There is a particular kind of spiritual sickness the Desert Fathers knew well enough to give it its own name: kenodoxia, vainglory — the hunger not merely to be great, but to be seen as great, and to arrange the furniture of reality until the mirror agrees with the appetite. This week the country was treated to a fresh and rather garish specimen of it. The President of the United States circulated an AI-doctored chart of presidential rankings, lifted from a 1948 Life magazine poll, in which he had been inserted at the very top — above Lincoln, above Washington, above Franklin Roosevelt — while Eisenhower and Kennedy vanished from the record altogether and three Democratic presidents were shoved to the bottom to complete the illusion.
One hardly needs a degree in political science to see what this is. It is not analysis. It is not even propaganda in the old, competent sense. It is a man commissioning a false mirror because the true one has stopped flattering him — the actual scholarly rankings place him last, or nearly so, among all who have held the office. And rather than sit with that verdict, or amend the record through the slow, unglamorous work of governance, he manufactured a new one.
Scripture has no patience for this sort of thing. The prophet Isaiah pronounces: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who change darkness to light, and light to darkness” (Isaiah 5:20, NABRE). The chart is a small, almost comic version of that woe — evil rankings called good, plain historical failure repainted as triumph — but the logic beneath it is not comic at all. It is the logic of the man in the parable who built bigger barns to store his own glory, only to hear the verdict: “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you” (Luke 12:20, NABRE). It is the logic of the Pharisee who stood by himself and prayed, thanking God that he was not like other men (Luke 18:11), a prayer answered not with commendation but with judgment.
Vainglory is not a private eccentricity. In the Christian moral tradition it is treated as one of the capital sins precisely because of what it produces downstream: envy, boasting, contempt for one’s neighbor, restless self-promotion. It disorders the whole person, and when it possesses someone entrusted with public power, it disorders the commonwealth along with him. A president absorbed in curating his own legacy — chartering $400 million in advertising to tell the country how great he is, while his own party’s candidates beg him to stay out of sight before an election he seems more invested in himself than in them — has ceased, in any meaningful sense, to govern. He is administering a shrine to himself, and asking the nation to serve as its congregation.
The Church has a word older than “narcissism” for what happens when a man cannot bear to be seen truly and so demands to be seen falsely: idolatry. Not idolatry of some carved image, but the interior idolatry St. Paul names when he writes of those who “exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator” (Romans 1:25, NABRE). The creature worshiped here is the self. The doctored chart is simply the idol’s latest coat of paint.
What is asked of us — of citizens, and especially of Christians who are citizens — is not outrage for its own sake but the older, harder discipline the tradition calls the hermeneutic of charity toward persons and unsparing clarity toward acts: charity for the man, and none whatsoever for the lie. We are not obligated to pretend a fabricated mirror is a true one. We are obligated to keep telling the truth in its presence, gently toward souls, relentlessly toward falsehood, until the counterfeit throne is recognized for what it is: not majesty, but need, dressed up and set loose on the republic.
Requiescat veritas — may truth find its rest, and its vindication, in due time.
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