|
Trump And The Devil
President Donald Trump has for some time been in a public dispute with Pope Leo of the Catholic church.
Within the context of the quarrel Trump posted a picture of himself depicted as saint healer overseen by a devil.
And no – this isn’t a late April’s fool joke …
On February 4 2026, the X/Twitter account NickAdamsinUSA posted this AI slop picture of Trump as a saint healer.
biggerYesterday Trump himself posted a similar picture on his Truth Social account. It was reproduced on X/Twitter.
biggerSome mend_alyn noted a slight difference between both pictures:
mend_alyn @mend_alyn – 4:44 UTC · Apr 13, 2026
> Trump’s Truth Social post added the horned figure (at the top) to an already disgusting picture @NickAdamsinUSA shared in February. <
Indeed. Here is a cut from the top of the picture posted in February:
biggerAnd a similar cut from the picture posted two months later by Trump:
biggerThe man in the middle has been transformed into something like a ‘horned’ angel. He seems to wear a Statue of Liberty look-alike crown.
One wonders who initiated that transformation. When and for what purpose?
Context:
Pope Leo XIV had recently spoken out against the wars waged by President Donald Trump.
On Apr 12 at 21:03 ET President Donald Trump posted a rant against Pope Leo:
Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. He talks about “fear” of the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside, and being ten and even twenty feet apart. I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA. He gets it, and Leo doesn’t! I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History. Leo should be thankful because, as everyone knows, he was a shocking surprise….
Forty-three minutes after his rant Trump posted the above picture which portrays him as a saint with a horned/crowned angel/devil above him.
How will the evangelical followers of Trump interpret this?
Who construed and directed this drama?
Please think about and answer the questions.
—
Added after publishing (15:39 UTC):
Trump just deleted his post of the picture.
Also added after publishing (16:09 UTC):
The President of Iran condemned Trump’s insults of the Pope:
Masoud Pezeshkian @drpezeshkian – 13:19 utc · Apr 13, 2026
His Holiness Pope Leo XIV (@Pontifex), I condemn the insult to Your Excellency on behalf of the great nation of Iran, and declare that the desecration of Jesus, the prophet of peace and brotherhood, is not acceptable to any free person. I wish you glory by Allah.
Rational actors and multipolarity from a theologic and game theoretic perspective
Big Serge shows utter ignorance about politics and history from time to time, and his war analysis is distorted by a US IR theory of rational state actors. … … A few weeks ago he also said that Israel and the US should be seen as “rational” actors, as if the politics of Zionism — vicious racial supremacy and expansionism, leading to strategic dead ends — play no role in the conflict.
Posted by: Crunchy | Apr 10 2026 18:07 utc | 34
I won’t be defending Big Serge. I’m not even all that familiar with Big Serge’s analyses. From what I could gather, he seems like a MAGA Russian, which makes him functionally an American. Unsurprising that b considers his opinion worth sharing. Very funny too that Big Serge made a comment that, with a full month of hindsight, looks incredibly stupid:
If you zoom out from Twitter, Trump has a pretty good setup for flexibility and dismount. Strategic ambiguity (no definite objective articulated), plus no boots on the ground, plus a shiny object (Khameini killed).
Big Serge, Mar 1, 2026
But, I do want to make a point here that what is rational for one worldview may not be rational at all for another worldview.
It has to do with theology and game theory. Specifically, it has to do with:
-
belief in reincarnation versus eternal reward/damnation,
-
belief in one world versus multiple disconnected worlds,
-
repeated games versus one-off games, and
-
two-player games versus multiplayer games.
I will be talking in broad strokes. What I will say here will not apply to every interpretation of every sect of every religion, but it is generally applicable.
Let’s sort out the basics first.
Abrahamic religions believe in eternal reward and eternal damnation. In other words, they believe in terminations/end points. Someone who enters heaven stays there forever. You can’t kick him out. There is the concept of purgatory where someone who’s a mix of good and bad gets to purge the bad before entering heaven, and Islam has a similar concept. The end result is still the same though. It’s still either an eternity in heaven or an eternity in hell.
Heaven, hell, and earth are considered distinct worlds in Abrahamic religions. While events on earth may influence your ability to enter either heaven or hell, events on earth do not truly affect heaven or hell. A nuclear bomb might send more devout believers into heaven, but negative effects like nuclear fallout will never affect heaven.
Now, let’s look at what pagan religions believe in.
Reincarnation is common in pagan religions, most notably those from South Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism. Taoism and the mostly syncretic Chinese folk religion have some concept of reincarnation too. The goddess of oblivion, Meng Po, wipes the memory of the person so they can reincarnate into the next life without the burdens of the previous life.
While there are other realms that one arrives at after death, they are never the final destinations for those who believe in reincarnation. At some point, you’re thrown back out into the world again, back to the same earthly realm that you came from. In essence, this is “one world” because you can never fully escape from what happens on earth. Even the most devout believers who are innocent victims of a nuclear bomb can’t escape from getting reincarnated into an irradiated hellscape.
Obviously,
-
people who believe that the earthly world is in a continuous process of development and
-
people who believe that the earthly world is just a temporary transit point before moving on to final endpoints/conclusions in other worlds that are disconnected from the earthly world
are going to engage with the earthly world very differently.
This is where game theory comes in.
I’m not throwing around the term “game theory” casually like Richard Medhurst is doing.
Speaking purely from a geostrategic/game theory perspective: I don’t think China and Russia are doing themselves any favors longterm by allowing attacks like this on their energy infrastructure to go unanswered.
Richard Medhurst, Apr 12, 2026
First off, I don’t have any hostility towards Richard Medhurst (yet) because he along with Brian Berletic identify America as the puppeteer orchestrating everything in the war against Iran and provided proof for their claim. I also recall Medhurst’s interview of Georges Abdallah on September 2025 fondly because Medhurst shared Abdallah’s uncompromising statement on Americans:
Georges Abdallah: All Americans, civilians and military alike, are implicated in the genocide in Gaza, I consider them, their families, their loved ones, their neighbors, and their entire country to be accomplices in the genocide of our kids.
For those unaware, Abdallah is a Lebanese who spent 41 years imprisoned by the French for his work in advancing the Palestinian cause.
So, Medhurst is okay in my book, for now.
Having said all that, I have to point out that a lot of people have the tendency to invoke “game theory” without clarifying what they mean. There are many types of games in game theory. Optimal strategies differ based on game design.
I will focus on the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma:
In game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma is a thought experiment involving two rational agents, each of whom can either cooperate for mutual benefit or betray their partner (“defect”) for individual gain. The dilemma arises from the fact that while defecting is rational for each agent, cooperation yields a higher payoff for each.
Cooperation and competition in international relations can often resemble a Prisoner’s Dilemma. In a ceasefire between the two parties, each party has to weigh the payoffs between adhering to the ceasefire and breaking it to assess which course of action is more prudent—to cooperate or to defect/betray.
However, the simplistic model of the classical Prisoner’s Dilemma does not capture the fact that such dilemmas are not one-off affairs and that there are other people (who can potentially be players too) who are impacted by the decisions of the players. The Minsk agreement was not a one-off. The first Minsk agreement led to the second Minsk agreement and eventually to the Russian SMO. Ukrainians and Russian separatists aren’t the only ones affected by the ceasefire. The Americans and Europeans have their own interests in the matter too.
This is why I made a distinction between repeated games and one-off games, and between two-player games and multiplayer games.
The optimal strategies differ between all these Prisoner Dilemma variants.
Scenario 1:
What happens when a player who thinks that he’s playing a one-off two-player game encounters an opponent who thinks that he’s playing a repeated two-player game?
The optimal strategy in a one-off two-player game is to defect. Being agreement-incapable is rational and maximizes your reward. If both players adopt this strategy, this leads to the worst outcome for both of them. From a class struggle perspective, mutual defection can lead to the “common ruin of the contending classes”, as Marx puts it in the Communist Manifesto, when two contending classes clash (“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed”).
But I did mention that the two players view the game differently. The opponent thinks that it’s a repeated (iterated) game. It’s possible for cooperation to be rational when it’s a repeated game.
John Nash remarked that rational behavior in the iterated version of the game can differ from that in a single-round version. This insight anticipated a key result in game theory: cooperation can emerge in repeated interactions, even in situations where it is not rational in a one-off interaction.
The quandary/dilemma for the opponent is finding a way to induce the player to see this as a repeated game instead of a one-off game so that they can both avoid mutual destruction, which is the guaranteed outcome when both players defect.
The opponent can signal (concretely) to the player that it is willing to cooperate, for example, by choosing to stick to cooperation across multiple rounds of the game even when the player consistently chooses defection. This, of course, will cost the opponent a lot, but the opponent knows that the losses will be offset by the mutual win-win cooperation in the long run—if the opponent succeeds in getting the player to keep cooperating.
But the opponent doesn’t understand how the player thinks/sees the world. The opponent doesn’t know that the player is a fervent believer that it’s a one-off game and will treat the opponent’s acts of cooperation as a sign that the opponent is either weak or foolish.
The player is America. The opponent is the Soviet Union.
Communists are fools who want to build a heaven on earth for themselves and their descendants, and communists are ideologically constrained from defecting and incentivized to cooperate. On the other hand, Americans are rational players who treat every Prisoner’s Dilemma game as a one-off game because they’re adherents of Abrahamic religions that believe that they’ll be whisked off to a different and eternal world once their temporary stay on the earthly world is over. Nothing will budge Americans from defecting. Nuclear brinkmanship is not scary. Americans might have children, but they consider their children’s lives on the earthly world as temporary one-off events. Devout believers always go to heaven. Defect, defect, defect, the defective but rational logic goes.
One-off game mentality is reflected in the gambling culture of America, Polymarket being a recent and prominent manifestation of it. Gambling everything to win big is very much the mentality of someone who treats their time on earth as a temporary one-off event.
One-off game mentality is also evident in American amnesia regarding past American atrocities and evident in the Americans’ belief that swapping administrations is equivalent to starting the game anew. Instead of treating the Prisoner’s Dilemma as a continuous series of rounds of the same game, the Americans treat each round as an individual game, disjointed from the rest. “The previous administration might have betrayed you, but that shouldn’t influence your decision to either cooperate with or defect against me now. We’re completely new people now. We’re born-again Americans,” the Americans would tell their opponent.
Scenario 2:
What happens when a player who thinks that he’s playing a one-off two-player game encounters an opponent who thinks that he’s playing a repeated multiplayer game?
The player is America and the opponent is China (representing the foolish communists in place of the demised Soviet Union), same as before.
The opponent reasons: If I abandon my ideology and we both defect, then mutual destruction is assured. If I cooperate like the Soviets did, then the opponent triumphs by default in the long run. A mix of cooperation and defection doesn’t work either. It just draws out my own destruction because the player will always choose defection. But what if I change the format of the game? Instead of letting it be a two-player game, change it to multiplayer. While I am disinclined to defect and inclined to cooperate, the same constraints do not apply to others.
The differences in strategy between America’s old and new opponents can be easily seen.
The Soviet Union led a large bloc of states. The Soviet Union constantly tried to export its ideology, communism. The Soviet Union always wanted communist states to act in unison. And if communist states acted in concert, then, from a game theoretic perspective, they constitute a single opponent.
China rejects alliances, even with those who share its ideology. China works with those it considers friendly, like North Korea (the only treaty ally that China has), Pakistan, Russia, Venezuela etc. China also works with those it considers unfriendly or even downright hostile, like India, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, European countries, Canada, Australia, America etc. China has long ceased to export communism. China doesn’t expect other countries to act in lockstep with it. From a game theoretic perspective, the non-American countries constitute multiple opponents because they are independent actors.
This is multipolarity.
America thinks that only it has mastered chaos as a strategy. China actually understands it too. Multipolarity is chaos. The treacherousness of others and chaos can be good too when communists know how to harness it, just like how communists can make capitalism work to advance the cause of socialism and by extension communism. Lenin’s words are pertinent here:
For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.
Will multipolarity work to take down America?
I don’t know.
But it is an alternative to guaranteed mutual destruction (constant defection in response to America’s strategy of constant defection) or guaranteed self-destruction (constant/occasional cooperation in response to America’s strategy of constant defection) under the old paradigm. The space of possible strategies have vastly expanded now that it’s a multiplayer game instead of just being two-player.
Everything I’ve mentioned here is a little more fully fleshed out in an extremely long manuscript that will be shared someday (or maybe never) and is tentatively titled:
Dialectical Materialism Beyond Political Economy: Physical Cosmology, Statistics, Psychology, Sociology, Decision Theory/Game Theory and Theology (Yes, Religion and Materialism, but No, It’s Not An Attempt To Reconcile Them)
No, it’s not Lysenkoism.
As always,
Death to America
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Posted by: All Under Heaven | Apr 14 2026 4:06 utc | 452
|
