Trump as Rival Pontiff?
Weaponizing Apostasy to Entertain Bored Evangelicals
Dear Reader,
Outrage mockingly soothed by the outrageous is a recipe for a Reign of American Terror not yet known to the world. Under Robespierre, French Terrorisme was a government policy similar to Trump’s policies designed to terrify immigrants and other disfavored groups. Trump appears to be trying to remake the French Terror in America by feeding the fires of American rage through apostasy dressed up as religious devotion.
For example, this image was posted by President Trump on Truth Social along with a tirade about Pope Leo XIV that seemed to be intended, despite later explanations, as an unconstitutional rival claim of religious sovereignty over Americans.[1] Prior to this post, several of the Pope’s American bishops commented publicly about the Trump administration’s sickening use of Hollywood movies and video games to glamorize the war in Iran as entertainment. Likewise, all lawyers should condemn Trump’s attempt to mutate administrative adjudication into a form of social media entertainment through Lisa Cook’s case, without an enabling act.
Imagine, you make an administrative claim for monetary benefits involving sick pay, or something else reasonable and contractually required. Then, without legal justification, the President reroutes your claim to Truth Social. He ominously posts a similar AI created image with the President as Jesus laying hands on your head. You are already healed, the Truth Social post proclaims in a statement publicizing the decision in your matter. Case dismissed.
This example might be facetious, if it were not already the case that Edward Coristine, a.k.a. “Big Balls,” was deputized as a sort of vigilante in the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”), without an enabling act. Many purged federal workers are facing a panoply of absurd realities, because of the President’s unilateral activities without statutory basis. Among other things, the President’s administration (1) delayed and/or denied benefits legally due to many retiring employees who were incentivized to leave; (2) falsely recorded several living people as dead in order to cancel their benefits; (3) perpetually categorized immigrants as arriving so that they can perpetually be detained; and (4) administratively granted white supremacist Afrikaners refugee status because the end of apartheid in South Africa was, apparently, grounds for “a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”[2]
Despite the fact that the Supreme Court is majority Catholic, Justice Barrett and potentially others on the Court defend the secular affirmation of death penalty decisions that are, presumably, against their private religious beliefs. The other Catholics on the Court may similarly see themselves operating in a fallen, Protestant experiment that requires them to artificially deny their better judgments to make room for Hobbesian concepts of sovereignty anathema to the intent of the American Founders and Framers. In the face of the Biblical prophecy in Revelation, the prophecy that Trump appears to follow comes from the atheist philosopher Thomas Hobbes who envisioned a real life Game of Thrones to establish a global society with one absolute ruler, which the Court Catholics might interpret as, basically, Protestant.
The Catholic judges may be, essentially, feeding America to the wolves, or the Wolf King as some of the Protestants call Donald Trump. They may interpret American sovereignty, in Hobbesian terms, as ultimately tracing back to the President according to “the chain of dependence” they invented in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB. Yet, the apostasy of large swathes of both Catholic and Protestant groups in America in favor of Trump-as-God, or at least Trump-as-new-Pope, appears to amount to nothing more than a product of boredom. Jesus was not entertaining enough, so several Evangelicals intentionally voted for Satan to bring in the end times for funsies.
Trump seems to have fit himself into an Evangelical demand for a Satanic figure to kick the rapture off that was created and promoted by B-level entertainers in the late 90s and early 00s with very little actual grounding in the Bible. At the same time, Trump actively deceives Christians to believe he is a Christian, or at least that he is redeemable and wants to be redeemed, without producing any of the fruits of the Spirit. Some actually think he is God’s chosen.
But Trump knows it was B-level Hollywood film entertainment that created him, and that unbiblical legends of the rapture, popularized by the Left Behind book and movie franchise, currently empower him. As the great Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor noticed, the Bible says that it is the body that will be resurrected in a glorified state to live on a new earth foretold in a passage of Isaiah 11 where God proclaims “on all my holy mountain” there will be no violence. According to the actual Bible, the new earth is to be inherited by the meek, apparently, not the ostentatious.
And thus, in order to counter these actual Bible passages with anti-biblical images of rapture and the end times that fit a Hobbesian gospel, Trump must lay a claim upon Hollywood glamor to make it seem “Christian” to many Americans for the President to go to war in Iran. The goal of many of Trump’s constituents seems to be to spark a war that ends in a final battle in Israel’s Megiddo Valley where they hope to witness some real angels and demons squaring off over the fate of humanity. As noted in my previous post, the Ellison family is cornering the market to sell tickets to what will surely be an Israeli-hosted UFC-style match between good and evil, largely to entertain American Evangelicals who are too bored with Jesus to make peace.
In all this hubbub motivated by American greed and boredom, the First Amendment is getting lost in the mix. Evangelical America’s passionate lust for images of beauty and divine retribution against America’s perceived enemies appears to be working to sink any resistance Americans could have otherwise maintained against this clearly unconstitutional establishment of religion. In my next post, I will explain the role of Trump’s proposed total breach of the separation of church and state, including relevant First Amendment standards as they currently exist, in order to understand the role of Trump’s apostasy in his administration’s resurrection of the king’s feudal “justice” as the President’s “justice” at the expense of the American judiciary.
Yours Respectfully,
Joshua J. Schroeder, Esq.
[1] Compare, the White House’s re-post of Trump-as-Pope and its post of Trump-as-king.