[I]f the mainline was merely the DNC at prayer while crossing its fingers even during prayer, then why go?
Low Church in High Places: The Fate and Future of American Protestantism
Well, imagine that! If you scoop up a bunch of brown-skinned people and send them summarily to a hell hole in El Salvador, based on half-assed signs of gang membership like soccer fan tattoos, chances are good that you’re committing a crime against humanity against totally innocent people. Whoever would have suspected that?
For the populists who want, say, WalMart to absorb the higher wholesale cost resulting from Trump tariffs without raising prices, a choice:
Your call.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, bungled answers on Tuesday about habeas corpus, incorrectly asserting that the legal right of people to challenge their detention by the government was actually the president’s “constitutional right” to deport people.
As the Trump administration works to carry out its promised mass deportations, efforts that largely fall under Ms. Noem’s jurisdiction, officials have floated the idea of suspending habeas corpus for immigrants being expelled from the country.
At a Senate hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, asked Ms. Noem about the issue. “Secretary Noem,” she asked, “what is habeas corpus?”
“Well,” Ms. Noem said, “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to—”
“No,” Ms. Hassan interjected. “Let me stop you, ma’am. Excuse me, that’s incorrect.”
If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence
E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
Nick Catoggio doesn’t entirely fall into the fallacy of reducing religion to crypto-politics, but he does write for a politically-oriented Dispatch. So it’s no surprise to see him muse about the political implications:
The last thing Leo wants for his papacy, I’m sure, is to see it sucked into the sleazy reality show that is Trump-era American politics, a black hole of shame and nihilism from which no dignity can escape.
In fact, my guess is that he’s less likely to comment on policy in the United States than the other candidates to succeed Francis would have been. Doing so might tempt Catholics here to choose between their loyalty to an American-led church and their loyalty to Trumpism, and not all would choose the church. It would also demean the pontificate, as surely the Holy Father has more exalted business to attend to than serving as the president’s latest foil in America’s degenerate “politics as pro wrestling” populist spectacle.
Most of all, it would show a world that’s been dominated by the United States for 80 years that even the papacy can’t prevent an American from parochially and narcissistically prioritizing his own country’s affairs. In an age of “America First,” where Uncle Sam unapologetically cares only about himself, the so-called Ugly American has never looked uglier. If Leo really does mean to prove that he “cares about the entire world,” the easiest way to do it is to reject that narcissism by ignoring the United States as completely as possible.
Catoggio pointed me to another article that’s spicier than his summary:
I expected to see an African pope in my lifetime. I never expected to see an American pope.
Why?
Because the Vatican is dominated by Europeans and they are deeply suspicious of America and American Catholics. To them, we are toddlers with shotguns.
Earlier this week, Bishop Robert Barron explained to a reporter from CBS why the next pope wouldn’t be American:
Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: ‘Look, until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.’ And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don’t want America running the world religiously. So, I think there’s some truth to that, that we’re such a superpower and so dominant, they don’t wanna give us, also, control over the church.
Barron is one of America’s MAGA priests, so naturally he could not imagine that anyone else in the world might view America as being in decline.
But we are and it’s obvious.
It’s obvious to the people of Canada, who just elected a prime minister exclusively on the grounds that the American century was over.
It’s obvious to the Chinese, who are planning to step into the vacuum and establish their own world order.
It’s obvious to our European allies, who are now making plans for a future in which America is toothless, lazy, and impotent.
And maybe—just maybe—this reality was obvious the College of Cardinals, too.
Maybe they looked at America and realized that it was no longer a colossus bestriding the globe. No longer exceptional. Not just in decline, but deluded about its reality.
Maybe Robert Prevost was elected pope because the Church realized they no longer needed to be concerned about America power.
Jonathan V. Last, MAGA and the American Pope
I hoped that someone who doesn’t reduce religion to crypto-politics would write about Pope Leo. Ross Douthat stepped up: What the World Needs From Pope Leo (shared link). If I could put it in a nutshell, I wouldn’t share the link, but this jumped out at me:
This is a much weirder landscape than the one in which liberal and conservative Catholics clashed over contraception or gay marriage, and it’s likely to get weirder still as we move deeper into a digital and virtual and artificial-intelligence-mediated existence.
Catholicism has had little of note to say thus far about what it means to be Christian and human under these conditions or how Catholics should think morally and spiritually about their relationships to these technologies. But if Leo XIV reigns as long as Leo XIII did, no issue may be more important to the faithful — or the world.
I reiterate that as far as I can tell, my fascination with the Pope has a couple of sources:
On the Cryptocurrency scene, Celsius Founder Alex Mashinsky Sentenced to 12 Years in Prison | WIRED
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced Monday that he would not be running for the Senate in 2026. The popular Republican governor was considered a top contender to challenge vulnerable Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in a state that President Trump narrowly won in 2024. Kemp, who clashed with Trump in the past over the president’s claims of election fraud in Georgia in 2020, won reelection in 2022 after defeating a primary challenger backed by Trump.
Why would he run? Trump’s a piece of shit who hates him, and the Senate is frozen in the headlights of Trump’s Panzer Divisions.
Forget whether he has a point (though I don’t think he does): Trump announcing that he’s going to strip Harvard’s tax exemption is a crime (I mean that), an outrage, and should get him impeached. But our Congressblobs are afraid of (1) primaries and (2) literal physical violence against themselves and their families.
On NPR Friday night, I heard a Trump supporter, speaking of the price increases (and other chaos?) from tariffs, sucking it up and saying “It’s what we get for letting them do that to us for so long.”
Sarah Palin was John the Baptist to Donald Trump’s Velveeta Jesus.
When Dan Turner of Turner Hydraulics ordered a custom product for a U.S. steel mill from a Chinese manufacturer back in January, he was expecting to pay a 25 percent tariff on the $49,000 product when it arrived this spring at a port in the United States.
But that was before President Donald Trump announced his April 2 “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries around the world—and then subsequently paused most of his so-called reciprocal tariffs while simultaneously escalating his trade war against China.
Just days after the custom product shipped, Trump announced China would face minimum tariffs of 145 percent, but the rate can vary by product. Turner is now expecting to pay significantly more than a 145 percent tariff when the item, currently somewhere on a container ship in the ocean, arrives.
“So we are having to pay an $84,000 tariff on a $49,000 item,” Turner told The Dispatch in an interview. “We’re just hoping either the ship sinks or somebody comes to their senses before it hits the dock.”
Ten days ago Trump displayed a photograph in the Oval Office of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s left hand to highlight the tattoos on each of his knuckles—a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull, which the White House insists is code for the Venezuelan gang MS-13. The photo Trump held had “M,” “S,” “1,” and “3” photoshopped into the image above each finger to explain the supposed symbolism.
When Jonah Goldberg and others complained that the president was misleading the public by relying on doctored evidence, Trump apologists scolded him for believing that anyone could be so stupid as not to realize that the “M,” “S,” “1”, and “3” were superimposed to explain what Abrego Garcia’s tattoos represent. Except someone was that stupid, it turns out: The president was, per his exchange with Moran.
I don’t think he’s lying this time. I suspect one of his toadies handed him the photoshopped image without explanation, perhaps assuming that he would understand at a glance that the letters and numbers had been added digitally, and Trump took it at face value. He did his own research—or relied on the “research” his aide did for him, at least.
Remember the George Costanza rule: It’s not a lie if you believe it.
If you hadn’t already realized it, Trump’s main man Stephen Miller is a damnable liar. This kind of crap is par for his course. Don’t believe anything he says without proof.
Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and has become a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird! For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance of her luxury.
Gosh! I can’t imagine why that keeps popping into my head!
Excerpts from Bill Maher, Mike Pompeo, Nellie Bowles, and More on 100 Days of Trump
Maher has been ridiculed for the warmth with which he described Trump—his laughter and all that. That kind of thing is sometimes accompanied by complaints about “humanizing” or “normalizing” Trump.
The “humanizing” and “normalizing” stuff has always been irritating to me. There is no need to humanize or to normalize Donald Trump, who is as normal as diabetic amputation and as human as a school shooting …
Here is a thing I read frequently in my correspondence: “You just hate Trump.” But I do not hate Trump—Trump is not good enough to hate. One must esteem something a little bit, at least, to hate it, because you cannot hate something that doesn’t have a moral endowment sufficient for being hated. It is not that Trump does not represent a serious phenomenon, but Trump is serious the way mosquitos are serious: Mosquito bites will kill something on the order of a million people this year, just as they did last year and will next year. When sharks are having a really big year, they kill half a dozen people worldwide, whereas mosquitos stack up corpses from the floors to the rafters around the world. But you cannot hate a mosquito—you can only swat him.
My feeling for Trump is not hatred but contempt. Contempt is not a particularly admirable emotion, and it is one that a more enlightened kind of man would resist better than I do, even—especially!—when confronted with that which is genuinely contemptible.
What Trump requires in a nominee is some combination of stupidity, weakness, low character, personal corruption, and, most importantly, lack of essential qualifications for the post in question. And so his administration is running aground under the combined incompetence of Pete Hegseth, who is not stupid but is a weak man of low character and entirely unqualified to serve as secretary of defense; Hegseth’s fellow Fox News figure and résumé-inflator Janette Nesheiwat; conspiracy kook Kash Patel and his conspiracy kook deputy, the aforementioned Dan Bongino; conspiracy kook Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; conspiracy kook Tulsi Gabbard; weirdo mall ninja Kristi Noem; addled crackpot Peter Navarro; television quack Mehmet Oz; Kelly Loeffler, who is married to the CEO of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange and has the world’s luckiest timing; Florida goofus Pam Bondi, who might as well get an honorary degree from Trump University; madcap billionaire dope Howard Lutnick, whose family is apparently cashing in on the Trump-inflated crypto craze; Trump’s fellow pro-wrestling figure Linda McMahon; Real World veteran Sean Duffy (“Rachel and Sean are America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple,” the White House literature boasts); feckless Putin enthusiast Steve Witkoff, etc.
What is important to understand is that Trump does not elevate these people in spite of the fact that they are out of their depth, stupid, corrupt, and unqualified, but because they are out of their depth, stupid, corrupt, and unqualified.
Here’s Trump in his own words:
You’ll find that when you become very successful, the people that you will like best are the people that are less successful than you, because when you go to a table you can tell them all of these wonderful stories, and they’ll sit back and listen. Does that make sense to you? OK? Always be around unsuccessful people because everybody will respect you. Do you understand that?
… Republicans—from leaders in Congress to the rank and file—are so in thrall to naïve monarchism, so convinced that all they need to do is to trust the leader, that they ensure that their tsar is, in fact, surrounded with just the kind of boobs and criminals and n’er-do-wells you can count on to fail the tsar, to keep things from him, to freelance their own crimes and imbecilities and acts of incompetence.
Next month the president is planning to host a pay-for-play event, right out in the open, in which there’s good reason to believe that wealthy foreigners will be participating.
The event is being billed as an “intimate private dinner” with Trump at his club in Virginia on May 22. Invitations will be limited to the top 220 investors in the memecoin he launched shortly before being sworn in. The coin’s value soared this week as investors sought to buy up enough to make the cut. And that money isn’t going to a campaign or PAC, which is the way rich people typically buy access to public officials. It’s headed for Donald Trump’s own pockets.
…
Even for Trump, that’s pretty Trump. “This is really incredible,” one of Biden’s deputies on regulating crypto told the Times of the May 22 dinner. “They are making the pay-to-play deal explicit.” A lobbyist for a consumer advocacy group described the event to Bloomberg as “buying influence with the president, there’s no ifs ands or buts about it,” and marveled that “we’ve never had a president who is so in love with money as this one.” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy called it “the most brazenly corrupt thing a president has ever done.”
View the archives
