Will someone please explain to Donald J. Trump that his middle initial doesn't actually stand for 'Jesus'?

Following the obscenities and blasphemies of his recent rants against Iran and Islam, the increasingly demented president has fractured his own Christian-Nationalist support base by posting an AI-generated picture of himself as their Messiah, healing the sick as warplanes soar overhead, and his followers worship at his feet.

(It has also been pointed out by the kind of people who comment on such things that the sick man being healed or resurrected by Mr. Trump's holy touch bears a passing resemblance to his dead old friend, the convicted child-abuser Jeffrey Epstein, a figure of such ill repute that the president's famously taciturn wife has just broken her habitual silence to announce that he's never been her friend.)

There are those who have supposed that Mr. Trump's frenetic vacillations between violent fits of pique and pious calls for peace have been cunningly calculated to make billions on the global commodities markets, with claims that anonymous individuals have consistently been buying or shorting oil immediately before each of his announcements has sent the price of a barrel either surging or tumbling, depending on which way his latest mood has swung him.

When last May he posted an AI-generated image of himself in the robes of the Pope, Baby Donnie Tantrump provoked the anger of American Catholics, but this latest outrage has also riled some of his most ardent supporters down among the evangelical Protestants of the Bible Belt of the southern United States.

He was trying to troll the Pope – the planet's most prominent American citizen – who had been calling for peace and speaking out against what he called those "discourses of death" that have been drowning out more reasonable voices and against that "delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive."

Without directly naming the US president (though the narcissistic, plutocratic, megalomaniacal, pugilistic target of his message seemed abundantly clear), Pope Leo XIV had said, "Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!"

Trump had responded with a typically rambling attack on the spiritual figurehead of the world's one and a half billion Roman Catholics, declaring his belief that the pontiff is "WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy" – and that he should "stop catering to the Radical Left" – as though the Holy Father were a hotdog vendor at a Bernie Sanders birthday bash.

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His Holiness (the one in the Vatican, that is, not the self-styled idol of the Oval Office) replied that he had "no fear of the Trump administration" or of "speaking out loudly of the message of the gospel" – continuing, he said, "to speak strongly against war, seeking to promote peace, dialogue, and multilateralism among states to find solutions to problems."

Matteo Salvini, Italy's far-right Deputy Prime Minister – usually a faithful fan of the American president (but someone who knows which side his electorate will take) – had also weighed into the debate, announcing that “if anyone is working hard on the issue of peace and conflict resolution, it’s Pope Leo" – and that therefore "attacking the pope, a symbol of peace and a spiritual guide for billions of Catholics, doesn’t seem like a useful or intelligent thing to do."

He wasn't the only member of the Far Right to attack their former ally. When he posted the picture of himself as Jesus, Trump drew swift fire from even his most fanatical devotees.

MAGA stalwart – and former United States Congresswoman – Marjorie Taylor Greene said, "President Trump attacked the Pope because the Pope is rightly against Trump’s war in Iran and then he posted this picture of himself as if he is replacing Jesus. This comes after last week’s post of his evil tirade on Easter and then threatening to kill an entire civilisation. I completely denounce this... It’s more than blasphemy... It’s an Antichrist spirit."

Other major MAGA voices said that Trump's blasphemy "wouldn't be tolerated by any other religion" and expressed nostalgia for the halcyon days when their man in the White House "didn’t actually think he was the Messiah."

This isn't just about his refusal to respect the norms of diplomatic protocols or international law. It's about his abject failure to recognise the essential expectations of moral and social conduct in human civilisation.

Many have called his post "unhinged" – although it's unclear when Mr. Trump could last have been described as in any way "hinged".

It's also unclear how much longer this deranged egomaniac can remain in office – but what is clear is that the scales are starting to fall from the eyes of even his most devout disciples – from Atlanta to Calabria via Clacton-on-Sea – and that, as the illusory veil of the emperor's clothes fall away, a crazed naked narcissism is all that's left for them to gawk at.

This won't of course be the end for a dangerously paradoxical administration whose capacity to disregard the basics of truth, reason and logic can, for example, condemn a maritime blockade of local waters as an act of "economic terrorism" at exactly the same time as it launches its own blockade of distant seas – but it may signal the beginning of its end.

And that's perhaps something for which people of all faiths, or of little or no faith, might be willing to come together and pray.