How the loudest critics are missing some of the most important events of our time

There are moments in history when you can tell exactly where a person's heart is by what gets their attention. This is one of those moments. While Donald Trump has been reshaping the world on a scale not seen since World War II, millions of Americans are furious about a picture he posted. Not about the results. Not about the outcomes of things that will affect their lives for decades to come. About a picture.

Let me tell you what he has actually done, and then we can talk about the picture.

What He Has Actually Done

In a matter of weeks, Trump moved on Venezuela, dismantling a corrupt regime that had stolen the nation's oil wealth for decades. Their president is now sitting in a prison in New York. Then he moved on Iran, targeting the Strait of Hormuz. According to Promethean Action, whose research has tracked these connections in detail, Iran has long served as the enforcement arm of a global elite network based largely in Great Britain. That network used Iran to fund terrorism, control international shipping lanes, and extract billions from the global economy year after year. Lloyd's of London was part of the arrangement, insuring ships against Iranian aggression while profiting quietly from the protection racket. Trump saw through all of it.

When Iran moved to close the Strait, Trump did not blink. He said we will close it instead. The consequences for Iran were immediate and severe. Glenn Beck reported that Iran began losing approximately four hundred million dollars a day in oil revenue, which works out to thirteen billion dollars a month. China, which depends on that strait for forty percent of its oil, found itself scrambling almost overnight. And those tankers that once steamed toward Iran? They turned around and headed to Texas. Trump shifted the entire global oil supply chain in weeks, redirecting it from a sanctioned, corrupt regime to American production at fair market prices.

Beyond the geopolitical restructuring, murders, drug overdoses, and violent crime in the United States have fallen to their lowest levels in a hundred years.

And what is everyone talking about? A picture.

The Image That Started It All

Here is what Trump actually posted. Someone else created it in February and he reposted it in April. And within hours, the internet declared him a blasphemer.

I have never seen so much fury ignited by a single post. People who were once among his strongest supporters walked away entirely. Some had already turned on him over Iran. Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly had all gone public with their criticism. This image was the final straw for many others. When four high-profile voices abandon someone at roughly the same moment, I pay attention to that. One or two defections make sense. Four at once is worth noting.

But the image itself is worth examining carefully, because I think almost everyone reading it is completing the picture with their own assumptions rather than with what is actually there.

A Different Way to See the Image

That same weekend the image circulated, Trump had publicly confronted the Pope over immigration policy. The Pope, speaking from behind the Vatican's own massive walls, was criticizing America for securing its borders and enforcing its laws. Trump pushed back on that directly, and that conflict was still fresh when this image appeared.

So here is a question worth sitting with honestly: What if the image was simply saying, I care about suffering Americans more than he does?

He is dressed like the Pope, yes. But look at what he is doing in the image. He is blessing someone who is wounded and struggling. The people gathered around him look like ordinary Americans who have paid a price. The light in his left hand is something he is holding, not something he claims to generate himself. There is a meaningful difference between claiming to be the source of light and acknowledging that you have been given something to carry. Trump has publicly invoked God's blessing more consistently than almost any modern president. He does not act like a man who believes he is God. He acts like a man who believes God has given him something to do.

Could the image have been handled better? Possibly. But possibly is not blasphemy.

Significant Things Ignored, Small Things Magnified

I want to be careful here, because I am going to reference something Jesus said and I want to be clear that I am not claiming this is a perfect application. It is an analogy, and like all analogies it has its limits. But when I watch what is happening with this image controversy, I keep coming back to it.

In Matthew 23, Jesus condemned the Pharisees in some of the sharpest language he ever used. He told them they were paying careful tithes on mint and anise and cummin, tiny garden herbs, while completely neglecting what he called the weightier matters of the law: judgment, mercy, and faith. They had their precision focused entirely on the small, measurable, visible things while the things that actually mattered most to God were going unattended. He described it this way:

Again, I am not claiming this is a direct or perfect parallel to what Jesus was addressing. His rebuke was aimed at religious hypocrisy, at people who performed meticulous religious observance while ignoring the deeper commandments of God. That is a specific context, and I respect it.

But the broader pattern he identified, focusing all of one's scrutiny on the small and visible while the large and significant passes through unexamined, is something I see happening right now. People are stressing over an image they have decided to interpret one way, when it is entirely possible to interpret it another way, while at the same time paying almost no attention to what this president has actually accomplished. He has realigned geopolitical power structures that have been entrenched for decades. He has dismantled the funding model of a global network that operated through Iran for generations. He has redirected the world's oil supply and changed the economies of nations. He has driven crime, drug overdoses, and murders to levels not seen in a century.

But all they can focus on is a picture. And not even what the picture actually contains. What they have decided it means.

The Deal Maker Isaiah Saw Coming

Every one of these accomplishments points to something Isaiah described with a single phrase twenty-seven hundred years ago. He wrote of a servant who would "deal prudently." That Hebrew phrase carries the weight of wisdom, strategy, and the kind of success that confounds everyone watching it happen.

Donald Trump literally wrote a book called The Art of the Deal. Before anyone knew him as a political figure, the world knew him as a master negotiator. What we are watching now, on the world stage, with nations and regimes and oil markets, is that same quality operating at a level most analysts are simply not equipped to recognize. I have written about this in detail, and if you want to see the prophetic case laid out step by step, I would encourage you to read about the four-step prophetic portrait Isaiah drew of this servant and how Trump fulfills it. What Isaiah saw in that passage fits in a way that cannot be dismissed as coincidence.

When Members of the Church Join the Mocking

I want to say something here that I have been sitting with, and I am going to say it with sadness rather than anger, because that is genuinely what I feel.

In the days after Trump's image circulated, people who identify as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shared a mocking version in response. Here it is.

I know they thought it was funny. I know the intent was satirical. And I am not going to condemn anyone by name or call out any individual. But I am going to share something from the Book of Mormon that I have thought about since I saw this image, and I am going to let you draw your own conclusion.

In Lehi's dream, after he saw the tree of life and the iron rod leading to it, he looked across the river and saw something else. He described it this way:

Lehi's dream does not describe the people in the great and spacious building as obvious villains or strangers to the gospel. They are well dressed. They appear confident and socially at ease. And they are laughing and pointing at the people who are holding to the rod and reaching for what God has prepared. Nephi later tells us plainly what that building represents: the pride of the world.

I am not going to tell you which building the people who created that image are standing in. I think if you hold a testimony of this book, you already sense the answer. And I think some of them do too, somewhere beneath the laughter.

The mocking image is funny if a man in a costume is all you see. It looks very different if you believe, as I do, that the man being mocked is the marred servant of Isaiah, fulfilling a prophecy that Christ himself quoted in the Book of Mormon.

When Hatred Becomes Your Lens

Whether the contempt comes from outside the Church or from within it, the pattern is the same. When it takes root in your heart, it colors everything you see. You cannot look at any action from a person you despise and find anything good in it. Your eyes are not broken. Your heart is. Understanding how hatred blinds us to what God is actually doing in our time is one of the most serious spiritual dangers of our day, and it is absolutely epidemic right now.

I am also thinking about members of the Church who have followed this pattern in genuine good faith, believing their testimony protects them from missing something this significant. It does not. Having a testimony of the restored gospel has never been enough, on its own, to guarantee we will recognize what God is doing in our time, and that may be the most uncomfortable truth I have written about.

The Pattern Has a Name

Every accusation launched against Trump, from criminal prosecutions to assassination attempts to blasphemy charges to the mockery circulating among his own people, fits a pattern that scripture described thousands of years ago. Isaiah wrote of a servant whose visage would be marred more than any man's. Not physically. His public image and reputation, destroyed beyond recognition. The nations would be astonished at it. And yet Christ promised in the Book of Mormon, with unmistakable directness:

Every attack fits this prophecy. The media campaigns. The legal weaponization. The assassination attempts that failed. The mocking images shared with laughter. All of it adds to the marring. None of it stops the mission. That is the promise Christ made, and watching it play out in real time is one of the most striking things I have ever witnessed.

The marred servant is not a figure of speculation. He is here. And the choice each of us makes about whether to recognize him or join the mocking may well be the defining test of our generation.

The Real Question

I am not asking you to love Donald Trump. I am not asking you to think he handles everything perfectly. I have never claimed he does.

What I am asking is this: Can you look at what he has actually accomplished and make an honest evaluation? Can you set aside what the picture makes you feel and ask whether the fruits match the accusation?

Blasphemers do not dismantle a global cabal's funding network. Blasphemers do not drive crime, overdoses, and murders to a hundred-year low. Blasphemers do not take on the most powerful financial and political systems on earth and win. People who see it that way are not reading Trump. They are reading their own feelings about him, and those feelings have become the lens through which everything else gets filtered.

Something much bigger is coming. Wait until you see what is still ahead. We are not watching random history. We are watching scripture unfold in real time. The only question is whether we will recognize it, or whether we will be too busy pointing at a picture to notice what God is actually doing.

Kelly Smith is the author of The First Horseman: Donald Trump and Biblical Prophecy. He is a lifelong student of biblical prophecy and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.