What Pope Francis Shows us about Trump

The strange thing about the death of Pope Francis is that, when I saw the news alert, I was just gazing at a Reuters photograph of President Trump in an excellent Daily Beast piece by Michael Daly about an old real-estate feud with the Pritzker family that helps fuel Trump’s hatred of Harvard (where Penny Pritzker leads the board). The close-up of Trump, taken by Reuters photojournalist Evelyn Hockstein at the White House last week, stopped me in my tracks. It’s the very image of the devil.

Holy fuck, I was thinking as I gazed on this personification of hell-bent malevolence in front of a burning white candle with a gleam of mammon’s gilt behind him. Lucifer is in the White House.

And then the pope died.

Paging Nostradamus or J.R.R. Tolkien! Please give us a spiritual lens to interpret this unsettling sequence of events. Francis was, as Joe Perticone in The Bulwark put it, a decent man in indecent times. Are we doomed to live in Mordor now?

As our snarling, rage-filled president systematically strips every agent of goodness and humanitarian assistance from America’s democratic systems and ships off random civilians to penal infernos with no due process, Pope Francis, who devoted his mission to the poorest among us, who chose not to live in the grandeur of the papal apartments but instead in a modest Vatican guesthouse, and who, despite his extreme frailty on Holy Thursday met with the discarded souls in Rome’s Regina Coeli prison, and managed to stay alive through Easter before he passed. It felt doubly dark that one of his last visitors was Satan’s minion, JD Vance, the man whose contempt for migrants is the antithesis of Francis, whose first papal visit in 2013 was to the refugee pit stop of Lampedusa Island in the Mediterranean. Francis called the mass deportation of migrants a “shipwreck of civilization.” His final Easter message from St Peter’s balcony was a plea to welcome “those who are different than ourselves and come from distant lands.”

In the UK, people compared Pope Francis’s exit timing to that of Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral, who died just days after she had greeted her fifteenth prime minister, thinking perhaps - from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss, this seems a pretty good time to go. The news that Melania will be accompanying Trump to the pontiff’s funeral in Rome means we will have a twenty-foot mantilla to look forward to.

All this makes me want to perform some global penance for America’s infliction of Trump on the rest of the world, a flagellation perhaps, like King Henry II requested from the monks at Canterbury Cathedral for his ordering of the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. (Soundtrack: medieval Gregorian chant, or, in this case, perhaps the choral arrangement of Trump anthem “Y.M.C.A.”) As we know, anything can happen. If Trump can grab Greenland and Canada and make himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, who says he can’t install himself as pontiff too?