President Donald Trump on Monday was slammed by his former senior campaign adviser, David Urban, for sharing an artificial intelligence-generated image depicting him as a Christ-like figure. Urban called it “bad politics” as a strategist and plain “offensive” as a Catholic.
He joined “The Arena” as CNN’s senior political commentator and, after New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro said that the Catholic Church has been experiencing a surge in converts, decried Trump’s decision to paint himself as Jesus-like and to publicly criticize the pope.
“I was going to say, look, as a Catholic, Christian, altar boy, right, all of those things growing up as a kid, it’s offensive,” Urban told host Kasie Hunt. “It’s patently offensive. Look, do I agree with everything the pope says? No. On politics, policy, not — it’s just bad politics.”
He continued, “You know, politics is about addition, not subtraction, right? So one plus one. We don’t need to lose people. As Lulu points out, the Catholic Church is growing by leaps and bounds, primarily by young people right now.”
Urban claimed that the church has seen a surge in new members, noting that it was unwise for Trump to “go out of his way to alienate those young voters” by criticizing “the first American pope ever,” who “wears a Cubbies hat,” and is “nice to kids” and “eats hot dogs.”
Pope Leo XIV is from Chicago, but a supporter of the White Sox — and not the Cubs.
The pope has been calling for peace after Trump launched the war in Iran, which has already cost at least 13 U.S. military service members and more than 2,000 Iranians their lives. Trump wrote Sunday on social media that Pope Leo is “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”
Urban went on to claim that a large swath of American Catholics vote in line with the pope and that it isn’t surprising for the pontiff to condemn the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, stating that this ethos of “peace, love and understanding” is inherently fundamental to his position.
“Like, that’s his job,” Urban told Hunt. “That’s his No. 1 job description. It’s like, ‘I’m the guy who’s supposed to say: turn the other cheek.’ That is his role in the world. You don’t have to agree with him on everything, but that’s his job.”
He continued, “He’s the most dogmatic person in the planet on those things. And so, for the president to take a poke at him, I don’t know who said, ‘This is a good idea,’ or who the person is that generated that AI and put it in front of him, but they should be fired. Terrible!”
Urban served as a Trump adviser during all of his presidential campaigns. He has since frequently criticized Trump’s decisions and social media antics, and predicted last year that Trump would remain an influential figure in U.S. politics long after his current term is up.
Urban said that the supposedly “great moment” of Trump’s McDonald’s delivery stunt earlier that afternoon was tainted by his controversial post the night prior, and rued that the president had unwittingly changed the conversation.
“We’re talking about this, instead,” he said. “We can’t — he’s stepping on his own message.”
