Donald Trump campaigned, in part, on returning political power to American Christians. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump promised a room full of religious news broadcasters in February 2024. “With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on November 5.” At different campaign events, he vowed both that Christian leaders would have a line “directly into the Oval Office—and me” and that he would create a federal task force to “stop the weaponization of our government against Christians.” Now, not even three weeks into his new term, he has begun down quite the opposite path.

Among the Trump administration’s first efforts were orders that delivered a stunning blow to humanitarian organizations, including the suspension of foreign aid pending review, the halting of refugee-resettlement programs, the dismantling of USAID, and the freezing of all federal grants that normally flow to nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Charities USA, the official domestic relief agency of the Catholic Church. Catholic Charities represents a network of 168 local groups nationwide offering disaster assistance, meals, and housing for people in need, and refugee services and programs for migrants. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the freeze was part of a broader effort to root out “wokeness,” though it’s difficult to match that descriptor to this particular organization. And although the freeze on federal grants and loans was paused two days after Trump signed the order, many organizations are still unable to access funds.

[Read: You can’t just unpause USAID]

Late last month, hundreds of leaders from Catholic relief and aid organizations met for the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, D.C. What ensued was “a scene of real panic,” Stephen Schneck, the chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me. “They were in shock, and they were disturbed, and they were feeling really panicky about the situation and wondering what to do.” Schneck recalled speaking with an attendee from El Paso, Texas, who was suddenly unable to buy diapers for babies in his charity’s care. “And this happened with no warning, no extensions,” Schneck said. “It just happened overnight.” Catholic agencies providing relief overseas were also affected by the freeze on foreign aid, which came with a stop-work order that suspended operations.

Along with the shutdown of federal funding for so many Catholic charitable organizations, Trump also revoked a Joe Biden–era policy that prevented Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from apprehending people in or near “sensitive locations” such as churches and schools. The change elicited a statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which registered its dismay at the transformation of places for “care, healing, and solace into places of fear and uncertainty for those in need,” and called for “a better path forward that protects the dignity of all those we serve, upholds the sacred duty of our providers, and ensures our borders and immigration system are governed with mercy and justice.”

The statement set off a back-and-forth between the bishops and Vice President J. D. Vance, who responded to the bishops on Face the Nation late last month, saying that “the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” The USCCB followed up with another statement, saying that “faithful to the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church has a long history of serving refugees … In our agreements with the government, the USCCB receives funds to do this work; however, these funds are not sufficient to cover the entire cost of these programs. Nonetheless, this remains a work of mercy and ministry of the Church.”

[Read: Bishop Budde delivered a truly Christian message]

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

Catholic politicians disputing the bishops’ witness to the faith is nothing new, though the allegations of avarice and corruption are somewhat surprising, and presage bitter conflict ahead. Perhaps that could be helpful, insofar as it would sharply distinguish the teaching of the Church from certain politicized versions of Catholicism tailored to the ideological preferences of their confessors. The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

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.

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The aged president of the United States and the young midwestern senator he’d chosen as his second-term running mate were having a private, late-night discussion. The commander in chief wanted to share his plan to make America greater than it’s ever been. He flung an arm toward one end of the room as he explained the most audacious idea in the history of the republic.

“Canada! Canada!”

The senator, a veteran of America’s most recent war, was dumbfounded. “A union with Canada?” he asked.

“Right. A union with Canada. … Canada is the wealthiest nation on earth … Canada will be the seat of power in the next century and, properly exploited and conserved, her riches can go on for a thousand years.”

Not only did the president want to annex Canada, but he then declared the need to bring Scandinavia—with populations ostensibly blessed by genetics—into a new Atlantic union. “Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, to be specific. They will bring us the character and the discipline we so sadly lack. I know these people … I’m of German extraction, but many generations ago my people were Swedes who emigrated to Germany.”

Other NATO members would be frozen out, especially Great Britain, France, and Germany, nations the president believed had faded as world powers. He assured his running mate that eventually they would become part of the new union one way or another—even if that meant using force against former American allies to compel their submission to his plans for greatness. “Force?” the incredulous young senator asked. “You mean military force, Mr. President?”

“Yes, force,” the president said. “Only if necessary, and I doubt it ever would be. There are other kinds of pressure,” the president continued, “trade duties and barriers, financial measures, economic sanctions if you will.” In the short term, however, the president’s first move would be to meet with the Russians—and to propose a nuclear alliance against China.

These exchanges are—believe it or not—the plot of a 1965 political thriller, a book titled Night of Camp David.

The author Fletcher Knebel (who also co-wrote the more widely known Seven Days in May) came up with these plans as evidence that a fictional president named Mark Hollenbach has gone insane. In the story, a crisis unfolds as the young senator, Jim MacVeagh, realizes that Hollenbach has told no one else of his scheme. He races to alert other members of the government to the president’s madness before the potentially disastrous summit with the Kremlin.

Such ideas—including a messianic president talking about attacking other NATO members—were in 1965 perhaps too unnerving for Hollywood. Unlike Seven Days in May, a book about a military coup in the United States that was made into a well-regarded film starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Night of Camp David was never made into a movie despite decent reviews and more than four months on the New York Times best-seller list. In fairness, the market was glutted with such thrillers in the mid-’60s, but perhaps the idea was too disturbing even for Cold War America.

And now, 60 years later, Donald Trump—an elderly president with a young midwesterner as his vice president—is saying things that make him sound much like Mark Hollenbach. He, too, has proposed annexing Canada; he, too, has suggested that he would use coercion against U.S. friends and allies, including Panama and Denmark. He, too, seems to believe that some groups bring better genes to America than others. Like Hollenbach, he dreams of a giant Atlantic empire and seeks the kind of accommodation with Russia that would facilitate an exit from our traditional alliances, especially NATO.

One of the most important differences between the novel and real life is that until the titular night at Camp David, Hollenbach is a highly intelligent and decent man, a president respected by both parties after a successful first term. His new plans (which, in another moment of life imitating art, also include unleashing the FBI on America’s domestic “enemies”) are wildly out of character for him, and in the end, MacVeagh finally manages to convince the Cabinet that the president is suffering from a sudden illness, perhaps dementia, a nervous breakdown, or the onset of paranoia.

Trump, however, has always talked like this. He is regularly caught up in narcissistic and childlike flights of grandeur; he routinely lapses into fits of self-pitying grievance; he thinks himself besieged by enemies; and he talks about international affairs as if he is playing a giant game of Risk. (In the novel, MacVeagh at one point muses that the president’s “once brilliant mind now was obsessed with fancied tormentors and played like a child’s with the toy blocks of destiny.”) Whatever one thinks of the 47th president, he is today who he has always been.

I am not a doctor, and I am not diagnosing Trump. I’m also not the first one to notice the similarities between the fictional Hollenbach and Trump: The book was name-checked by Bob Woodward, Michael Beschloss, and Rachel Maddow during Trump’s first term, and then reissued in 2018 because of a resurgence of interest in its plot. Rumors that the United 93 director, Paul Greengrass, wanted to make a movie version circulated briefly in 2021, but the project is now likely languishing in development hell.

In any event, rereading Night of Camp David today raises fewer disturbing questions about Trump than it does about America. How did the United States, as a nation, travel the distance from 1965—when the things Trump says would have been considered signs of a mental or emotional disorder—to 2025, where Americans and their elected officials merely shrug at a babbling chief executive who talks repeatedly and openly about annexing Canada? Where is the Jim MacVeagh who would risk everything in his life to oppose such things? (I’ve read the book, and let me tell you, Vice President J. D. Vance is no Jim MacVeagh.)

The saddest part of revisiting the book now is how quaint it feels to read about the rest of the American government trying hard to do the right thing. When others in Congress and the Cabinet finally realize that Hollenbach is ill, they put their careers on the line to avert disaster. At the book’s conclusion, Hollenbach, aware that something’s wrong with him, agrees to give up the presidency. He resigns after agreeing to a cover story about having a serious heart condition, and the whole matter is hushed up.

Perhaps such happy endings are why some thrillers are comforting to read: Fear ends up giving way to reassurance. Unfortunately, in the real world, the GOP is not responding to Trump’s bizarre foreign-policy rants by rallying to the defense of America’s alliances and its national values as the leader of the free world. Instead, Republican members of the United States Senate are seeing how fast they can ram through the nomination of an unqualified talk-show host as secretary of defense.

In 2018, Knebel’s son was asked what his father would have thought about the renewed interest in the book. The younger Knebel answered: “He’d say, yeah, this is just what I was afraid of.” But at least Mark Hollenbach only dared whisper such ideas in the dark. Donald Trump says them, over and over, in broad daylight.

Related:

Emperor Trump’s new map The political logic of Trump’s international threats

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MAGA is starting to crack. Turns out signing the Hunter Biden letter was a bad idea, Graeme Wood writes. Capitulation is contagious.

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily blocked Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.” Trump told the countries attending the World Economic Forum that if they don’t make their products in America, they will face a tariff. The Senate voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as the new director of the CIA.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Stephanie Bai spoke with Russell Berman about the last president to lose, then win, a reelection bid.

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Evening Read

America Is Divided. It Makes for Tremendous Content.

By Spencer Kornhaber

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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