1. Senators

I’ve given you two pieces of joy this week so let’s bring down the room. If Democrats don’t win the Senate in November, it will be bad.

• Democrats are likely to come close to flipping the Senate, so if they fall short the narrative will be that Trump “held” and did better than expected.

• Without control of the Senate, impeachment becomes an even more politically-fraught exercise.

• If Republicans control the Senate, then chances are >90 percent that Trump will have the chance to replace both Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, creating a Trump-picked majority on the Supreme Court for a generation.

Now, there is some good news and some bad news on the Senate. The good news is that

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Thank you all for your thoughtful questions for our first Triad Video Mailbag. We’re planning another one for Friday, May 8.

This time, the Q&A will be accompanied by a transcript for those who prefer the reading experience. Vote for your favorite questions—or leave your own question—in the comments here.

Now, before we get to the MAGA eugenics stuff, a quick word about the Supreme Court and priorities.

1. Expand SCOTUS?

Just going to leave this here for my BFF and me to talk about tomorrow on the Secret show: It’s almost as though the Supreme Court is trying to discredit any norms-based opposition to SCOTUS expansion.

I wonder what the history books will say about John Roberts. I believe—truly—that he sees himself as an institutionalist whose highest duty is to safeguard the place of the Supreme Court. And yet, when he leaves the bench, his Court’s reputation and standing will have been so damaged that the citizenry may demand major reforms to it, of the sort that Roberts will almost certainly abhor.

Sometimes when we talk about whether or not Donald Trump is a Russian asset we ask, “If he was taking his orders directly from Putin, how much would he do differently?”

I’d ask a version of that question about Roberts: If he was a radical bent on using the Court to impose his own ideological vision, how much would he do differently?

There are surely some votes he would have changed, here and there. But on the spectrum from radical to institutional, I’m pretty sure he falls closer to one side than the other. Regardless of how he sees himself.

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Kill the filibuster, make D.C. a state, and expand the Court. If Democrats can’t do those three things then I’m not sure anything else matters. Now, let’s move on to the really dark stuff.

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2. Eugenics

One of the under-appreciated aspects of Trumpism is its aversion to—what euphemism shall we employ?—dysgenic types.

Trump famously mocked a disabled reporter in front of thousands of people and has a well-documented distaste for disabled or disfigured soldiers.

There is the MAGA movement’s constant murmuring about racial purity—advocating for “heritage Americans,” warning about “vermin” infesting the country, voicing concerns about groups of people who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation with their “bad genes.”

There is the obsession with erasing public acknowledgment that trans people exist.

There is the disgust at neurodivergence and the view of autism as an “epidemic” to be stamped out.

And while everyone is paying attention to the big-ticket stuff—the Iran war, the looming bond-market crisis, the Putinesque levels of corruption—the administration has been quietly doing some soft eugenics.

Let me tell you about “the most pro-life president” in American history . . .

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Hey fam -

Thank you all for your thoughtful questions for our first Triad Video Mailbag. We’re planning another one for Friday, May 8.

We’ve heard your feedback. This time, the Q&A will be accompanied by a transcript for those who prefer the reading experience.

For our first edition, we covered:

• What is going to happen when Trump wants the codes to nuke Iran?

• How will our era be regarded in history generations from now?

• Who will be the first male cabinet member to get fired?

• Is JVL a pessimist?

• When’s the last time someone made an argument that changed your mind?

• How do you talk about today’s political climate with your kids?

Watch: April 24 Triad Mailbag with JVL and Jasmine

Leave us questions for our next edition of “Ask JVL” in the comments on this post. We’ll pin this to the top of the Triad channel on the site and remind you of the link throughout the week.

Ask JVL

Questions can be whatever is on your mind. Was there something JVL needs to explain more from a recent Triad? Something he hasn’t dealt with lately that you’d like to hear more about?

If you posted a question last time that didn’t get picked, feel free to post it here again. There were so many good, worthy questions.

Before you pose a question, please look through the existing questions and upvote (by clicking the 🩶) those you most wish to explore, and thread your replies if you have similar questions or follow-ups. Upvoted comments float to the top, letting us know what’s most important to the community for us to answer.

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1. Table Stakes

Some reminders:

• The United States is still at war with Iran.

• On Monday three (3) ships transited the Strait of Hormuz.

• The average gas price in America is $4.229.

• The Epstein files have still not been fully released.

In the face of this, the Trump administration’s two highest priorities—at this very moment—are:

1. Building a $400 million ballroom for President Trump.

2. Prosecuting a former director of the FBI for posting a picture of seashells on Instagram.

I just feel like you have to start from the big picture before you zoom in on specifics. And the specific we’re going to look at today is the economic plight—and political opinions—of American farmers.

Do you want the short version? I will give you the short version.

Rural Americans are being hurt by Trump’s policies—specifically tariffs and the Iran war—more than any other group of Americans.

Also: Rural Americans overwhelmingly approve of the job Trump is doing.

You may want to bite down on stick before you read the long version . . .

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1. Elon, Again

Remember Elon Musk? He’s the visionary tech alchemist who managed to create the most valuable automobile company in the world without selling many automobiles and, on the strength of this accomplishment, was allowed to spend several unsupervised months destroying large swaths of the federal government.

This was before he accused the president of the United States of being a pedophile. Then claimed he was leaving the Republican party and starting a new party. Then went back to being friends with the president he said was a pedophile, and supporting Republican candidates and legislation.

And all of this was before auto sales in Musk’s car business fell off a cliff.

Anyway: You might have thought that we had the luxury of forgetting about Elon Musk. That he had shat the bed, blown up his company, and pissed off his political patrons, forever. That he would remain part of the national furniture, but safely removed from the realm of social consequence.

Wrong.

Today we’re going to talk about how Elon Musk fucked up Tesla, how the market has rewarded him for the mistake, and how we are a few weeks away from Musk becoming even wealthier—and more dangerous—than anyone could have feared.

All as we are about to roll into the midterm elections.

America is about to find out what happens when it is home to an illiberal trillionaire.

Get your pitchforks ready.

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Not a full Triad today. I’m under the weather. But we have to talk about political violence, again.

All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.

That is Dickens describing the origins of the French Revolution. He regards the guillotine as a horror—an abomination—but believed that French society had become so dysfunctional, so disordered, that the abomination became inevitable.

Not justified, but inevitable.

I think about that passage often.

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Hey guys! Jasmine and JVL here. Today we’re trying something a bit different. Earlier this week, we asked you all to leave us questions for a Triad Q&A, and here it is. We received over 600 questions (!) so we prioritized the most popular, the most frequently-asked, and the most fun.

If you like this new Triad format, let us know! If you don’t, let us know! (I promise, my feelings won’t be hurt.) If there’s something you’d like us to change about this mailbag format… let us know! If this works, we hope to make a Triad Q&A a regular event, coming straight to your inbox as the normal newsletter does.

Thank you for being such an energetic, inquisitive community. We hope you enjoy.

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Reminder: Tomorrow Jasmine and I will be bringing you an attempt at a video mailbag in the place of a normal Friday Triad.

1. Stop Loss

Yesterday Secretary of the Navy John Phelan was fired.

Twenty-one days ago, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George was fired.

Fifty-four days ago, the American military launched its largest war in a generation.

These datapoints are linked. They are an admission by the president that America is losing the war.

Because the simple fact of the matter is: You do not make high-level personnel changes in the middle of a war if you are winning.

Phelan and George occupied different roles in the Pentagon. Neither was in charge of day-to-day management of the war—their jobs were focused on things like recruitment, retention, and training, of personnel and acquisition of technology and supplies. We can leave aside questions about their competence. Maybe they were excellent at their jobs; maybe they were not. Maybe they were pushed out for purely political or personality-related reasons that had nothing to do with performance.

But this war is a gigantic, sprawling exercise. It involves two dozen warships and roughly 50,000 troops. We are spending somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion per day and expending munitions at a fantastic rate.

When an organization enters a period of high-tempo operations like this, it places strain on the entire system. There are warfighters on the front line. Behind them are people in charge of logistics for the tip of the spear. Behind them is a universe of people who then have to compensate force dispositions across the rest of the world to rebalance America’s military presence. And behind them are the organizations Phelan and George led: people who suddenly have to start the process of rebuilding stockpiles and working double-time on procurement; who have to deal with what the war will mean for force retention and human resources.

There is no corner of the Pentagon that doesn’t get touched when America gets into a real war, as we are in Iran.

And when organizational structures are strained, the thing they need most is

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Heads up: Bill Kristol and I will be live with Katie Couric today at 5pm in the East. You can watch us on Substack here or on YouTube here.

1. Virginia

Abigail Spanberger did not campaign on saving democracy at the federal level. But that might turn out to be the most important thing she does as governor.

As Bill discussed this morning, Republicans in Texas—at the behest of the president—violated a bunch of norms when they embarked on a quest to gerrymander more seats for their party in the middle of an election cycle.

This action was illiberal and anti-democratic but—and this is the key—it was also legal.

Democrats, to their credit, responded not by rending their garments but with ruthless proportionality: Led by Gavin Newsom and Spanberger, they counter-gerrymandered.

This is the way.

The road to preserving liberal democracy does not involve unilateral disarmament or faking normality in the hopes of making the world normal again. It involves meeting force with force while crafting a national remedy for nonpartisan redistricting, which would force everyone to behave according to standards of good government.

It’s classical deterrence theory. As some Roman general once said, “If you seek peace, prepare for war.”

This should be the model for the biggest piece of ruthless aggression of them all: expanding the Supreme Court.

Let’s get ruthless.

[Reminder: This Friday’s Triad will be a members-only “Ask JVL” video newsletter. Leave your questions here.]

Join now

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This will not be AMA style, like the last time—which became an absolute cluster.

Instead, you can drop questions in advance here. Then Jasmine and I will do a video in which I answer the most interesting ones. I’m not going to put any limits on this; ask whatever you like. But my bias is in the direction of the news and conversations about this week’s newsletters. So I’ll take some general questions about The Bulwark, life, pinball, etc.—but I’ll want to focus on newsy questions.

My two asks of you: (1) Try to glance over the list of questions already submitted so you don’t duplicate each other, and hit the like button on the ones you like most. I’ll pay special attention to questions that get up-voted. (2) If you have a follow-up question to something that has already been asked, thread it by replying to that question.

The mailbag page will remain live until after the Thursday Triad goes out. You can leave questions here.

Oh, and the mailbag will be for only Bulwark+ members. So if you were looking for a reason to join the gang . . .

Join Bulwark+ with a FREE 14-day trial

1. The Shit Sandwich

Over the weekend Paul Krugman quipped that Donald Trump “can’t even surrender right.”

This is correct.

Today we’re going to talk about the benefits of failing fast, the costs of failing slow, and how Trump is managing to maximize the downside of even the least-bad outcomes from the Iran war.

Warning: If you ever believed in American Greatness, that sense of pride is about to take a beatdown.

Two weeks ago I praised the ceasefire agreement, sort of. Trump’s ceasefire was a surrender that would enhance Iran’s position and harm America’s interests—but having made the strategically idiotic decision to go to war, it was the least-bad option available.

My verdict was that the ceasefire was a shit sandwich, but a shit sandwich we can afford to eat.

Since then Trump has screwed up the execution on this, too. He did not actually nail down commitments on Lebanon. He could not control his Israeli allies. Instead of taking his medicine and closing the deal, he antagonized his counterparty—even though they have all of the leverage. He allowed another hostile counterparty (China) to insert itself into the conversation.

This guy couldn’t even get his shit sandwich plated and out the door.

Which has now left us at another brink.

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Hey fam -

On Friday (4/25), I’m going to take a stab at a second Triad Q&A, but this time on video. Jasmine and I will record this Thursday night and I’ll drop it into your inboxes on Friday at lunchtime.

My ask: leave us questions in the comments on this post. I’ll pin this to the top of the Triad channel on the site and remind you of the link throughout the week.

Questions can be whatever is on your mind. Was there something I need to explain more from a recent Triad or is there some other topic I haven’t dealt with lately that you’d like to hear more on?

Please do look through the questions and upvote (by clicking the 🩶) those you most wish to explore, and thread your replies if you have similar questions or follow-ups.

Ask JVL

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1. 2028

We can already see the contours of 2028 on the Republican side. The GOP nominee is likely to be one of five people.

1. Donald J. Trump (more on this in a minute)

2. JD Vance

3. Marco Rubio

4. Tucker Carlson

And the fifth? He’s my dark-horse pick to win. You’re going to love this . . .

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Programming note: At noon in the East and 9:00 a.m. in the West, tickets for our Bulwark Live: California shows go on sale for everyone. I’m not going to make it out there for this tour, but you’ll be in great hands with my best friends Sarah and Tim and Sam Stein. These shows are truly great; they feed the soul. Don’t sleep on this, SoCal friends.

And today at 12:30 p.m. ET I’ll be on with Catherine Rampell for Receipts Live on Substack and YouTube.

1. Oil and Allbirds

The American economy is not great right now. We’ve had the largest oil shock in history at the same time that job growth has been flat and unemployment has ticked up. Inflation is not runaway, but it is persistent.

Yet even as the actual real world is not-great, the speculative world of the stock market is going gangbusters.

Here are two news items from this week that I’d like you to rationalize. First, the Financial Times on April 13:

The last oil tankers to traverse the Strait of Hormuz before the outbreak of war will reach refineries in the coming days, in a pivotal moment analysts warn could herald physical shortages in Europe and the US within weeks.

The final ships to clear the strait before the Iran war began on February 28 are expected to reach their destination in Malaysia and Australia by April 20, intensifying the supply shock rippling across Asia.

But with Asian refineries responding by buying up a record number of crude oil cargoes that would normally have sailed to Europe and the US, analysts said refiners in some of the world’s wealthiest countries may soon also face shortages.

“It will hit the west in a month when all the Asian cargoes bought leave the Atlantic basin,” said Nic Dyer, an analyst at Energy Aspects.

And here’s the FT two days later:

How do you reconcile these pieces of information?1

I have a theory.

For a decade Trump apologists have toyed with the “Madman Theory” of foreign policy—the idea that ackshually it’s good to have a crazy president because rival states will give him whatever he wants since no one knows what he’s capable of.

As Andrew Egger explained recently, the Iran war has disproven the Trump Madman Theory in the realm of foreign policy.

But what if it’s is true for the financial world?

Here’s my Madman Theory of the Stock Market:

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Fam: The conversation about accountability and reform in the comments yesterday was exceptional, even by the standards of this community. I cannot begin to describe how gratifying it is to labor over a piece of writing and then have readers add value to it the way you do.

Thank you.

1. Conservatism and Democracy

In 2018 David Frum saw the world more clearly than I did. He wrote, “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”

That was on January 18, 2018, less than a year into Trump’s presidency. Frum’s prediction has become one of the key insights for understanding our moment.

It is also immediately what I thought of when Donald Trump attacked the pope this weekend.

American Catholics have increasingly thrown in with Christian nationalism over the last decade. If they are asked to choose between Trump and the Catholic Church, some significant percentage of them are going to choose Trump.

I’m doing Sarah’s Focus Group show and this week the groups we listened to were Catholic voters. I’m not supposed to give too much away, but I can’t stop myself.

You will not believe what these people had to say when asked to choose between Trump and their Holy Father.

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Yesterday I gave you a long exegesis on how Victor Orbán legally turned Hungary into a competitive autocracy. The short version is that Hungarian democracy—like American democracy—was run on the honor system. I hope you’ll read the long version anyway.

Today I want to talk about how the incoming Hungarian government is thinking about structural reforms to take their democracy off of the honor system. We should pay attention to this because if we’re lucky enough to throw off Trumpism in America, we will face a choice.

Should the American opposition party focus on “the future” and “kitchen-table issues”?

Or should they go after the retreating authoritarians hammer-and-tongs and use power to reform the structural weaknesses that allowed Trumpism to flourish?

After we talk about what the Hungarians are looking at, we’ll talk about some of the things that should be on the table in a post-Trump America.

Warning: We’re in a late republican period. If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of liberals right now are uncomfortable with.1

Let’s go.

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If you didn’t vote for me the first time please do it now? You can vote here.

A reminder of what’s on the line: If I win this totally meaningless award I am going to make myself a WWE-style championship belt which I will carry around at live shows and display prominently whenever I’m on the Focus Group.

I’ve never wanted anything more. Help me live my dream. 🙏

Make JVL Insufferable Again

1. The NYT’s House Illiberal

Ross Douthat celebrated the end of Viktor Orbán’s rule by arguing that ackshually Orbán governed totally within the bounds of normal democracy and everyone who was upset about him should now see how silly and alarmist they were.

There will be no Orbán coup!

The Douthat position is: If the ruling regime leaves power without bloodshed, then that regime was, by definition, a democracy consistent with our understanding of the word.1 (To understand Douthat-ism, see this footnote.2)

But this isn’t about Ross. It’s about noticing what he’s up to. Because the rehabilitation of Viktor Orbán is the opening gambit in the attempt by American illiberals to prevent accountability and reform should Trumpism be defeated.

Because when Ross Douthat and his friends look at Hungary, they fear that they are looking at their future.

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2. What Orbán Did

We start by understanding what Orbán actually did to Hungary’s government and the rule of law.

When Orbán returned to power in 2010 he did so with 52.7 percent of the vote. His support was concentrated in rural areas, which had disproportionate representation—so his majority was greatly magnified. His party controlled 68 percent of the seats in parliament. This supermajority allowed Orbán’s party, Fidesz3, to amend the Hungarian constitution on party-line votes. Orbán took this as license to rewrite the entire constitution and then pass it on a party-line vote.

Among the new constitution’s first objectives was to neuter the courts, because Orbán understood that he could not consolidate power if the courts were independent. So the new constitution:

• expanded the Constitutional Court from eleven to fifteen judges;

• created a new process for appointing Constitutional Court judges that allowed the ruling party to do so without consultation;

• relocated the power of the Constitutional Court to elect its own chief judge to parliament (i.e., to the ruling party);

• forced the removal of many sitting judges by putting the retirement age at 62;4

• forced the removal of the Supreme Court’s chief justice by inventing a requirement that disqualified him from service on the high court;5 and

• created a government office in charge of hiring and firing judges; this office would be controlled by an appointee from the majority party.

The next step was capturing the administrative state. Orbán embarked on a campaign to replace the heads of nonpartisan government agencies with political loyalists. (Sound familiar?) Simultaneously, he established terms for these appointments that were incredibly long—often nine or even twelve years.

The goal was to ensure that even if Orbán lost an election in the near term, his people would maintain control over both the courts and the administrative state, preventing the new government from undoing his actions6 and making a return to power easier.

Orbán next turned to attacking the political system itself. Here’s Johan Norberg’s excellent account:

The 2012 constitution also gave significant powers to a restructured Budget Council. This three-member body consists of officials appointed to long, staggered terms—up to twelve years—ensuring they remain in office long after the government that appointed them may have left. They can veto the budget and if this results in no budget passed on time, the president can dissolve parliament and trigger new elections. As Orbán told an Austrian newspaper: “I make no secret of the fact that in this respect I tie the hands of the next government. Not just the next one, but the next ten.”

Then Orbán changed the voting system. Hungary is a multiparty parliamentary system. Before Orbán’s changes, voting had been done in two rounds—the idea behind this being that in any given election, the first-round results typically split between the majority party on one side and the various opposition parties on the other. After the first round, the opposition parties consolidated around the leading vote-getter and the second round was a one-on-one runoff.

Orbán eliminated the second round of voting. In a two-party system this would not have meant much. In a multiparty system it created an enormous advantage for the party in power and a huge hurdle for opposition movements.

The next step was the creation of a majoritarian multiplier. This is somewhat complicated but the upshot is this: First Orbán changed the electoral system to make it easier for the ruling party to get a majority and then he changed the representation system to give extra seats to the majority—the net result being that even if Orbán’s party won only a plurality of the votes cast, they would still have a supermajority in parliament and hence the ability to change the constitution at will.

Then, just for good measure, Orbán gerrymandered the hell out of the parliament map to provide extra cushion for Fidesz.

Here is the net effect of these machinations: In the 2014 elections, Orbán’s share of the vote dropped from 52.7 percent to 44.9 percent. Yet Fidesz maintained a supermajority in parliament and could unilaterally alter the constitution to perpetuate itself in power.

This is not “bending the rules”; it is not “democracy qua democracy.”

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There’s more. A lot more. Another constitutional amendment prohibited all political advertising—except on publicly owned broadcast media. Meaning: State-owned channels, controlled by Fidesz, could choose not to air ads from opposition parties.

The government used its power to deny opposition parties almost any chance at communicating with voters. Here’s Norberg again:

When the opposition realized that their only chance to grab public attention during the 2014 campaign was advertising on Budapest streetlamps, the city council banned such ads, supposedly for road safety purposes (sidewalk kiosks owned by a Fidesz-friendly company were exempted from the ban). This almost ruined the company that sold such ads. After the election, that company was bought by a businessman close to Fidesz, and after that, advertising on streetlamps was once again permitted.

These are merely the legal things Orbán did in his quest to subvert democracy. We haven’t even begun to touch the outright corruption and illegality of the regime.

Here’s Norberg, one last time:

Orbán and the group around him are lawyers, and they were meticulous in making sure that their power grab was done in a technically legal way. They also defended every single step of the process by saying that almost all of these institutional changes, taken separately, exist in other consolidated democracies. But that is institutional cherry-picking. The problem is that all these steps led in the same direction: toward unrestrained executive power, since other countervailing checks and balances that make such institutions work in other systems were also dismantled.

And that, right there, is the challenge.

Like us, the Hungarians discovered that their democracy was run on the honor system. The question is: Once a society understands this reality, how do they respond?

What happened in Hungary—what is happening in America—is not a feature of normal “democracy qua democracy.” If it were, then there would be many fewer democracies in the world.

If a democratic system can be turned against itself in this way, then it is not sustainable. It’s like building your house next to a barbarian encampment and hoping they respect your property line.

There are two questions in confronting competitive authoritarianism.

The first is: Can you defeat the aspiring authoritarians through nonviolent means?

The second is: If you defeat them, are you willing to take democracy off of the honor system and do what is necessary to make life harder for the next aspiring authoritarian?

And that’s what we’ll talk about tomorrow.

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3. Worst. Car. Ever.

I’ve been waiting for Mr. Regular to do one of his essays on the Cybertruck and he finally has—and it’s everything I’d hoped it would be. Enjoy.

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1. Pope Fights

Three things happened this weekend, each of which suggested that Donald Trump is, as poker pros put it, playing on tilt.

(1) Donald Trump gave Iran everything it wanted in the hopes that it would agree to stop the war he started. His plan seems to have been: Capitulation followed by renegotiation. When he tried to change the terms of America’s surrender, the Iranians rebuffed him and reclosed the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s response was to say that if Iran was going to close the strait, then the United States would blockade the straight.

Is this some idiot reverse psychology? Or dementia? Who can say?

(2) Viktor Orbán, the proto-Trump whose goal was to create a permanent one-party state, was deposed by Hungarian voters in a landslide election. Trump had pushed all-in to support Orbán, explicitly aligning the U.S. government with the Hungarian strongman and even sending JD Vance in-country to campaign for him.

Hungarians have now thrown Orbán over and Trump will watch to see if the new government pursues criminal charges against Orbán and his confederates and/or if it attempts constitutional reforms to prevent Orbánism from ever taking root in Hungary again.

Trump must know that he is watching one of the possible futures that await him 31 months from now. Which may be why:

(3) Trump picked a fight with Pope Leo XIV. Here is the statement he published at 9:03 p.m. on Sunday night:

Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. He talks about “fear” of the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside, and being ten and even twenty feet apart. I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA. He gets it, and Leo doesn’t! I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country. And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History. Leo should be thankful because, as everyone knows, he was a shocking surprise. He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican. Unfortunately, Leo’s Weak on Crime, Weak on Nuclear Weapons, does not sit well with me, nor does the fact that he meets with Obama Sympathizers like David Axelrod, a LOSER from the Left, who is one of those who wanted churchgoers and clerics to be arrested. Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church! President DONALD J. TRUMP

And here is the image he posted 46 minutes later:

My friends, these are not the actions of a guy who’s winning. This is what it looks like when a man is spiraling out of control and reaching for something—anything—to get well. This is playing on tilt.

In poker, when a player is on tilt he loses the ability to judge between good and bad risks. He’s so desperate that he pushes all-in not because he has the nuts, but because he thinks he has no choice. He chases cards, refuses to walk away, and turns what could just be a run of bad luck into full-on bankruptcy.

That’s where Trump is right now. And it is delicious. So let’s interrogate this moment because—for once—you’re going to love it. This is the funniest thing you’ve ever seen.

2. The Bulwark Pope

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1. Christian Nationalism

Heads up: We’re gonna get super churchy today. I know that’s not everyone’s thing. That’s okay. But it’s important because I want to try to answer three questions:

1. Why are Pete Hegseth and—of all people!—Donald Trump invoking God so much lately?

2. What kind of Christianity—or more specifically, what kind of Christianity-adjacent traditions—are they invoking?

3. How is the Trump/Hegseth brand of Christianity threatened by Pope Leo’s Catholicism?

Big caveat: I’m going to talk almost exclusively about Catholicism as a stand-in for True Christianity™.1

Partly this is because of my own papist biases, but mostly it’s because once you get into Protestantism, everything gets more complicated. It can be hard to delineate what a “True Baptist” believes. Just within the largest Baptist denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, membership is seen as a matter of voluntary association and churches are understood as a matter of biblical doctrine to have a fundamental and un-infringe-able autonomy. Even then, the underlying theological consensus within the SBC has dramatically shifted within my lifetime. Many Protestant sects also allow a good deal of theological free-lancing. Another denomination, the Church of England, has a famously large tent that covers everyone from extremely conservative theologians on one end to those who don’t even accept a realist conception of God’s existence on the other.

Whatever its flaws, at least the Roman Catholic Church has a catechism and a magisterium and a pope. It is possible to say “Catholics believe X” pretty definitively in most cases.

With all those caveats in mind, let’s go.

You may have noticed an uptick in overt religiosity from the Trump administration around the Iran war. Here is Trump offering glory to God while threatening to kill people:

At a press conference on April 6 Trump was asked, “Do you believe God supports the United States’ actions in this war?” His response:

TRUMP: “I do, because God is good. God is good, and God wants to see people taken care of. God doesn’t like what’s happening. I don’t like what’s happening.”2

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has done quite of lot of God talk, too. On March 8 he told CBS News, “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.”

At a briefing on March 10 Hegseth offered this . . . statement? invocation? prayer? “May the Lord grant unyielding strength and refuge to our warriors, unbreakable protection to them and our homeland, and total victory over those who seek to harm them.”

And then there was Hegseth’s “God is good” press conference testimonial.

At the same time you may have noticed the Trump administration moving toward increasingly open conflict with the guy who sits at the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV.

This is important.

A big part of Trumpism is Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism is not primarily a flavor of Christianity. It is a sub-brand of nationalism.

Christian nationalism cannot abide Catholicism—no matter what the Catholic integralists insist, the two must inevitably fall into conflict. Today I’d like to talk about why that is.

“God is good.”

Hegseth said that phrase over and over while bragging about the successful rescue of an American airman and boasting that the Iranian military was “impotent.”

You will note that Hegseth did not say “God is good” when reporting on the deaths of the first six American soldiers killed in the Iran war.

Why not?

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1. Told You So

We have a bunch of contradictions to keep in our heads today and it’s not going to be fun. But first I want to underline the value proposition of this newsletter: I told you from the beginning that we were likely to get war. I told you it wasn’t going to be a quick in-and-out affair like the Venezuela raid because (1) Israel wanted it; (2) Trump believed he could win a war; and (3) Iran believed that by absorbing punishment for a brief period they could improve their position since Trump would eventually have to bribe them to allow America to exit the war.

Let’s try to see around the next corner, right now.

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1. Petrodollars

The Iran war is a dagger aimed at the heart of the petrodollar system. I have been banging on about this for weeks because the petrodollar is America’s Achilles’ heel. The United States is losing the war, but we can absorb most of the losing scenarios. For instance: It will be bad if the sanctions regime against Iran is destroyed.1 It will be worse if Iran is set on the pathway to become a nuclear power.2

But neither of those outcomes would be a strategic threat to America.

The risk to the petrodollar is a different category. If its supremacy is supplanted then the entire American-led world order begins to teeter and the extent of the damage is impossible to calculate.

Just as a for-instance: Without the petrodollar system, Social Security and Medicare become hard to support at current levels and defense spending gets crunched.

In order to understand this threat, we’re going to have to dig into economic and geopolitical history. We’re going to talk about the gold standard and currency recycling and deficit financing and OMG this is not sexy stuff.

But it’s hugely important, and I think it’s possible to explain it clearly. And (to mix metaphors) if you want to see around corners, sometimes you have to eat your vegetables. So get ready for a double-shot of spinach, fam.

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