.”

The New York Times wrote on Friday:

Pete Hegseth, the U.S. defense secretary, has asked the American people to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Pope Leo XIV, the first U.S.-born pontiff, has a starkly different take on what should be done in Jesus’ name.

In a homily during a Mass on Thursday morning before Easter, the pope said that the Christian mission had often been “distorted by a desire for domination, entirely foreign to the way of Jesus Christ.”

Since the United States and Israel began bombing Iran in late February, the pope has consistently called for an end to the violence and a return to dialogue to resolve the conflict. But without naming Mr. Hegseth, he has also pointed out the ways in which Christianity has been marshaled for purposes that the pope says do not align with Catholic teaching.

“We tend to consider ourselves powerful when we dominate, victorious when we destroy our equals, great when we are feared,” the pope said in a homily during a Holy Thursday rite at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the bishop of Rome. “God has given us an example — not of how to dominate, but of how to liberate; not of how to destroy life, but of how to give it.”

In late March the pope warned against invoking the name of Jesus for battle, saying in a Sunday homily that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”