The less popular Trump gets, the more shameless his open lawlessness becomes. This weekend, an old Trump campaign ad was back on airwaves across the country, with Trump railing against the “communists, Marxists, and fascists,” vowing to expel the “deep state” and “warmongers,” and declaring this “the final battle.”
In 2024, the ad was paid for by the Trump campaign. Now, the ad discloses, it is “paid for by the U.S. Government.” Your tax dollars at work. Happy Monday.
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Do Not Look Away
by William Kristol
When Pope Leo XIV speaks, Americans tend to listen. He is, after all, the first American pope.
On the other hand, there’ve been scores of American cardinals since the first was appointed in 1875. Those of us who aren’t in the Church don’t necessarily hear much about what they have to say.
I read about what Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, said yesterday thanks to Christopher Hale’s excellent newsletter, Letters from Leo, which covers developments in the Catholic Church. Last night, Hale reported on McElroy’s speech at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C.
A word about McElroy. He was born in San Francisco in 1954 and graduated from Harvard in 1975, where he studied history. He took an M.A. in American history the next year at Stanford. He then attended seminary and was ordained in the priesthood in 1980. As a priest, he pursued further studies, earning a degree in moral theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University. His dissertation was on the great liberal American Catholic theologian, John Courtney Murray, whose writings in the mid-twentieth century sought to reconcile Catholicism and American liberal democracy and to ground a defense of religious pluralism and religious freedom in both liberal and Catholic thought.
After rising through the church’s ranks to become bishop of San Diego, McElroy was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2022, and then archbishop of Washington in March 2025. A couple of months later, he participated in the conclave that elected his fellow American, Cardinal Robert Prevost, pope.
As Hale explains, the occasion for McElroy’s speech was the church’s annual day of recognition of migrants and refugees. The cardinal’s text was the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he pulled no punches. We as a nation have not been good Samaritans.
For the last year and a half, the people of the United States have witnessed the suffering of the undocumented in our midst, purposely and strategically magnified by our government, and for the most part, we have simply passed on by.
Indeed, McElroy explained, we have failed to live up to the two great legacies that shape America’s duty to the stranger: the command in Deuteronomy that “you shall not violate the rights of the alien or the orphan,” and the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty. The cardinal deplored the fact that, in the last eighteen months, our country has traded that legacy for “suspicion, division, cruelty, and violence.” And in abandoning the words of Deuteronomy and the Statue of Liberty, “we are losing our soul as a nation.”
McElroy noted that there are more than a million people who had been living here legally who have now lost or are losing temporary protected status. “These refugees never broke any law,” he said. They are being deported because “the bigotry that has often tarnished American immigration history is rampant once again in our nation.”
McElroy’s words particularly hit home for me. I’d returned the day before from the Bulwark event in Dayton, Ohio, on behalf of the Haitian Support Center in nearby Springfield, where we visited Friday afternoon.
It was inspiring to see the fortitude of immigrants we met there. It was heartening to see how many citizens are rallying to their support, coming from elsewhere in Ohio to bring food packages to Haitian families who have lost their work permits so have no income, and who now can’t venture outside their homes for fear of ICE.
It’s also inspiring that so many of you in the Bulwark community have contributed to support the Haitians in Springfield. When I wrote Friday morning, donations amounted to an already impressive $85,000. This morning they stand at more than $340,000.
So that’s all uplifting. But I must also say that it’s depressing and infuriating to see the city of Springfield and its people suffering under a cruel and unjust assault from our own government.
Our government’s policies are appalling and shameful. And so, as Cardinal McElroy put it yesterday, we need not to avert our eyes but to “recognize the evil that is being carried out in our name and fight every dimension of it.” And we need to “seek to convert our political representatives from tolerating this evil, or replace them.”
In five weeks, we can replace a whole bunch of them.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Could a Wave THIS Big Actually Happen? Dems who lived through past bloodbaths see something similar happening—in reverse, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
Suddenly, Democrats Have a Path to a HUGE Senate Majority… Live from Dayton, Ohio, JVL, SARAH, and TIM recorded a bonus Buckeye edition of The Next Level.
Trump Said It Out Loud. His Cabinet Says It Never Happened. WILL SALETAN meticulously breaks down Todd Blanche’s defense of Trump’s press crackdown, Mike Waltz getting confronted with the president’s own words, and the shifting story about the war with Iran.
Reddit AMA with Catherine Rampell: Monday from 2 to 4 p.m. ET. This is your chance to ask her anything about prices, housing, jobs, tariffs, immigration and the policy debates shaping the economy. Go to r/politics on Monday to join in.
Just How Crazy is the White House Right Now? On The Bulwark on Sunday, BILL KRISTOL talks with former Trump White House deputy press secretary SARAH MATTHEWS about Republicans distancing themselves from Trump and why she fears things could get more reckless after the midterms.
Quick Hits
BLOOD MONEY: Ever since he decapitated Venezuela’s government last year by arresting President Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump has pursued a policy toward the South American nation that can best be described as ‘Make Colonialism Great Again.’ The White House didn’t just help itself to Venezuela’s oil reserves—it also immediately began opening up U.S. access to the country’s notoriously corrupt gold market. The New York Times reports:
In early March, as President Trump basked in the success of a military intervention in Venezuela, he joined Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the West Wing for a private celebration. A businessman also attended, and brought along a pile of gold.