Meditations in an Emergency

04/12/2026

Something that’s struck me about the Trump Administration throughout its second term is its profound misunderstanding of power. Over and over again, Trump and his minions demonstrate that they think they have a monopoly on power and that history will unfold as their actions without any reactions, a literally inconsequential view as in “there will no consequences other than the ones we impose.” It’s a version of reality so simple I would not accuse a toddler of holding it; toddlers know well there will be reactions and consequences, because they know others have power.

But the Trump Administration’s thugs, for example, went into Minneapolis thinking they were a conquering army that would terrorize and intimidate the populace into subjugation and found that the populace was fearless in its defiance. It was a defiance motivated by a kind of moral beauty – solidarity, care, loving thy neighbor – this administration has trouble imagining, especially when it reaches across differences of ethnicity and religion as it did in Minneapolis. In this sense love is a power, or a motivating force to exercise the power of solidarity with the oppressed and noncooperation with the oppressors. The abominable JD Vance doesn’t understand these forces; he had earlier misinterpreted Catholic theology to claim that “We should love our family first, then our neighbors, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.” Catholic theologians smacked him down then, and they haven’t stopped since.

Speaking of the Catholic church, this week the New Republic described this extraordinary situation: “Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture. ‘The United States,’ Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, ‘has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.’ One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the fourteenth century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France.”

Yes, these idiots reportedly threatened the head of this ancient institution, on the basis that the pope had better not dare oppose its power.