Weekly Roundup: Trump, Vance, and Just War Theory + Pete's Pulp Fiction

Brad Onishi: This week, the quagmire in Iran turned into a Catholic quagmire in the United States. The Pope received attack after attack from not only Donald Trump, but remarks from the Catholic Vice President JD Vance and the Protestant Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. This was one of those weeks where it was hard to keep up with the various religious and theological conflicts happening here in the United States. Luckily, we are two religion scholars trained in theology ready to break it down for you and anyone who will listen. Lots to cover, let's go.

Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, author of American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning the United States into a Monarchy, founder of Axis Mundi Media, here today with my co-host.

Dan Miller: I'm Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought, Landmark College. Glad to be with you, Brad. Getting over like my third cold of the season, so just in case anybody hears me coughing or wheezing or anything, that's what that'll be. Good times.

Brad: You ever had a dean or a smart business school person or an arrogant scientist say, "Oh, who needs religion majors? That's the stupidest department on campus. Why do we have the humanities?" And I don't know — just weeks like this, I just don't even need to say anything. We just hold up the week and be like, "Hey, here you go. We kind of need people who know about this stuff." And that's what we do. We've been studying this stuff for two decades. We lived it. This is who we are.

Dan: And — all right, even more importantly, Brad, if we get to it, if we get far enough to delve into the world of Pete Hegseth this week, some of us are old enough to remember Pulp Fiction. So I think that just feels relevant this week as well.

Brad: This is like, if you are a humanities person who is an elder millennial, this week was just for you. This was your week. You know what I'm saying? Because the Pulp Fiction just — it's hard to keep up.

Okay, so everybody is aware that Donald Trump attacked the Pope and has started a quagmire of his own doing here at home. And I'll say quickly, Dan, I think he did that because he got his ass handed to him in Iran. He did not — he started a war he couldn't finish. He tried to bully Iran. Iran didn't back down. They had one trump card — pun intended — in their back pocket, which was the Strait of Hormuz. The war just sort of turned into something real. I will say this later, but I'll say it now: the Trump administration has no just war theory. They just thought, "Oh, it's just a war. How hard could it be?" And it turned out it was a lot harder than they thought. And so I think what Trump did is what he always does. He's like, "Well, this isn't going well. I didn't win. Rather than admit I didn't win and fix it so people don't suffer, I'll just start a fight with someone else." I will argue that this quagmire of his own making in the United States — which is an attack on the Pope — is going to cost him as much or more as what happened in Iran. And we'll get there. Before we do that, run us through the summary so people are kind of caught up on what happened this week and some of the back and forth. We'll get to JD Vance, we'll get to Mike Johnson, we'll get to the U.S. Catholic Bishops responding, blah, blah, blah. Let's get it.

Dan: Yeah. Most of what sort of started here is Pope Leo issued a statement. He did not cite the Trump administration. He didn't specifically talk about Iran, but I think everybody knew what he had in view. And I will read his statement, because this is what sort of started the whole thing. He said, "God does not bless any conflict. Anyone who's a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today dropped bombs. Military action will not create space for freedom or times of peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples." That's what he said. Trump, being Trump, couldn't let it go, and so he came unglued, issued a like 334-word Truth Social diatribe that says that the Pope's weak on foreign policy and weak on crime, and that he fears the Trump administration, and a whole bunch of stuff like that. He then followed that — this is almost an aside, but one of the other weird things this week — with the AI-generated image of him as Jesus, like healing someone, and that created a bunch of backlash from everybody, including even a lot of conservative Christians. He later deleted it. That's just another thing we can do what we want with.

The Pope then responds, and I think this is what's kind of remarkable — you get this back and forth — the Pope basically said that they're not afraid of the Trump administration, they'll speak the gospel, and that's what the church works for, and so forth. Trump then convenes like a Q&A session where he refused to apologize for the comments, and among other things he said — and I think this is going to be a theme as we go along and look at how other politicians respond to this — he went public, saying, "I'm just responding to Pope Leo. He started it." Even though, to reiterate, Leo never mentioned Trump by name, never mentioned the Iran conflict, and so forth. Trump then also responded to the image of him as Jesus and said that he thought he was like a Red Cross worker in it and didn't know he was Jesus. Another aside thing about Trump: it's like either you make yourself look like the 25th Amendment should apply when you say things like that, or you're just the liar that you are.

Brad: Yeah, well, so Karoline Leavitt said that that was a doctored image. So, you know, I think a lot of folks listening have seen this already, but I'll just reiterate it. It seems like the talking point Trump was supposed to say is that it was a doctored image, but he went with "I was a Red Cross worker." So it seems — but I think secondly, Karoline, the image is AI.

Dan: Of course it's doctored. It's like an invented image. Yes.

Brad: It's not a photo, Karoline. It's not something that's been altered. It's a generated image. So there's that. I think third — and I don't think we're going to spend tons of time here — there was real backlash to the Trump-as-Jesus thing. There was a split in MAGA Christianity over this. Some people said it's blasphemy, he should take it down. Franklin Graham said, "Oh, I believe him when he said he thought he was a Red Cross worker." Megan Basham said, "I believe that too." So anyway, that happened this week. It deserves five hours of analysis, but nonetheless, we're going to keep going. What else?

Dan: Yeah, so this brings us to JD Vance. First — you know, Trump's spokesperson, as you mentioned — he's the Catholic Vice President, and on Fox News he sort of took a softer line, said the Pope should stay in his lane, said he should stick to matters of morality, as if war and conflict are not related to morality. But then later — or in another event, I forget actually which one came first.

Brad: It was the TP USA event, yes.

Dan: Turning Point USA — channeling his inner Charlie Kirk. He still wants to be the heir apparent of that movement. I think we have a clip of part of what he had to say there, where he took a much firmer line.

JD Vance [Clip]: "When the Pope says that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword, there is the thousand-year — more than thousand-year — tradition of just war theory. Okay, now we can of course have disagreements about whether this or that conflict is just, but I think that it's important — in the same way that it's important for the Vice President of the United States to be careful when I talk about matters of public policy — I think it's very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology. And I think that one of the issues here is that if you're going to opine on matters of theology, you've got to be careful. You've got to make sure it's anchored in the truth. And that's one of the things that I try to do, and it's certainly something I would expect from the clergy, whether they're Catholic or Protestant."

Dan: Now what I want to pause on here — and this is a thing that's going to come up — is there at the end where he basically is like, "Yeah, the Pope just doesn't understand Catholic theology." I, JD Vance, lay Catholic without any formal training, I've been Catholic for ten minutes. I can't believe he doesn't know what just war theory is. And this concept of just war theory is where I want to hover for a bit and turn into the geeky academic religion scholar that I am. This is where we can sort of earn our money today.

Brad: Let me play you a clip first of what the Pope said yesterday. This was after JD, so we got JD on Fox News, we've got JD at TP USA, and then here's the Pope yesterday, after all of that.

Pope Leo XIV [Clip]: "Woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth. The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy, yet often a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild. They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing, on devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education, and restoration are nowhere to be found. The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants. It is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters. They are the descendants of Abraham, as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore."

Brad: So he says a handful of tyrants are destroying the world. It takes a few seconds to destroy, it takes a lifetime or a generation to build back up. All right, so that leads into this whole just war theory.

Before you give us just war theory, can I also give you Mike Johnson? All right, so here's Mike Johnson, who is Protestant, and he brings up just war theory and says he's kind of surprised the Pope got involved. Mike Johnson has never looked more like a weasel than in the last six months. Like he looks like a little weasel who gets sent out every time JD Vance and Donald Trump do something — he has to go out there and be like, "Didn't see it, I don't know." Or he says things like, "Well, I'm kind of surprised that the Pope got involved." I mean, the leader of a worldwide church with 1.2 billion members that's been a political entity for 2,000 years — well, I can't believe he would have something to say about somebody threatening a nuclear winter on an entire civilization. But that's just me. He's a weasel, and he looks more and more like a weasel every day.

Mike Johnson [Clip]: "I think he said several days back that something about those who engage in war, Jesus doesn't hear their prayers or something. You know, it is a very well-settled matter of Christian theology. There's something called the just war doctrine. There's a time to every purpose under heaven. I think what the President's comments, what the Vice President's comments reflect, is their understanding — deep — in the classified briefings of the stakes that are so high in the situation that we're facing, and the fact that you had the nation that was the largest sponsor of terrorism now having had that ability taken away from them, that means potentially millions of innocent people will be able to keep their lives and not be killed by terrorists. That's a good thing. That's what's come out of this."

Brad: Okay, I set the table for you. We got JD, we got the Pope, we got Mike. So what's up? What is just war theory?

Dan: People are wondering when they hear this term, "just war theory," and people arguing about whether the Bible talks about war and whether God is ever on the side of warriors and so forth. Here it is.

So for the first two or three hundred years of Christian history, it was actually common church teaching that Christians were required to be pacifists. The understanding of Jesus's teachings was that they had to be pacifists. Roman soldiers — there were all kinds of debates about, can somebody who's been in the Roman army become a Christian? Can a Roman soldier be a Christian if they've been in the army and been part of a warrior culture like this? What do they have to do to atone? All of these kinds of questions.

But then the church runs into this problem: Christianity becomes the favored and later official religion of the Roman Empire, which of course was the world's most powerful empire, built and maintained through military conquest. So the church around that time had to basically come up with a way to make war okay. You get this — and this is my very cynical take on Christian doctrine and the history of it — suddenly the church is the church of power and has to find a way to make warfare acceptable.

And it's an actual doctrine developed primarily by Augustine. That's the name that will really get attached to this. Later thinkers like Thomas Aquinas — some of the big hitters in the history of specifically Catholic theology — developed this theory. But just war theory has become influential far beyond the confines of narrow theological discussions. If you take an ethics class and you talk about conflict or warfare, just war theory will be brought up. You find a lot of public figures who just talk about this, and even a lot of international conventions on warfare are arguably built around the concept of just war theory. So it's a really significant theory.

But here's what it is. I'm going to be really nerdy for a minute and just lay it out. Basically, there are two main pieces of this that we're concerned with. The first is that it's supposed to give a justification for going to war — in Latin, the jus ad bellum, which basically means you have to have good reasons, moral reasons for going to war. And the second is that you have to have just conduct in war, the jus in bello. So basically, it's saying there are moral reasons for going to war, and there are parameters you have to operate within in the conduct of warfare to make it just.

What are some of the reasons that would make it just to go to war? You have to have a just cause — a real wrong, such as self-defense. Self-defense is typically the standard piece of this. There has to be a legitimate authority declaring war. You have to have right intention — you have to be seeking to redress injustice, not to seize territory or power. It has to be the last resort — you have to have exhausted all peaceful alternatives. Proportionality — the benefits of the war have to outweigh the potential destruction. And you have to have a reasonable chance of success. Those are all things that are supposed to go into justifying a war.

And then the conduct in the war: combatants have to be distinguished from civilians. The concept of proportionality — the violence used has to be proportionate to the objective. And there should be no intrinsically unethical means used — which is now interpreted as methods that are forbidden by international law, such as atrocities or certain weapons.

So that's just war theory. And if you look at that, you can see why people would question whether or not this meets any of those parameters. Was there a legitimate authority in the U.S.? It's supposed to go through Congress, not the President — we've talked about that. Was it the last resort? It wasn't. The proportionality — both ad bellum, proportionality in the justification, and in the conduct — Trump has been threatening war crimes for weeks. We talk about the way that Hegseth talks about raining down destruction and disproportionate attacks and all that. So all of that is why you would get those in the Catholic tradition who would say, this is not a just war.

And then to back that up, at the same time, you've got JD Vance telling the Pope, "Well, I guess the Pope doesn't understand just war theory." That's kind of weird. Or referring to him as a Catholic clergy member when he's in fact the head of the Catholic Church.

On Thursday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops posted a statement on their website in response to public comments like the comments made by Vance. And this was really interesting. The statement was offered by Bishop James Massa — I believe that's how you say his name. He's the chairman of the Committee on Doctrine. So what is the Committee on Doctrine? It is the committee tasked with upholding, interpreting, and teaching the Catholic faith. So in other words, to the JD Vances of the world who say, "I can't believe the Pope doesn't understand just war theory" — the Conference of Bishops says, "Hey, we've got our Catholic theology experts, and here's what they had to say."

So I'm just going to read through this, and then we can sort of dive in from there. They say: "For over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory. And it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war. A consistent tenet of that thousand-year tradition is that a nation can only legitimately take up the sword in self-defense once all peace efforts have failed." And it cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church — that is the official teaching of the Church. They go on: "To be a just war, it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Father actually said — 'He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.'" So they're contextualizing what Pope Leo said, highlighting the ways in which the current Iran conflict violates the tenets of just war theory. And they go on to say: "When Pope Leo speaks as supreme pastor of the universal church" — that's sort of his official title — "he is not merely offering opinions on theology, JD Vance. He is not just a Catholic clergy member. He is preaching the gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ. The consistent teaching of the Church is insistent that all people of goodwill must pray and work toward lasting peace while avoiding the evils and injustices that accompany all wars."

Not saying we all need to be beholden to Catholic theology or anything else, but this all contextualizes this language of just war and the mire that the Trump administration has now created with the Catholic Church, and I think opens up a number of pathways for us to reflect on what's been going on this week.

Brad: Let's take a break. We'll come back and analyze everything we just heard from Dan about all these events.

Okay, Dan, so here's a couple of ways for me to start on Trump and Vance and Johnson and now their lackeys — who we'll get to later, we'll get to the sort of third-rate back-bench Republicans who are jumping into the fray. They've started something that I think was inevitable, but I did not think we would see this early. And what I mean by that is I have said for a while that there are potential fissures in the Christian nationalist coalition in this country, because there are actual differences — theologically, doctrinally, ecclesiastically, and just in terms of lived experience, networks, money, etc. — between Catholics and Protestants in the United States. And I said that, you know, if the dog ever catches the tail, if they ever appoint their American Caesar, or their Protestant Pinochet, or their American Franco, whatever — somebody's going to be disappointed because it's going to be a Catholic appointment, a Protestant appointment, a technocratic appointment, whatever. Trump has only sped that up.

I think what has happened here — and I'll just say something I said already — is that because Iran has gone so poorly in terms of approval numbers, in terms of losing service members' lives, in terms of killing 16,000 or 17,000 civilians, in terms of a 20 to 30 billion dollar bill — it's all gone so bad. There has been such a lack of support at home and abroad that he had to pick another fight. And now we're all talking about the other fight. So in some sense, we're doing exactly what he wants. We're not talking about the Epstein files, we're talking about Iran. We're not talking about Iran, we're talking about his fight with the Pope. But this has real-world consequences, and we'll get there in a minute.

So I think that's number one. But I think one of the reasons this is getting underneath the skin of people like Vance and Trump and Johnson is that there's a moral authority coming into play here that other people will listen to. And I'm not the first one to say that — there's been a lot of folks who've offered that idea.

But if we go back to just war, we have this framework of, "Well, if you have to wage war, here's how you do it." And it is a long tradition, and it does offer a kind of way to understand how to engage in conflict if that's what you have to do. Now, I don't think you or I are here to defend the Catholic Church. We're not here to defend Augustine. But I want to just go through — and we don't get to do this very often — can I just take you through a very basic Thomistic point? Thomas Aquinas.

Dan: Are you ready for this? So excited.

Brad: So Augustine is pretty much the progenitor of just war theory. There are a lot of other folks who pick up on it, but I'm going to mention Aquinas, and then I'm going to mention Peter Lombard. This is just a great day. It's really great.

So Aquinas works on this idea that evil and sin are a lack, okay —

Dan: Privation theory of being. It's a lack of being. It's not a substantive being in its own right. Yes.

Brad: Just a Thomistic pro on the other end of the mic over here. Evil is a privation of being. It's a lack. It is something that you don't have. So war for Aquinas and war for the just war tradition is always a lack of peace. Now it may be a necessary evil, but it is always an evil. It is always —

Dan: Necessary or unavoidable, but always — it's never good. It's never a positive.

Brad: And there were even medieval theologians like Lombard and others who would say, look, yes, if you have to go into war, you go into war, but if you kill someone in war, you might have to do penance for quite some time, because you've killed someone. So what we get with just war theory is the idea that you only wage war if you have to. You only wage war if you've been attacked first. You only enter into war if you have no other viable alternative. And when you do that, you don't kill civilians. When you do that, you use proportionality. You don't threaten to drop bombs such that you end somebody's civilization.

So if we wanted to do a scorecard — like have Dana White at the podium scoring whether or not this lines up with just war theory — Trump's conflict in Iran, I think, would get a zero out of ten in terms of checking any of the boxes for a just war. There is no sense in which JD Vance, a Catholic, has any ground to stand on here, or Mike Johnson, a Protestant, when they mentioned the Pope and just war. Not only is it an affront — as a Catholic, from JD Vance, to the Holy Father — but their theology is also just poor, because there's no stick to stand on here when it comes to arguing that whatever is happening in Iran is a just war. There's just not. And Trump can say all he wants, "Well, I guess the Pope wants a nuclear weapon" — that is just a red herring. Nobody thinks Iran has a nuclear weapon right now. Their capability has been diminished. I mean, it's a complete false — it's not real.

So those are my initial thoughts: this does not line up with just war in any sense. It does not fit any of the criteria. And I think Johnson and Vance kind of think they can just fire back at the Pope in a way that might be effective. And I think this is going to truly backfire on them. Anyway, further thoughts on this. I want to get into a couple more things when it comes to the Pope and Trump. What else have you got after taking a break?

Dan: Some more things, I think, related to what you're saying. One is — being a person of a certain age — the last time this came up in the U.S. context was with the war in Iraq. And the same question came up then, because it was a war of preemption. The just war thing came up, and it was much more muddied for people, because there was this argument that there was a kind of imminent threat from Iraq. The difference is, the Trump administration keeps saying that, but they haven't given any evidence of anything. You had the Bush administration trying to show that there were WMDs in Iraq and all of that — of course, that all ended up being false and misleading, and there are questions about whether they knew it was false or not. But the point is, there was an effort to meet the standard of just war theory and say it was preemptive but it was an act of self-defense, etc. You don't even have that here. You've just had this blind invocation of the concept.

And there are a number of things here, but one is that Mike Johnson and JD Vance — they're like the undergrad who, I don't know, read the intro textbook thing and throws out some big words. And maybe to some regular person out there, they're like, "Oh, just war theory, Ordo Amoris, you're using Latin terms and things, that must be big." Only this time they went up against the PhD. Like the professor. The person who teaches the doctrine —

Brad: The distinguished professor who's written ten books, who's like, "Oh okay, let me tell you what that means."

Dan: So I think there's just — on one hand — they are just telling them where they're in over their heads. I think they picked a fight with the wrong person. If you want to argue with somebody about just war theory, don't go poking at the Pope of all people, or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. So there's that piece.

I think we've seen this play before, and it's worth noting. It shows all kinds of things about the Trump administration — whether it's just hubris, whether it's a disinterest in learning lessons from the past, of not having looked at the Bush administration and what happened with the war in Iraq on this very issue and so on.

To your other point about the division within MAGA land: I think it's significant because you have a weird coalescence here. On one hand, you already had a lot of that super hardcore America First piece of MAGA that never liked this military action in Iran. They saw this as a violation of what Trump said — America First, not being interventionist. And you've also had a certain subset of American Catholics who have sort of been moving in MAGA circles. You've got the hard-line JD Vance "rad trad" Catholics, but you've got some others who are sort of there, but they care about what the Pope says. They have an intuition that this feels weird. And so you have this expansion of some of those schisms — or those splits — that you're talking about. On one hand, a kind of super nationalist America First piece, but also a certain kind of Catholic American, a certain kind of Catholic voter who now is not comfortable with what is going on, partly because the Pope said this, but partly because Trump and Vance are busy yelling at the Pope. And I think that that's an interesting dynamic to continue watching as we go forward.

Brad: Well, if you don't think that's real, Robert P. Jones has a great piece at Substack today about this, and he shows you that white Catholic voters are people that do flip. We've talked a lot about Latino voters. We've talked a lot about religious Latino voters and Black voters, but white Catholic voters are not white evangelical voters. If you look at 2016, 2020, and 2024, there is some movement there. We'll see that, I think, now going into the midterms.

So if you think that this is just a lock — that a white Catholic in Worcester, Massachusetts, or in Pittsburgh, or wherever across the country is just going to be on the side of the President here — there is a sense of, "Well, no."

And I think — before we move on — I want to touch on JD Vance, and I think this is going to play into some stuff you've been talking about with Josh Hawley. Why would JD Vance say this so flippantly? Like, can he be this dumb? So I just want to take a minute on JD Vance here if you don't mind. Like, why would JD say this? Even for a Catholic convert who's not been a Catholic for very long, to come out and say that the Pope should be careful, or the Pope should stick to matters of morality — it's just breathtaking in its imbecility. But also, it's like, read the room. He's the kind of guy who walks into a funeral and is like, "Oh, bad traffic getting here, huh, everyone?" And you're like, "Bro, Aunt Joan died. Shut up about the traffic."

Why would he say this? And I think one thing that you and I really want to touch on — and we've touched on for a long time on the show — is that for a certain person, Christian nationalism, the conversion to Catholicism on JD's part, the 36-year-old dad who goes to the megachurch in his neighborhood even though he's never been a Christian and now all he can talk about is how he is truly Charlie Kirk — there's a deep sense to me there that especially men in those categories are buying into a worldview of authority, of order, of "as a man, I have a great place in this framework. I'm the head of the household. I have power, I have reverence, and I get to impose on the world" — this sense of right and wrong, good and bad, clean and dirty, us and them.

Like, when I see the Mark Wahlbergs of the world out there being super Catholic these days, or the Chris Pratts, when I see especially white men — but not just white men — who are in their 30s and 40s and 50s going down this road, I always think, "Oh, your Christianity is going to be a Christianity of order and authority and imposition." It's never that contemplative, vulnerable, "Oh, you started reading Thomas Merton. Oh, you discovered Meister Eckhart. Oh, you really got into the idea of peace and a radical kingdom of God." No, it's always going to be these dudes who are super into a certain way of being. And here's the thing — if we did a little word bubble, the words that would come up would be like: father, husband, Christian, American, patriot, heritage, tradition, history, bourbon, whiskey, cigar, mahogany. Like, those are the words that would come up. Anyway, you've been talking about this with Josh Hawley. I'm sure you've got more eloquent ways to say this than me.

Dan: There's a few things. One — you talk about why would JD Vance say this — I think one thing is also the way that he says it. That sort of casual drop. One piece of it is just the casualness that's supposed to pass as knowledge. "I can just throw this out because I know a lot about it." And you're like, "Cool, what do you know about it? Like, what is it? Can you explain it to me?" And of course, he wouldn't be able to.

But I think there's this thing — so I'm going to back up again. As you said, this is the religion scholar's day. There's an old, old kind of philosophy of religion question or conundrum, and it predates Christianity. Ancient Greek thinkers posed this question, but it comes into Christianity too: does God do what is right because it's right, or does something become right because God does it or wills it? And it's this fundamental debate that cuts through the whole Christian tradition and it's still sort of there. In other words, when God commands something, does he do it because it's the right thing to do — and if God is supremely good, of course he's going to will the good? Or is it just because he is all powerful, so anything he wills by definition is good because he wills it?

JD Vance and his Catholicism, lots of forms of Protestantism, the Pete Hegseths of the world, so many of the "bro" return-to-Christianity that you're describing — it answers it that latter way. Whatever God does is good because God is a God of order and power. Not "God is a good God who uses order and power to bring about the good." God is all powerful. God is power. And so anything that God wills or empowers becomes good.

And I think what that means is that once you adopt that theology, it's not a long stretch to say, "Well, whatever is an exercise of power is good. If God is power and God does things and that makes it good, then if we exercise power and we impose order through power, that becomes good. That becomes our God." And I think that is part of the draw of this when you have the most privileged segments of society latching on to this theology, as you're highlighting.

But I think that's also why you get this notion — I think it is inconceivable to JD Vance or Mike Johnson or Pete Hegseth that you could have an American war that would be unjust. Why? Because it's an act of power. The fact that it's an act of power, and it's something that America is doing — imposing an order on the world, bringing order into chaos, all the language that they'll use — means that by definition, it becomes good and it's just. It's just a simple slide of the idolatry of Christian nationalism. It's the nation as God. That's what Christian nationalism extols — not really "we're a bunch of Christians, we're going to retake our nation," but the nation becomes God. American power is the god of Christian nationalism. And that's why —

Brad: Dare I say, the leader becomes Jesus? I don't know, Dan, is that — I mean, that's crazy.

Dan: You get this kind of inversion of just war theory, where by definition, anything America does is just. And we could just go from there.

Brad: I think that's right. So one thing JD Vance asks, in his typical reply-guy manner in this whole thing, is, "Did the church oppose World War Two and fighting the Nazis? Did the church oppose D-Day and liberation and all that?" And you know, Vincent Miller — he's a Catholic theology chair at the University of Dayton — he spoke to America magazine this week and he says, "Look, the church condemned the conduct of total war in World War Two, such as the obliteration bombing of cities" —

Dan: Exactly what Trump was threatening to do to Iran.

Brad: Yes, exactly. Like, Miller goes on: "The Vice President's answer shows he has much to learn about what the church actually teaches about peace and war." So JD wants to give you the reply-guy — "Whoa, what about D-Day? Is the Pope going to be against that? What about liberating Dachau?" — and it's like, actually, when grown-ups do theology, it's nuanced and complex. When grown-ups do ethics and try to figure out right and wrong, it's nuanced and complex because that's how the world is. But additionally, JD tried to reply-guy the Pope, and he just looks like that smug 41-year-old who thinks he knows everything, and I think he looks really, really stupid here.

I want to take a break, and then I want to come back and take exactly what you said about the nation becomes God, and I want to apply it to Pete Hegseth and his viral Pulp Fiction moment. We'll be right back.

Okay, so everybody by now has seen the fact that Pete Hegseth prayed a prayer that came from Pulp Fiction. And first of all, shout out to the guy who's been on this from the beginning, and that is Brian Kaylor. Brian Kaylor dropped this. He broke the story. He's been paying attention to the worship services at the Pentagon. He is the guy. If you want to thank anybody, it's Brian Kaylor at Word & Way. He is the one. So Brian Kaylor, come get your flowers. Come to the podium, please, because you're the one who gave us this.

So he says Hegseth, when he prays the prayer, the prayer is titled CSAR 25:17 — which stands for Combat Search and Rescue — and alludes to the fact that it borrows some wording from Ezekiel 25:17. So the prayer that Hegseth prays in the viral clip is Combat Search and Rescue 25:17.

Dan: So it's like a stock prayer that's sort of part of the practice of this and so forth.

Brad: Yeah. Now here's my wager, Dan: most people watching or listening to this have seen Colbert make the joke. They've seen YouTube videos, they've heard podcasts. Everybody is making fun of it — the memes, the Facebook, the Instagram. It's everywhere. Pete Hegseth dressed in all manner of different Pulp Fiction characters — Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, everybody. Okay, good for you, Pete.

I'm going to be a little bit of the stick in the mud here and point you to something that I think is the actual story. And that is: yes, it's funny. Make fun of him. Pulp Fiction. Go for it. I don't think he thought this was a Bible verse. I think that's wrong to say. I think if you see like a YouTube video or an Instagram — I don't think he was actually thinking, "This is a Bible verse." I think he thought it was a stock prayer, as you just said, Dan.

But let me read you from Brian Kaylor's Substack on this, at Word & Way. "The last two sentences of the prayer do mirror language from Ezekiel, except the speaker is changed from being God to the commander of the U.S. mission." So when the prayer is prayed — "I will execute great vengeance on them. I will lay vengeance on them" — that language about vengeance, in Ezekiel, it's God. But in the prayer, it's the commander of the U.S. mission — ostensibly the President.

Dan, I don't know — I think I heard you say five minutes ago that in the Christian nationalist understanding of Hegseth, of Vance, of Mike Johnson, the nation becomes God. The leader of the nation becomes the representative of God. And so even Hegseth's prayer — to bring in a prayer where the person speaking about the vengeance is not God, who is the creator of the universe and the judge, the Alpha and the Omega, but is the commander of the U.S. mission — is an even further revelation of how these guys think about faith, the divine, and their ability to say, "Yes, we will go kill people. We will go destroy civilizations. We will attack girls' schools. We will end the lives of 17,000 civilians. And yeah, that's what God wants, because we represent God, and we pray in the voice and name of God when we pray."

Sorry, I know, Dan — we would probably get more clicks, more likes, and more people if we just did a whole "make fun of Hegseth as Uma Thurman or Bruce Willis, Pulp Fiction" thing. I think the actual story is this.

Dan: I got a lot of weird questions, man. Like, so when I first came across this, I first saw the headline of "Pete Hegseth channels Pulp Fiction" or whatever. And I start looking at it, and then I find out that there is this search and rescue prayer that's like a stock thing that's clearly modeled on Pulp Fiction. Like, where the hell did that come from? Like, I don't know — I have not had time to go into the background of who wrote this and who was the Pulp Fiction fan that was like —

Brad: Was somebody trolling Pete Hegseth? Did they want him to look —

Dan: Why is the search and rescue thing all about killing people? That's a whole separate whatever.

But also — once upon a time when I watched Pulp Fiction, and that scene with Samuel L. Jackson where he says this — I remember, as a Bible student at a Southern Baptist college, I was like, "Is that what Ezekiel says? I don't feel like that's what he says." And I remember I went and looked it up. It was like, "Oh, it's like mostly a bunch of made-up stuff and then like an allusion to Ezekiel. Because let's face it, it sounds cooler than what Ezekiel said."

I personally actually think there's a good chance that Hegseth, like, thought that was what the Bible says, because I don't think Pete Hegseth actually cares what the Bible says. I think, like most of these Christian nationalists, when they appeal to the Bible, it's usually virtue signaling. It's stating their tribe. They don't actually know what the Bible says.

But to your point — this isn't isolated to this. I tell undergraduates all the time when they're reading texts, "You've got to be really careful to look for the quotation marks sometimes, because what you're reading — is it what the author is saying? Are they quoting what somebody else is saying? Who's the speaker in the text?" And in the Hebrew Bible, there are lots and lots of passages where you have the prophets — it's in quotation marks — and ostensibly they are conveying a message from God. That's what a prophet is: a messenger. And this is one of those things. So there are often places in the Hebrew Bible where God is the speaker, and even though you get all that first-person language — "I this and that, whatever" — it's God.

But conservative Christians and Christian nationalists do this all the time, where they just invoke the passage — "I will blah, blah, blah, blah, blah" — and be like, "This is how we've been empowered as Christians to do this." And you're like, "Whoa, that was actually — you're quoting God. Like, you are abrogating the role of God. Are you sure? You sure that's okay? Like, you want to go that direction?"

So I think you're exactly correct to pick that up in that prayer. I think you're exactly correct to pick up Hegseth's use of it. I just want to amplify that and say — if we were to do a full discourse analysis of the kinds of passages Christian nationalists use, all these violence and executing judgment and wrath passages — it'd be interesting to go and do a deep dive on how many of those are prophetic quotations of things that God has said that are then simply picked up as the mission of the nation. And then the nation becomes God. God just becomes a kind of empty vessel that you can fill up and try to make it seem legitimate that you're doing that. But nationalism is just a form of the worship of the nation, among other things. That's all it is. And we see that on a regular basis.

Brad: But there's this assumption by these men that of course they have the right to put themselves into the place of the God who's saying in the first person singular, "I wage war."

Dan: God exercises power, wages war — and that's it. "I can wage war and exercise power. Therefore, I'm a divine figure." Here we are.

Brad: That's exactly right. Now, I do want to say — and it may seem silly, but whatever — JD Vance once again continues to attach himself to TP USA, as you said. He made these comments about the Pope at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia. And Matthew Bodie was there — he's somebody who wrote a book on Charlie Kirk, and he was the first one on social media who I saw talking about this. The TP USA event was like a tenth full. Nobody was there. Erika Kirk pulled out — ostensibly saying fears of threats and so forth. But they've said there was no sign of any indication of threats to her.

Dan: If I recall, Dan — and I'm working on memory here, it's not in front of me — I do believe that the Vice President of the United States has a Secret Service detail. Does that strike you as true?

Brad: Yeah, okay, all right. We'll have to check it later. But I do think he has a Secret Service detail. I do think they're probably abreast of all of the threats and intelligence that might come through —

Dan: They'll protect him. They'll let somebody else get assassinated on stage, but — they're just there, yeah. They're not going to sweep the building or anything. They're not going to check everybody for weapons. No, they're not going to do any of that. It was a ridiculous notion, which I'm suggesting means I think there were other reasons why Erika Kirk backed out of the event.

Brad: Well, because no one was there. And I think that's all pretty clear.

I think one of the things we should notice here is that a year ago, it felt as if the onslaught from the Trump administration was unbearable and unrelenting, and we would never be able to fight back. And a year later, we are in a place where there is utter chaos in this administration — period. The numbers for the midterms look terrible. There is no momentum on any front: the economy, foreign policy, the religious front. There is just division all over the board. And TP USA, which was once the beacon and hope of the younger generation of Christian nationalists in this country — that looked, after Charlie Kirk's death, like it was going to be this behemoth, this juggernaut — is having things like this happen. And JD Vance has continued to attach himself to it.

You know, who hasn't lashed out at the Holy Father, Dan, after being stood up on a date? I mean, if you're trying to cheat on your spouse and meet up with your, you know, your paramour, and they don't show up, you're gonna get mad and you're gonna start yelling stuff you don't mean. And I think maybe we should just give JD the benefit of the doubt. Erika Kirk didn't show up. He was hurt. He was feeling vulnerable. He started saying things he didn't mean. Maybe he'll realize that later. I don't know.

Let's take a break, and last one of the day, we'll come back and we'll do an extended segment on Hegseth and then on the back-bench Republicans trying to defend Trump.

Okay, Dan, here's a piece of what we just talked about: nation as God, men of authority who take the role of God in the nation because they think they represent power and authority, a deity that is an empty vessel just for men to wage war and imposition and conflict. And I can already see the emails now. I can see the folks in our mentions on Facebook — people who are like, "You guys are ridiculous. You have Trump Arrangement Syndrome. You're just angry ex-evangelicals." And I just — you know what, maybe they're right. So I want to give Pete Hegseth the chance to defend himself and just see if he would even ever consider comparing Donald Trump to God or Jesus. Like, I just want — Pete, let's be fair. You have your say. Go ahead. Here's Pete talking about it.

Pete Hegseth [Clip]: "Our press are just like these Pharisees — not all of you, not all of you, but the legacy Trump-hating press. Your politically motivated animus for President Trump nearly completely blinds you from the brilliance of our American warriors. The Pharisees scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative. The hardened hearts of our press are calibrated only to impugn. I would ask you to open your eyes to the goodness, the historic success of our troops, the courage of this President, and this historic moment — for a deal that could end the Iranian nuclear threat, the incredible battlefield victory laid before your eyes, the not one, but two incredible rescue missions — miracles, you might say."

Brad: So, according to Pete Hegseth, the press in the United States are the Pharisees. Now, I want to just say clearly that his conception of the Pharisees is a supersessionist, borderline anti-Semitic understanding of the Pharisees. In certain brands of Christianity, the Pharisees are always sort of seen as these enemies of Jesus and God. But the Pharisees historically were much different than that. There's a much more complex picture to the Pharisees than whatever Pete Hegseth or a Christian nationalist pastor is telling you. So that's one — I'm not going to go in on that forever.

But two, Dan, he says the press doesn't recognize basically the miracles that are happening. Like, the Pharisees are the ones who see Jesus heal people and are like, "Nah, he didn't do that." The press sees the miracles of Trump. So in this story, Pete — Trump is Jesus. I mean, Trump wouldn't dare compare himself to Jesus. Wait a minute — okay, it seems as if, Dan, it kind of seems as if the nation is God, the leader of the nation is the Messiah, and Hegseth and Johnson and Vance are just willing to go into a kind of public sphere and argue for that on a Christian nationalist basis. Pete Hegseth said it himself. Thoughts here before we go to the back-benchers.

And they're telling the Pope to stay out of politics.

Dan: Just to add — this isn't new. We've heard the Messianic stuff about Trump since the first administration. He's Cyrus the Persian, allowing the Jewish people to return to their homeland. He's going to bring religion back to America. It was explicitly Messianic language that was used about him. Remember the whole thing with him signing the Bibles, autographing Bibles and all of that stuff? And now we have this. Like, this is not new. This is just more. And so it's almost weirder that people this week are like, "Oh my gosh, how dare you compare Trump to Jesus" — like, they've been comparing Trump to Jesus for like ten years, man. This isn't new. It's maybe more explicit, but it's not going anywhere. And as you say, it's like example after example. We could not make it up if we had to.

Brad: Franklin Graham, on Twitter: "I do not believe President Trump would knowingly depict himself as Jesus Christ. That would certainly be inappropriate. I'm thankful that he took it down or made it clear that that's not what he intended." Sharp rebuke. Sharp rebuke. Okay, cool. Megan Basham said the same thing, paraphrasing, so whatever.

I just think that if you want to take a thesis away from today, it's this idea that if you turn the nation into God, you turn the leader of the nation into the Messiah and into the divine figure. And then you have to defend that. And if anybody says otherwise — like the Pope says, "This is immoral, this is not right, actually God is not with you on this" — you get so threatened that if you're JD Vance, or you're Mike Johnson, or you're Pete Hegseth, you just start losing it. And that is what I think we've seen this week.

So, all right. Now this all trickles down. We all know that once Trump says something, they have to write up talking points, and then go find people to sort of defend this and articulate like some kind of rationale for what is happening. So Trump's picked a fight with the Pope. Here's Troy Nehls, a representative from Texas, talking about his take on what's happened with the Pope and the back and forth of comments.

Troy Nehls [Clip]: "Any reaction to Donald Trump's comments on the Pope over the weekend? I've probably — I see the Pope needs to keep his business into leading his flock, so to speak — leading the church — and probably stay out of the political arena. He doesn't need to be getting involved in the political arena. Go lead your church, but stay out of the politics. We didn't elect the Pope to be the President or anything else. So just keep his nose in the church's business and stay out of the political arena."/p>

Interviewer [Clip]: "What if he sees his role as sort of —"

Troy Nehls [Clip]: "Lead his flock. Well, let's focus on just behavior, doing everything else. Just focus on your flock. And Donald Trump is our President. It's not the Pope. I didn't elect the Pope to be President."

Brad: Smoking a cigar, looking smug and tough and machismo as he walks up the steps. Swagger, John Wayne. "I just think you should stick to his own flock. Lead your church, and we'll take care of the world." The Marlboro Man walks into Congress. Thanks, Troy. Appreciate that.

Here's Elise Stefanik, who lost like three jobs — I think Elise thought she was going to be in the Pam Bondi role or the Marco Rubio role, and now she's on CNN arguing with Deborah Brown about the Pope.

Elise Stefanik [Clip]: "Republicans who are Catholic should also be coming home. It should not be — attacking the Pope, from my perspective, should not be engaging in political attacks. I don't want to see the Pope as a politician. I want to see the Pope continue to focus on this resurgence that we're seeing in the gospel. As he has said, 'I'm not getting involved in politics and focusing on the gospel.'"

Interviewer [Clip]: "You don't see it that way?"

Elise Stefanik [Clip]: "I don't believe that the Pope should function as a politician. President Trump is a political leader, and he is a strong political leader. So I was disappointed to see that attack from the Pope, and I know CNN wants to continue to focus on these tweets. This is what has been happening for the past ten years. Look at the results. Look at the historically historic number of support from Catholics for President Trump, from Catholics for House Republicans as well."

Brad: Now if we want to top it off, here is Donald Trump's really good friend, Sean Hannity, theologian par excellence. Give it to us, Sean.

Sean Hannity [Clip]: "But right on cue, Pope Leo the Fourteenth is now seemingly more interested in spreading left-wing politics than the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. As the AP put it, quote, 'Pope Leo amplified his condemnation of America's conflict with Iran, saying that God does not bless any conflict and certainly doesn't side with those who drop bombs.' Well, first, that is simply not biblically accurate. The Bible contains over 400 references to war, frequently depicting God as authorizing, commanding, intervening in battles — like one that we all know, the battle between David and Goliath. Why is the Pope twisting religion to specifically attack only President Trump and the U.S.? Why did he recently meet with top Obama adviser David Axelrod and the far-left governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker? Is it because he is a run-of-the-mill, Trump-hating Democrat that lacks moral clarity about radical Islam? By the way, did he talk to them about abortion? Well, in that case, you know, where are the pointed words for Iran — this evil regime, the number one state sponsor of terror?"

Brad: All three of them are giving us the line that the Pope should stay out of politics. And I could talk for sixteen hours about this. I want to make a very clear point as we start to head toward the last fifteen or twenty minutes of today.

Christian nationalists will always say things like, "We didn't elect a pastor. Stay out of politics." But they will never say, "We did not elect a pastor, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Mike Johnson — so you stay out of theology. You stay out of faith." Christian nationalism works on a one-way street. It gives more and more theological and religious authority to the government, and it takes less and less away from actual Christian institutions.

And Christian nationalists are so happy when the government — the leader of the nation, which, as you just said, Dan, represents God — approves of them. So yesterday, Sean Feucht, the Christian nationalist troubadour with Sideshow Bob hair, was at the White House leading worship, and they're singing songs that come from Bethel. They love when the government, as God, approves of them. Mike Johnson — do you remember when he became Speaker of the House, he compared himself to Moses? Pete Hegseth is praying prayers where the commander of the war is in the place of God, saying, "We will get vengeance on you." But when the Pope says something about morality and war ethics, it's like, "Bro, stick to your lane."

Christian nationalism is bad for the religious and the non-religious alike, because what it does is give all the power to the government to decide what is good religion and what's good Christianity. And it says that the politician, the President, the congressman, can tell the religious leader: "Stay in your lane over there. But we are going to take over your lane and ours. We're going to be theologians. We're going to be politicians. We're going to be ethicists. We're going to be totalitarian in our approach to what we tell people and how they should live." But they have one single lane — that's what they tell everybody. They told LeBron James to shut up and dribble. They kind of just told the Pope to shut up and shepherd this week. What do you think?

Dan: I think you got another t-shirt: Shut Up and Shepherd. Shut up and shepherd. We have all these "shut up and" t-shirts that like you and I and like two other people wear, and nobody knows what they mean. But when the four of us get together at a live event, it's going to be awesome.

Brad: It's just like LeBron James's body but with the Pope's face, and he's not dribbling.

Dan: Yeah, so — I think it circles around to another point when we talk about Christian nationalism. And I know you've gotten this question, I've gotten this question: where people say, "Well, how come other Christians don't speak up? How come other Christians don't get involved? Why do they let them speak for them?"

And what it highlights is that Christian nationalism is not about Christianity. It's about a very certain conception of Christianity, and only that kind of Christian gets to play a role. And that's what we see. I mean, I'm not going to take sides on sort of Christian debates about true or authentic Christianity or whatever, but it would be a weird statement for most people to be like, "Yeah, the Pope's not Christian." I understand certain kinds of Protestants would do that, but I'm like, okay, I'm not going to question his credentials to call himself a Christian.

But the Pope doesn't matter. The Pope's not the right kind of Christian. Christians protesting in Minneapolis are not the right kinds of Christians. Christians decrying immigration policies — they're not the right kinds of Christians. Christians who affirm the LGBTQ population and help relocate them to cities and states where they can be safe — not the right kinds of Christians, not real Americans. They're all fake.

So there's that piece of this too — when people say, "Well, why don't other Christians who think things differently change things?" This is why they get defined out of Christianity, out of American identity and so forth. So much so that Trump, in his long response, even said that he's the only reason there is an American Pope. The church just wanted to come after him and thought they could control Trump with an American Pope. So, other Christians need not apply. There is no space for any other kind of vision of Christianity.

And so, yeah — I have students who ask like, "Well, wasn't Obama a Christian?" Yeah, still is probably, as far as I know. Biden, Christian, right? But not the right kinds. And so they don't count. The Pope of all people — not the right kind, doesn't count. And so they're just dismissed. And when people wonder about the obvious hypocrisy of that — how in the world does a Mike Johnson of all people be like, "Yeah, you really ought to keep religion out of politics"? Like, you're literally legislating from the Bible, man. What are you talking about?

Brad: Somebody asked him, "What is your worldview?" And he said, "Bible." And you're like, "Well, okay, what? How?"

Dan: Yeah, "But let's keep religion out of politics" — as the Speaker of the House, the highest-ranking Republican in Congress. "I'm going to invoke — not the Constitution — the Bible." But nope, nope, nope, hey, keep religion out of politics.

Brad: But what I'm always trying to explain is: they will tell pastors and the Holy Father, "Keep yourself out of politics." But nobody's allowed to tell them to keep religion out of their politics. It's a one-way street.

And what I think everyday Catholics are feeling — if you wanted to give an analytical category to it — is that JD Vance, Mike Johnson, and Donald Trump are saying to you, "Your religion is not legitimate. It is not authorized. It is not good religion, because it comes from the Pope, who we have just defined out of actual true gospel Christianity. Sorry." And that's the position you're putting Catholics in. It's like, "Okay, so now, if I go that way, it's not real Christianity, and it's bad Christianity. It's not authorized by the divine figure who's the head of my country." And some of them are going to go with Trump — don't get me wrong, I've already seen the posts. Some of them are going to go MAGA on this. But not all of them.

And before we move on — do you remember way back at Easter, like two weeks ago, when Pete Hegseth had a Protestants-only service? The fissures of the historical Protestant persecution of Catholics in the United States — the ghosts of that are here in real ways. That's undeniable.

So I think that's just — it's incredible to hear Mike Johnson, the leader of the Congressional Caucus of the GOP, say "stay in your lane." Or JD Vance — these are guys that want to legislate birth control. JD Vance wants there to be blue laws. And you know what, I think we kind of need, Dan — and I will close on this, and then we'll go to reasons for hope — I just wonder if it's maybe time in this country for a task force. You know what I mean? To really investigate this, because it seems dangerous. We have the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the press — they're all saying negative things about a Christian leader. And Troy Nehls, the marble man, and Elise Stefanik and Sean Hannity — they're also picking on Christians. Do you think it's time for an anti-Christian bias task force or something like that, that could really get to the bottom of this political persecution of American Christians? Because it feels dangerous. We might need a task force.

Dan: The Pope is an American Christian. They're limiting his religious freedom. Yeah, so we ought to go — yeah, definitely. There was a task force to try to defend the violations of Christian conscience and freedom in America. If only some administration could do that.

Brad: As silly as I'm being, the point is made: the Christian task force only investigates anti-Christian rhetoric or actions that the state — and the god-like figure at the head of it — deems to be anti-Christian. They decide what's anti-Christian. And then when you attack them, when you criticize them, when you critique them — even if you are the Pope — they're like, "Oh no, no, you're not Christian. You're not Christian. We will persecute you, and the task force is actually going to come after you rather than try to defend you." Do you see how Christian nationalism works? Do you see why it's bad for atheists, for Hindus, for Buddhists, for agnostics, for humanists — but also for Christians? It's bad for everybody. Because you turn the nation into a God and you turn the leader into a Messiah. What's your reasons for hope, Dan?

Dan: So I'm gonna make one more point, then I'm gonna — it's gonna segue into my reason for hope. I'm sure it's gonna be smooth and seamless, as all of my segues are.

Brad: A privation of being — you know when it's right.

Dan: Yeah, it was not approaching the highest good. It was not approximating that. So — you talked about the loss or the potential erosion of Catholic support. I think one piece of this is, for example, Catholic blue-collar Americans — all those union members, all those blue-collar Americans in Catholic districts that used to be reliably Democratic, that have shifted Republican over time. Why do they vote for Trump? They voted because of the economy. Some of those Catholics, when they're now being told "You're not really good Americans because you're Catholic" — and oh, by the way, the same Pete Hegseth who's busy not having Easter Mass, who's not doing these things, is also the same one who, this week, invalidated union contracts in the Department of Defense. So you get the intersection of these things. Not only is there the anti-Catholic piece, but you have the utter failure of the Trump administration to deliver on its economic promises, which is what drew a segment of that Catholic population to Trump in 2024. And I think that's a real thing.

That leads me to my reason for hope, which just basically — and I want to preface this by saying I am aware that all of these things have a real human cost, and I am not saying that they are good things, but we are looking for reasons for hope. Here is one: the Trump administration has lost the plot. They continue to be lost. As you're saying, they're foundering. It looks like the wheels are coming off.

This week, another story that went almost completely unnoticed was Tax Day. And Tax Day — I'm just going to throw this out there — sucked for me this year. We owed a lot of taxes, so I was very aware that it was Tax Day. But the Republicans are trying — they're trying to tout the one big beautiful bill, which it turns out didn't give the kind of savings that they thought it would, and didn't do the things that they thought it was going to do. But they were supposed to be pivoting and emphasizing that. And Trump was — remember when he's gonna be talking about affordability and all these things? We have been hearing that for months and months at this point. And I remember hearing, "Well, you know, it's still a year out from the midterms, there's a lot of time to turn this around. We're confident that American voters are going to get behind this." Well, we're now almost halfway there — still seven months from the midterms — and there's just no sign of being able to recover those themes that they want to recover, because they're busy picking fights with the Pope. They're busy participating in unpopular wars. And again, there are real costs to those things. I'm not celebrating that.

But I do think that as we continue to swing toward the summer and then into the fall and the midterms, watching this administration be as rudderless and aimless and incapable of doing anything that it needs to do — I think it continues to be a reason for hope as we look to what I think is a really, really important election.

Brad: All right, I'm going to give you some reasons for hope from our Discord. Our Discord is lit, and we've got a lot of amazing people in there every week. So Dawson posts an article from The Guardian about the Trump administration agreeing to keep flying the Pride flag at the Stonewall monument, which is awesome. Andrea posts that a 96-year-old woman has enlisted her 150-pound dog to plant her spring flowers. You know, that may seem small, but Barbara Collins and Chewie her dog — they're getting the flowers planted. And in a year that has felt like the little, beautiful, joyful things like planting flowers are not going to happen — Barbara and Chewie are doing that this year.

Something that is a little more on brand for us: Democrats have filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth. We'll see what happens there. The special election in New Jersey happened, and predictably, the Democrat won. That's to replace the now-governor of New Jersey. Nathan put in that. The Montana Supreme Court rules that it's entirely constitutional in their state to protect trans people. So those are all great things. There's more we could mention, but I'll stick to those.

All right, y'all, thanks for being here. Thanks for your support. We can't wait to see you next week. I'll be at an event on April 23 with Matt Taylor, Julie Ingersoll, Sarah Posner — you can find that at axismundi.us if you want to come hang out. Be back next week with the Sunday interview, with some great content early in the week. It's in the Code, the weekly roundup — it's all there. Go visit our website, sign up for our newsletter, subscribe, like, and tell people about us. We need your help, especially on our YouTube channel. Thanks for being here. We'll catch you next time.

Dan: Thanks, Brad.