2 hours ago
12
The battle to be the absolute worst Trump henchman can feel so closely fought. But in the end, it’s always JD Vance, isn’t it? You would say Stephen Miller, but Miller’s too hidden to qualify as a front-of-house henchman among the US president’s court of grotesques. Stephen’s clearly been judged so wantonly horrifying that the administration must keep him out of public view. If you enter the store, Miller is the only-for-the-initiated entity alluded to in a whisper by the oleaginous sales assistant. “We do have something in the back – off-the-books, as it were – if sir is after something a little more … specialist.”
But Vance? Vance besets us like the 11th plague – the plague of media appearances. For the next South Park season, I hope the creators give their brilliantly ghastly little vice-president avatar a papal mitre to wear. After all, here we have a man whose pick-me book on his journey to Catholicism has yet to even be published. That tome currently lies in the rectum of HarperCollins, ready to be excreted in June – yet inevitably, Vance is already giving menacing doctrinal advice to the pope as part of the multi-theatre fallout of Operation Epic Facepalm.
This week, the vice-president really did tell a Maga-faithful conference: “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” For heaven’s sake, Vance – he’s your god’s vicar of Christ on Earth. Have you said thank you once?! I guess in some ways Pope Leo got off lightly with this interaction. Last year, his predecessor Pope Francis famously met Vance and was dead within hours.
Historically, there have been many ways to register disapproval with the Vatican leadership. Martin Luther famously nailed his 95 theses to a church door; Trump spaffed his on to Truth Social after his TV made him angry again. Maybe Vance will turn out to be one of those secessionist Catholics like Mel Gibson, who reject the authority of any version of Catholicism after the second Vatican council, and consequently haven’t recognised a pope since 1963. (In practical terms, this involved Mel building a private church compound in the Malibu hills that had assets of $42m and a congregation of 70 families – my favourite eye-of-the-needle ratio – then reportedly berating that select throng when they failed to get on board with the breakdown of his 28-year marriage and his new relationship.)
Among the wider subjects of the Holy See, however, we are encouraged to believe that these are testing times for Maga Catholics. Alas, I think we can have only a limited well of sympathy for those who certainly seem to have lived down to the old adage that “the ‘Christian right’ tends to be neither”. Honestly, imagine reading everything so wrong that you genuinely believed in the anti-abortion credentials of the guy who once explained every vagina “is a potential landmine”. Avoiding STDs in 1990s Manhattan, Trump memorably clarified, was “my personal Vietnam … I feel like a great and very brave soldier”.
Arguably belatedly, then, some Maga Catholics are questioning the faith they placed in a moral abyss so vast you could see it from space. Certainly from heaven. But the attack on the pope, coupled with Trump’s decision to post the AI picture of himself as Jesus, has reportedly prompted some to contemplate the possible contours of Trump’s religious faith. “I’m not entirely sure what that faith is,” one believer-turned-doubter told the Times this week. “My understanding is that Trump was raised as a traditional Protestant, but he’s not a regular churchgoer. I get the impression that his understanding of the Bible is very limited.” Ya think?
Needless to say, any question of his religious bona fides is unlikely to trouble the president. Should an afterlife exist, his best hedge against eternal damnation is being so radioactively unpleasant that Satan would balk at spending five minutes with him, let alone an eternity. Or maybe Trump has designs on hell, viewing it as a totally unexploited real-estate opportunity to create some kind of Stygian Riviera. “Actually: it’s beautifully hot down there, they have a great climate, they’re just too stupid to develop it.”
For now, perhaps we are living through the ideal conditions for an American break with Rome. When the English pulled the trigger on the Reformation, of course, they were ruled by a sociopathic malignant narcissist, who emptied his pram of toys when Rome didn’t sign up to his obsession of the hour. He was also extremely given to kleptocracy, and couldn’t really see a policy position without reconfiguring it as a material benefit to himself. I dunno: something feels familiar, I just can’t put my finger on it.
But then, one of the defining characteristics of the Trump era is that persistent feeling that you might be asked to look back on it from a worse place and ask yourself: be honest, were there any warning signs? Nope, nope – none at all. I mean, the vice-president is kinda telling the pope the Vatican’s a nice place and it’d be a real shame if anything happened to it; the president has a God complex and posts illustrations just in case you didn’t get the point; and the defence secretary smites your earholes with Bible quotes that actually turn out to be from Pulp Fiction and literally has Crusades tattoos all over his man-tits. But yeah – came totally out of the blue. Who knew?
-
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
