And so it has come to pass. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. They’re holding God hostage while the Pope is hors de combat in hospital. They’ve denounced the Episcopal Bishop of Washington for imploring them to have mercy on the vulnerable. Their leader, who couldn’t lay his hand on the Bible when he took power after flogging copies of the book for profit, claims God saved his life from assassination so that he could save America. “America first” is his mission – and to hell with the rest of the world, unless, of course, his gang can make a fast buck by plonking a sun-sand-and-sexy resort on some patch of it.
The vindictive, serial-lying, thrice-married billionaire sexual assailant and convicted felon known as US president Donald Trump, has established a taskforce to “move heaven and earth” in defence against what he calls anti-Christian bias in the federal government. He has also set up a Faith Office in the White House run by his spiritual adviser, televangelist Paula White. He professes to love the Bible as much as he loves tariffs. He should read it.
“We have to bring religion back,” declares unrepentant Trump. “Let’s bring God back into our lives.” His secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, is a self-described “evangelical nationalist” who attends a church affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches some of whose members, US media have reported, want the repeal of women’s right to vote. Also thrice-married, he has been investigated on suspicion of sexual assault and sports tattoos of Christ’s cross on his chest and a catch cry of the medieval crusades, “Deus vult” (God wills it), on his right bicep.
[ Pete Hegseth: US army veteran and Fox News firebrandOpens in new window ]
Trump’s second-in-command, JD Vance, took to the podium at the Munich Security Conference to scold Europe for being too compassionate. With the zeal of a convert baptised a Catholic five years ago, he excoriated European leaders for being soft on immigration and obsessed with regulating disinformation, which he calls “free speech”. He wants Europe to emulate Trumpism and lock its borders, ignoring the wars and environmental destruction propelling the flow of humanity.
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His speech shamelessly milked the horror of a suspected terrorist attack by an asylum seeker on the German city while ignoring the almost routine mass killings by native-born citizens in his own country. Even the Pope isn’t Catholic enough for Vance.
For he preaches the opposite philosophy. “The wars being fought today involve several regions of the world, but the weapons with which they are fought are produced in entirely different regions,” Pope Francis states in his autobiography, Hope. Those regions producing the killing machinery, he says, “then refuse and turn away the refugees who have been generated by those weapons and by those conflicts.”
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has estimated global military expenditure in 2023 at $2.443 (€2.346) trillion, the biggest annual spend ever, with 75 per cent of arms exported by the US, France, Russia, China and Germany.
Leaving aside his effrontery in accusing Europe of censorship while the White House bans the Associated Press because the agency declines to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, Vance should be taken seriously because he is a man on a frightening crusade. He’s smarter than his boss. Better read too, though granted, so are Barbie and Ken. After his assertion that Ukraine started the war with Russia, Trump is as incontestably divorced from reality as he is from Marla Maples.
Vance has the conceit to project himself as a moral intellectual. He explained his theological hierarchy of obligations in descending order during a Fox News interview when he said: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbour, 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 prioritise the rest of the world.” This, he clarified, is according to ordo amoris, an ancient concept propounded by Vance’s favourite saint, Augustine.
Pope Francis has said Christian love is not a concentric expansion of love that little by little extends to other people and groups. It is about fraternity, without exception
Within this concept is the kernel of the choice facing the Irish Government in its deliberations about how to contend with the madness of the court of King Trump. Considering Vance’s superstructure of responsibilities, Merrion Street’s promised “charm offensive” will have as much traction on that court as water on a duck’s back.
If Micheál Martin receives an invitation to bring a bowl of shamrock to the White House next month, should he go? If he does go, should he grovel for Ireland’s selfish interest in retaining American jobs? What if Trump embarrasses him, as he did when, sitting beside the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in a media glare, he castigated India’s import levies as “very unfair and strong”.
None of these questions can be definitively answered until, first, the Taoiseach establishes which end of Vance’s theological see-saw Ireland occupies. Is it to be Ireland first? Or will the country’s humanitarian and missionary history win out?
Wary commentators have urged Martin to go to the White House and cravenly keep silent about Trump’s plan to decant Gaza of its people, his ostracisation of Ukraine, his defenestration of USAid, his “drill, baby, drill” vandalism and his mass deportations. Some want him to delay and dilute or even abandon the Occupied Territories Bill. The likelihood that provocation will lead to trade and employment losses for Ireland is a genuine concern. And yet the choice is not hard. Ordo amoris may have made some sense before the wheel was invented and a person’s ambit stretched no farther than to the Flintstones’ for dinner, but the advent of instant communications has shrunk the world.
How can we relegate people’s suffering in other countries when nightly we watch war and famine and sinking migrant boats and ecological destruction on television in our sittingrooms? Pope Francis has said Christian love is not a concentric expansion of love that little by little extends to other people and groups. It is about fraternity, without exception.
The Taoiseach should go to Washington and, as Enda Kenny did, remind the American president that St Patrick was an immigrant and that Ireland, with its history, can be no mé féiner. Trump has dragged our world into a dark night of the soul. The lord may work in mysterious ways but it is imperative that political leaders speak out unambiguously and unequivocally for everyone’s sake.
