Imagine it was someone other than President Donald Trump. Suppose a different leader were posting deranged rants in the small hours, insulting the spiritual leader of 1.3 billion Catholics, threatening entire civilizations with annihilation, and comparing himself to God. What would be the reaction?
We all know the answer. Both parties would be rushing to bundle him out of office before he did irreversible harm to the republic. Yet, as we all also know, different rules apply to Trump. Democrats, having had their fingers burned by two failed impeachment attempts, are reluctant to try again, for they know that there is no surer way to boost his support. Republicans, who privately despair at the electoral damage he is doing, let alone the constitutional damage, are paralyzed by fear of upsetting their primary voters.
Harold Macmillan, the suave British postwar leader, liked to quip that there were three institutions that no sensible man challenged: the Brigade of Guards, the National Union of Mineworkers, and the Roman Catholic Church. Yet Trump, in one of his nocturnal forays, decided to conjure a fight with the Bishop of Rome out of thin air, calling him “WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy,” and adding that “if I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”
The president, whom critics accuse of having a God-complex, then followed up with an image of himself as Jesus healing the sick. This image was offensive, not only to Catholics, but to almost every practicing Christian and, come to that, to almost every Muslim. The Iranian ayatollahs used one of the Lego videos with which they have been trolling the president to condemn what they sincerely saw as blasphemy.
They were not alone. CatholicVote.org, which turned out millions of voters for Trump in three successive elections, condemned the post as impious. At the same time, according to its president, Kelsey Reinhardt, “President Trump’s post insulting Pope Leo crossed again a line of decorum.”
Trump decided to send out his vice president, a committed Catholic, to defend his behavior. JD Vance duly chided the Holy Father, which he cannot have found comfortable. He tried, as politicians do in these situations, to tell the pontiff to stick to spiritual matters and let the president do the politics. But, when pushed, he was reduced to making the extraordinary assertion that, “It’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”
Trump’s superpower, it has always seemed to me, is to make the people around him debase themselves while offering them no loyalty in return. If, as St Paul says, a man cannot serve two masters, Vance has made his choice.
Even now, a residual MAGA base will cheer the president unconditionally. At an event in Texas last week, I made a slighting reference to Trump’s tendency to insult U.S. allies. Afterward, a perfectly charming couple spoke to me in a succession of MAGA clichés, like online Russian bots made flesh: “He’s playing chess while you’re playing checkers,” “He’s smarter than his critics,” “Where do you get your news from, the New York Times?” I can’t help noticing, though, that such people are fewer than they were a year ago.
What chess move, after all, requires picking a quarrel with the pope? The only conceivable answer might be that Trump is engaging in prestidigitation, fabricating a row to distract from something worse. What, though, could be worse? Is he worried that voters will suddenly wake up to the ways in which he and his associates have been enriching themselves in office? That there will be a belated interest in the favors sought from foreign governments, the digital currency boondoggles, the consultants offering access for cash, and the acceptance of a private jet from a Gulf state? Or does he fret about the fate of his Hungarian ally, Viktor Orban, hammered by voters last week after rising concerns about his autocratic style and the enrichment of his cronies?
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These things are possible, I suppose. The likelier explanation, though, is that this is exactly what it looks like. A 79-year-old man who has long dealt in chaos is now being consumed by that chaos. His episodes are becoming more frequent, his good days further apart. What he has lost is not a sense of decency or decorum — he never had those — but any remaining sense of self-control.
Everyone around him can see it. Yet, whether from ambition, cowardice, or weary acceptance, they keep looking for ways to rationalize his behavior. The tragedy is no longer Trump’s. It is now America’s.