It is not unusual for clerics to address their leaders directly. King James regularly caught hell from the pulpit. So when Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde went for the king, at the end of an interminable sermon on Tuesday morning in the National Cathedral, she was acting within an established tradition. She was also operating within another well-known tradition, the “Where did everybody go?” confusion within her church regarding its sharply declining membership.

She asked Donald Trump to think of America’s undocumented immigrants in a compassionate light, and to see them for who so many of them really are: “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”

Exactly right—and she was exactly the right person to say it in exactly the right place. These vulnerable people, now with the full powers of the American state readied against them, aren’t just a Christian concern; in a sense they are the Christian concern. Christ is always on the side of the outcast, the stranger, the prisoner, the leper. “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

[Read: How social justice became a new religion]  

I must be one of the only people other than those actually in the cathedral to have listened to the entire thing. It was dry, high-minded, and Christ-light, and it built on a theme of “unity” in which all people drop their political differences and embrace a generalized, feel-good, Esperanto-like uni-faith, with everyone directing their prayers to Whom It May Concern.

Then, with a straight face, she described the county’s undocumented, much-abused subsistence workers this way: “They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.”

Our gurdwara? Tell me, high priestess, are there many undocumented Sikhs laboring in poultry farms and meatpacking plants where you live? Sikhs are 0.06 percent of the U.S. population. Jews are 2.4 percent—the number of undocumented people of these faiths toiling in the shadows and performing menial labor must be tiny. And what “temples” is she talking about? Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian?

Have we considered the implications of Trump’s policies on the undocumented Zoroastrian?

[Read: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

It was a minor moment of an otherwise forgettable sermon. And yet it was revealing. The problem, as she described it, was one in which the undocumented immigrant performing stooped labor in the California fields is as likely a Sikh as a Christian. She was presenting the world not as it is but as she would presumably like it to be: diverse and unified in the strength of its religious belief, although not any particular religious belief, which is a really strange position to hold. If she wanted to be more precise about the situation, she might have acknowledged that the huge majority of undocumented immigrants began their journey in Latin America. Latinos are joining the evangelical Church in huge numbers, which might help explain the significant number of Latino U.S. citizens who voted for Trump—and is that okay with you, Bishop Budde?  

In her appeal to a great big interfaith community of people who probably more or less believe the same or same-ish thing (a community in which all believers are equally imperiled by anti-immigration policies), she offered one more reminder of how we got ourselves into this sorry state, in which anti-intellectualism, populist rage at established institutions, and the thirst for ever more bizarre conspiracy theories have run riot over good sense and established fact.

The high priestess wanted to reveal her goodness, her moral purity, her inclusive and diversity-forward politics. She wanted a gold star, and in many quarters she got one. A headline in The New Republic read “Trump Seethes as Bishop Calls Him Out in Heartfelt Plea.” Trump issued a demand that the bishop apologize. But in the church he had looked only bored, as though his mind was on other things. Maybe he was seething. Or maybe he was thinking, That’s why I won.

So much political news over the past four years has been astonishing: Joe Biden’s disintegration on a debate stage, Donald Trump’s return to power, the possible U.S. annexation of Canada. But New York Mayor Eric Adams’s MAGA turn, by contrast, seems completely predictable.

Since the election, Adams has lunched with Trump and his son at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida. On Monday, he accepted “on behalf of New York City” what his spokesperson described as a last-minute invitation to the inauguration. And Tuesday, he sat down with the house media organ of MAGA, Tucker Carlson, for an interview.

“People often say ‘You don’t sound like a Democrat,’ and ‘You seem to have left the party,’” Adams told Carlson. “No, the party left me.”

This is a man who less than four years ago described himself as “the future of the Democratic Party.” Finding a reason for the abrupt shift isn’t all that hard, and it doesn’t involve any changes in the Democratic Party. It involves the multiple felony charges against Adams, and the pardon power that Trump has now regained. Trump said before his inauguration that he would consider pardoning Adams.

[Michael Powell: How it all went wrong for Eric Adams]

The mayor was charged in September, in an indictment that alleged florid corruption, including bribery, campaign-finance violations, and elaborately constructed travel itineraries through Istanbul (the New York City of Turkey, if you will). Adams has denied any wrongdoing, in the emphatic way only he can. So many top officials in his administration have been raided, indicted, or forced to step down that New York magazine could barely fit them all on a cover; by the time the issue hit stands, it was already out of date. Things are so bad that polls suggest he could lose reelection to Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor with his own long record of alleged misconduct, though he, too, has denied wrongdoing.

Adams is not the first Democratic politician to discover a strange new respect for Donald Trump. Rod Blagojevich followed the well-trod path from the Illinois governor’s mansion to prison, then pioneered the playbook Adams appears to be employing, culminating in a 2020 pardon.

“My fellow Democrats have not been very kind to him,” the former governor said of Trump afterward. “In fact, they’ve been very unkind to him.” He even coined a useful term: “If you’re asking me what my party affiliation is, I’m a Trumpocrat.”

Other politicians have turned Trumpocrat, or at least Trumpocrat-curious. When former Senator Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, was indicted for corruption, he echoed Trump in claiming that shadowy forces were out to get him because of his politics. Never mind that Menendez was indicted by the Biden Justice Department. He’d previously been charged by the Obama Justice Department, but he beat that rap; this time he was convicted, despite his best efforts to blame his wife. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat indicted for bribery last year, has also gone out of his way to signal openness to working with Trump. (Cuellar denies wrongdoing.) Trump appears receptive; after the indictment, he claimed on Truth Social that Cuellar was being punished for being tough on the border.

But Adams and Trump share more than felony charges and a love of New York City nightlife. Seldom have two politicians seemed so destined for alliance. Both men are masters of personality politics—naturally charismatic but also perversely watchable because of the likelihood that they’re going to blunder and cause a huge blowup. They’re also big-picture thinkers, able to tap into emotionally freighted topics—especially crime—with grand gestures, but less skilled and less interested in minutiae, leaving that to lieutenants.

Not coincidentally, both have also been Democrats and Republicans at different times in their careers. Conforming to a platform is less important to them than rallying voters around a feeling. Moreover, they are both nakedly transactional—in Adams’s case, according to federal prosecutors, to a criminal degree; in Trump’s case, his attempt to exchange aid to Ukraine for an investigation into Hunter Biden was enough to get him impeached. They share a sense that they are perpetually being persecuted by the establishment, even as one is the mayor of the nation’s largest city and the other is starting his second term as president.

[Michael Powell: The low comedy of Eric Adams’s indictment]

The possible benefits for Adams—a pardon—of cultivating Trump are clear enough. What does Trump get out of it? One can imagine a few possibilities. The first is that Trump is a New York real-estate developer, and it’s never a bad idea to be on the right side of city hall. He surely noticed that, according to prosecutors, the bribes paid to Adams helped get quick inspection approval for a building in Manhattan. Trump also remains obsessed with the idea of success and belonging in New York, even as he lives elsewhere—another thing he might share with Adams.

Politically, Trump has been working to make inroads with Black voters in blue cities and states, and Black voters open to a more conservative vision happen to be Adams’s core constituency. By embracing Adams, just as he did Cuellar, Trump is also hoping to bolster his claims of being a target of political prosecution: He contends that their indictments show how the “deep state” goes after its enemies. This doesn’t make much sense—Adams and Cuellar are both Democrats indicted by federal prosecutors in a Democratic presidential administration—but coherence has never been all that important to Trump.

Of course, all of this might be overthinking the situation. The attraction between Trump and Adams may be as simple as the two men seeing a lot of themselves in the other—game recognizing game.