Question: The law says that thirty days before a President fires an inspector general, … he must tell Congress … why. That didn’t happen. [Trump] broke the law!
Answer: Yeah, I think, you know, he should’ve done that. But the question is, is it okay for him to put people in place that he thinks can carry out his agenda? Yeah, he won the election. What do you expect him to do, just leave everybody in place in Washington?
Yes, that sounds like a failed tryout for the freshman debate team at an underfunded high school, or perhaps a stab in the dark by a student who never studied for a civics exam. Astonishingly, however, the questioner was Dana Bash of CNN, while the person who smirked while giving the most obtuse answer possible was a United States Senator.
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, contrary to all evidence, holds a law degree and has long served on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The November 2024 election resulted in Donald Trump taking an oath—without placing his hand on the Bible, which is not required but is revealing—to uphold the Constitution of the United States, which requires the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
But hey, he needs people to “carry out his agenda,” Graham tells us. This is one of the more extreme versions of ends-justify-the-means reasoning that I have come across in quite some time. Worse, he adds an absurd slippery slope argument to claim that following the legally required procedure to remove high-ranking officials from their positions would mean “just leav[ing] everybody in place in Washington.”
Worst of all, Graham relies on the backward justification that winning an election means that a president, rather than being responsible to uphold the Constitution, is above the law. And Trump’s obvious lawlessness is exactly what his detractors talked about during the campaign, only to be told by people like Graham that Trump is merely prone to exaggeration and would never violate the law.
The “constitutional conservatives” who railed against Barack Obama’s supposed pretensions to being a king were obviously spouting nonsense at the time, especially given their approval of Republican presidents’ abuse of signing statements. The hypocrisy was obvious, but no matter how much we anticipated their approval of Trump’s utter lawlessness, the nakedness of the power grab is still difficult to fathom.
The problems do not end there. In the balance of this column, I will discuss two additional ways in which we are in a through-the-looking-glass world. Things truly are as crazy as they seem in terms of the daily barrage of diktats from Trump’s White House, but the underlying degradation of decency and shared ideals is in some ways even worse.
What Would So-Called Jesus Do?
One of the rituals accompanying a presidential inauguration is an interfaith service at the National Cathedral in Washington. This year, the service was again led by Episcopalian Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who made news by including the following plea toward the end of her homily:
Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in both Democratic, Republican and independent families who fear for their lives.
…
[Some immigrants in the United States] may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara and temples.
[H]ave mercy … on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. Help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.
It was hardly a surprise that Trump was triggered and enraged by that moment. He quickly took to social media to complain that the service was “very boring and uninspiring,” which is completely on-brand for that sacrilegious and blasphemous man. Pouring on the playground-level insults, he called Bishop Budde a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” “ungracious,” “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.” In short, he treated the Bishop of Washington the same way that he has treated Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and everyone else who displeases him (especially women, of course).
Trump also sneered at Bishop Budde in one other predictable way, calling her a “so-called Bishop.” Adding “so-called” to any title is one of his tics, another in a long line of tactics taken from the fever swamps of the internet. Just as the Bishop who dared make him unhappy is now a so-called Bishop, judges who displease him are always so-called judges.
Having more than once in my life been labeled a so-called professor by blowhards like Trump, I find this both amusing and odd. This is obviously supposed to be an insult, but why? I am a professor, and I am called that because that is what I am. Trump is a so-called president, Lindsey Graham is a so-called senator, Lebron James is a so-called Laker, and Melania Trump is a so-called wife. Meanwhile, the world wonders what will become of our so-called lives.
Again, however, this is the kind of immaturity that we have long expected to see from Trump in these situations. What I did find truly stunning was the attacks by supposedly religious people—so-called Christians, I guess we can call them—on Bishop Budde. In particular, the so-called Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, spat this out on social media:
Bishop Budde hijacked the National Prayer Service to promote her radical ideology. This was an opportunity to unify the country in prayer, but she used it to sow division. Even worse, she’s continued her political crusade in media interviews. Shameful.
To be clear, Johnson is a so-called Bible-believing man of faith who has been clear about how he views scripture: “Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it.’ That’s my worldview.” As one commentator wrote in a Catholic journal:
Johnson did not say the Bible forms his worldview. He said it is his worldview. The lack of any sense of mediation has stalked Protestantism since Martin Luther nailed his theses to the chapel door in Wittenberg.
Johnson is assuming the meaning of the Bible is uncontested, that his interpretation is the only available one.
But if Johnson thinks that the Bible is clear and unambiguous, and Bishop Budde was quoting the Bible, how did her homily “sow division”? A little more than a year ago on Dorf on Law, I wrote about my own religious background, noting that my father was a Presbyterian minister but that I had ultimately not been moved to religious commitment.
Even so, I emphasized that lapsed Christians and nonbelievers can still look to the Bible for what I called “the good stuff.” That is, if some people can live by the Golden Rule without needing to go to Sunday School, that is great. If others get there through religion, also great. And the teachings of Jesus more broadly, as reported in the New Testament, are truly inspirational—one might even say unifying.
The Sermon on the Mount is a beautiful call to all to seek a greater sense of humanity (including the non-Trumpian call to “turn the other cheek”). Or how about Matthew 25: 34-40?
Then the King will say to those on his right, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” Then the righteous will answer him, saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?” And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
Some people have indeed argued that Jesus was a radical, but clearly not in the sense that so-called Speaker Johnson means it. More to the point, what exactly did Bishop Budde say that was shameful? On culture war issues, Pope Francis once said this: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” I guess the Pope is also “woke”?
To be clear, disagreements between and within religious groups have always been with us. Plenty of Roman Catholics preferred the harsh version of their religion promoted by Francis’s predecessor, and Bishop Budde’s Episcopalian church has endured years of enmity over all kinds of doctrinal and social disagreements.
Again, however, how is this core set of aspirations—The Good Stuff—not truly unifying? The Beatitudes include some of Jesus’s most loving pronouncements—”Blessed are the meek,” and “Blessed are the merciful.” The homily that enraged the Trumpian right was built around calls for mercy toward the meek. Again, was Jesus a radical, woke leftist? I never thought so, but apparently people like Johnson do.
Hijacking Universal Ideals for Partisan Gain is What the Right is Now All About
It is hardly news that Johnson’s branch of Christianity long ago decided to ignore Trump’s manifest personal immorality as part of a political bargain. They wanted political power—first to take away women’s bodily autonomy, but that was obviously only the beginning—so they conveniently jettisoned their long-ago claim that the reason to oppose Bill Clinton was because the Oval Office should not be the workplace of a sinful reprobate. (Imagine the Republicans’ furious response if Barack Obama had not placed his hand on the Bible during his swearing-in ceremony!) They now seem ready to admit out loud that they view Trump’s unchristian hatefulness as a reason to support him, not something to strategically ignore.
Even so, this latest blowup is new. It is no longer a matter of saying that anyone outside of the Christian right misunderstands some aspects of the Bible in some important ways. Now they are saying that one must be as vicious and spiteful as Donald Trump is or be branded a shameful and divisive political crusader. There is no more shared ground, even at the bare minimum of being a decent and humane person. For those who profess their beliefs most loudly, to be Christian now means to mock Jesus’s teachings.
Taking a universal value and claiming it for conservatives’ partisan purposes, unfortunately, is not new. I have spent most of my life wondering how the conservative movement had the nerve to politicize the symbols of patriotism, to the point where simply flying the national flag is widely understood as (at various times) supporting invasions of countries that never attacked the U.S. or overthrowing democratically elected governments.
I have always been proud of the genuinely patriotic version of The Good Stuff—what makes America truly great— including the expansions of voting rights over the country’s history, the end of slavery, and the advances of the various civil rights movements. Sadly, those examples of America’s greatness and goodness seem soon to be relegated to history books. Because of the arrogance of the belligerent right, to say “Yay America” and sing the national anthem somehow became—long before Trump came along—tantamount to declaring a particular (and still very unpopular) political view.
Trump campaigned on “giving people their country back” and, of course, making America great again. Now he flouts the rule of law and takes the country away from those who disagree with him—that is, from the majority of Americans. Meanwhile, he and his supporters continue to try to take Christianity away from everyone else, in ever more extreme ways.
It is enough to make a so-called human being cry.