The bullies invoking Jesus as their best buddy

Trump and Putin's desire to be loved, admired and followed.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A fierce looking man walks at the head of a phalanx of suited men.

Trump strides from the White House to St John's Church, 2020.

The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’m not at all sure that the parents of a teenager driven to despair, or even suicide, by online trolls, or a woman in a coercive relationship, are likely to see their tormentors as victims, making a cry for help by making the lives of others intolerable.

Bullies, it is said, have invariably been bullied themselves. A popular proverb has it that bullies never prosper, a comforting canard knocked down by some comprehensive research recently from the British Cohort Study that, of 7,000 children born in 1970, it was the nastiest, most aggressive little pieces of work that did best in life by age 46.

Social insecurity may well have driven their cruel treatment of others, but financial security has been their reward. Said one of the study’s authors, there’s ‘a strong link between aggressive behaviour at school and higher earnings later in life’.

What exemplars of that might we find on the international stage? Step forward the erstwhile and very possibly future president of the United States and the great-returner president of Russia.

They’ve had all that and they want a harder drug. Like most bullies, they want to be loved by those whose attention they have won.

Bullying may be too light a term for what Donald Trump has done to countless women and business associates in his life, what Vladimir Putin has done to Ukraine and other old Soviet satellites, and what both men have done to their nations’ electoral systems.

But I want to make an armchair case for the psychological insecurity of both men. That insecurity presents itself in a rather pathetic (in the literal sense) desire to be loved, to be admired and to be followed by devoted disciples.

And what role model might they come up with for that? Why, of course, they have both invoked Jesus Christ as their best buddy, who is very much on their side politically and who is really a lot like them.

Trump has endorsed excruciating (again, literally) drawings of himself sitting in the dock at court with the Christ and has published his own $60 “Bible” (one remembers the delightful self-publicist Jonathan King launching his fictional memoir, entitled Bible Two).

Putin has claimed that he’s not a little like the Nazarene calling fishermen by the sea of Galilee, as he rallies Russian youth to resist the pernicious culture of the “Satanic” West. He casts himself, along with Jesus, as the defender of “traditional values”, though the conflation of the Christ with cultural tradition is a little awry, but never mind.

There’s pragmatic political ambition in both men for co-opting the Christ to their cause. Trump wants and needs the US Christian Right on his side for re-election. Putin is promoting a rapprochement with Russian religions and already has the Russian Orthodox Church onside for his Ukrainian escapade.

But there’s something else going on here. The armchair psychologist can identify motives at work. Both Putin and Trump want not only attention. They’ve had all that and they want a harder drug. Like most bullies, they want to be loved by those whose attention they have won.

Their problem, naturally, is that they can never make it, which can only compound their insecurity

What better figure to associate themselves with than love incarnate? A demi-god aspires to be loved as God loves and is loved. It may replace a familial love that has been missing, or it may more simply be the toxic desire to be loved by those you oppress and by one’s peers – again, the instinct of the bully.

That’s closer to admiration and has vanity at its root. Witness Putin’s faintly ridiculous bared torso astride a horse as a younger man, or Trump’s vainglorious comb-over and orange-tanned skin.

Such a shame that we have no idea how the most famous figure who ever lived, whose legacy is the largest religion on earth, actually looked. Or they might try to look like that. Because, to their minds, emulation would win similar admiration.

Finally, Trump and Putin need to be followed, like bullies need their gang. Never mind that even the most devoted disciples of Christ abandoned him to his fate in his mortal life. There’s something like 2.5 billion declared followers of him today, some two millennia later. That’s some legacy and the kind that would shore up even for deepest of their insecurities.

Their problem, naturally, is that they can never make it, which can only compound their insecurity. The nature of Christian leadership, at its source, is unreachable. He said himself that we could not follow where he was going, because it’s a form of leadership beyond human scope – self-sacrificial, infinitely humble while also divine.

That leadership was among us and we didn’t recognise it. The leaderships of Trump and Putin, even as they claim Christ-like affinity, carve recognition and to be above us. These are not men who would lay down their power, far less their lives, for their friends.

These are bullies in the playground of politics. We must pray for their souls as we condemn their actions.

Column

Culture

Migration

Politics

20 November 2025

4 min read

From MI6 to migration: the tangled legacy of empire

Britain’s security dilemmas, from LinkedIn spies to post-colonial legacies, reveal a deeper global story

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Home Office.

There’s a food chain in the British intelligence services and the government offices they serve. The Foreign Office is advised by MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) or more usually simply “Six”, which, though it would deny it in favour of claims of collaboration, looks down on the national security service, MI5, which serves the Home Office.

An old acquaintance from Six used casually to call the parochial Home Office the LEO, short for Little England Office. There’s less of that now, to be sure, as they struggle to accommodate their political masters. Foreheads were rubbed wearily at MI6’s HQ by Vauxhall Bridge when Yvette Cooper, fresh from proscribing Palestine Action at the Home Office as a terrorist organisation alongside al-Qaeda and ISIS, was made up to foreign secretary at the last re-shuffle.

Meanwhile, over the river, MI5 faces the challenge of a new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who may believe that the prospect of limiting leave to remain to a maximum of 20 years and confiscating their jewellery might dissuade those with ill intent against the British state from embarking on a small boat.

Taken together, these challenges make it not a good time to be an intelligence officer, or even an intelligent one. It gets worse on the canvas of large superpowers. The problems with an erratic clown of American jurisdiction are well recorded. But China is something else.

They’d be chuckling merrily at MI6, if it wasn’t so serious, at the headlines this week, suggesting that China’s principal infiltration of the British state is through agents posing as headhunters on LinkedIn. The immeasurably greater threat from Chinese intelligence has come from the global march that China has stolen in the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), the network of Chinese-sourced sensors, software and chips embedded and monitored in technologies that connect and exchange data globally.

This isn’t tin-foil hat conspiracy territory; it’s real and has been called out for years. It’s significantly why the case against two alleged British spies for China was recently withdrawn. Britain has to keep China sweet for fear of what it knows of and could do with British data. That’s a massive US problem too.

To that end, trade and co-operation are the way to keep China onside, not confrontation. It’s an example that the Foreign Office might set for the Home Office. And, indeed, the two might work more closely together (just a suggestion).

The Home Office has long acknowledged that there are “Push and Pull” factors to our immigration crisis. It almost exclusively concentrates on the Pull, by trying to make the UK a less attractive destination for migrants through limits of right to remain and by nicking their jewellery. The Push factors are war, oppression and economic deprivation and these are very much more the territory of the Foreign Office.

A big problem arises when the Home Office tries to do the Foreign Office’s job, as when Mahmood threatens Trump-style visa bans for the likes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Namibia. Good luck with that – it betrays a neo-colonial instinct and there, perhaps, is the rub.

We pay a post-colonial price in both illegal and legal immigration. A predominantly Christian Europe and New World endeavoured to make disciples of every nation and now many of them are coming home. Christian culture as a former weapon of oppression is perhaps overstated, but there’s some truth in it. An even more stark truth is that we have to address the Push elements of migration if we are to find common ground on which we can make progress.

Our colonial oversight left Afghanistan a modern and post-modern historical mess. Syria is almost untouchable in its post-Assad dynastic horrors. The Indian subcontinent is still a wreckage that we abandoned only some 80 years ago.

Trying to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan or the former al-Qaeda breakaway al-Sharaa interim regime in Syria may not be so much a triumph of hope over experience as of naivety over history. But our current position with China may point a way forward. Tariff-free trade and economic co-development is a surer way to address migration crises than making arrivals unwelcome.

It’s admittedly more complicated than China. A US/UK post-colonial future will need to align neo-Christian western cultures with an enlightened Islam that concentrates on the Quranic instructions of co-existence, respect, fairness and the explicit injunction that there can be “no compulsion in religion”. But if it was easy everyone would be doing it.

That’s the call of the 21st century and it is, quite clearly, a global rather than nationalistic one. The US will need to recover its position in the world. And, in the UK, foreheads will need to be raised from being banged on desks to solve foreign crises before they wash up on our shores.