Trump et Vance Excommunicandi Sunt
Vaticanum delenda est? Antagonizing the Catholic Church: what a stupid idea Trump and his administration had.
To set the scene properly: American Catholics form the largest single confessional bloc in the United States—some 67 million souls at a bare minimum—and the number keeps swelling thanks to Latino immigration and a steady trickle of converts. We are speaking, of course, of a coherent group marshaled under one centralized institution.
By contrast, American Protestants, mostly of the Calvinist persuasion, are scattered like puzzle pieces across a bewildering array of churches, each more flamboyantly eccentric than the last.“Eccentric” being the polite modern substitute for the word the Holy Inquisition—thankfully long defunct—would have uttered before hauling the whole lot off to the stake after a few pointed and burning questions.
Donald Trump—well, we all know the man. He bellows like a wounded bull at any faithful soul who has the sheer audacity to point out that his host is made of cardboard and his “wine” is nothing but grope soda—pardon grape soda, methyl anthranilate. Because of course it isn’t real grape juice; that would require actual grapes.
We mocked, at the time of Leon XVI’s election, all those in Europe who refused to entertain the possibility that the new pope would be American—while conveniently laying out, in non-exhaustive fashion, the web of ties binding the Pontifical State to Washington since the late 19th century.
We persisted in our diabolical mockery, precisely to underscore how unwise—and frankly premature—it was for the Curia to unleash its own sneers at Donald Trump while the conclave hadn’t even convened yet.
We must confess: while we had correctly foreseen the outcome of the cardinals’ ballet, we had utterly failed to grasp that Trump was possessed to such a degree that he turned out to be exactly what we had insisted he was not. The first person who quotes Baudelaire goes straight into the boiler.
