Donald Trump’s signature extortion line of 2025 was delivered right out of the gate last January. Ironically, he said it to the last person in the world he would dare extort: Vladimir Putin. “We can do it the easy way or the hard way,” he told the Russian President in regard to the war with Ukraine. Although Trump’s FCC lackey Brendan Carr used the phrase months later in attempting to pressure the FCC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Trump owns the letter and the spirit of this gangland “proposition.” He said it again on January 9, this time in regard to annexing Greenland, as he regaled the oil executives he called to the White House with scenarios of Venezuelan plunder.

In the mob world, “We can do this easy way or the hard way” is usually delivered to someone in a very bad place. In extreme situations, victims are aware that if they don’t submit they will be tortured to death (the hard way) whereas if they do they will merely be fatally shot (the easy way). With the White House rackets, many have paid to take the easy way: Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia; YouTube, Disney, Meta, ABC, and most notably CBS. Pepper that with a bunch of white-shoe law firms and voilà! . . . a one-pan dictatorship for a crowd. During the Year of Submission, it seemed that this is what you did when your number was called: capitulate to the criminal threatening to remove your organization’s congressionally approved federal funding and/or tax exempt status.

Given the great many Christian leaders who’ve supported Trump since 2015, it’s not surprising that religious institutions are the one entity to have escaped his extortion attempts so far. What feels different between Trump 1 and Trump 2, however, is the profile of Catholics. First time around, he seemed to be on a tear nominating conservative Opus Dei types to the Supreme Court. He also found one for his Attorney General. But in 2025, the primary foul-mouthed Catholic shaming his faith for the glory of Trump was and is J. D. Vance.

I usually don’t comment on people’s motivations for belief, but as a former parochial school kid, I’m pretty sure that Vance became Catholic for class-hopping reasons. Generations ago, Catholics were considered dirty immigrants (my Irish ancestors, for instance). To mainline American Protestants of the 1950s, Catholics with their Vatican rules and Latin Masses seemed hopelessly backwards. In the 1970s, abortion had overtaken humanitarian causes for many in the Catholic Church. Also in the 1970s, evangelicals began overtaking mainline Protestantism.

Somewhere along the line, poor people in Latin America turned away from Catholicism to Pentecostal and charismatic denominations. With the exodus of the downtrodden, Roman Catholicism in the sway of Opus Dei suddenly started to look classy to would-be WASPs. I have always understood the appeal of Vatican tradition to aristocrats like Evelyn Waugh: what I liked about church as a kid was the physical simulation of the Old World—the stained glass and the scent of incense and burning wax.

I wrote here in 2020 about Bill Barr’s religion of exclusion and hate. The fact that this was not long after Jeffrey Epstein’s rubber-stamped suicide—what Catholics have always considered “taking the easy way out”—meant less then than it does now. As U.S. Attorney General when Epstein allegedly hung himself, Barr seemed to have no issues closing the case on a global pedophile kingpin without public accountability. But then Barr also had no issues closing the Mueller investigation without public accountability. Even after calling Trump “unfit for office” when he testified to the January 6 commission, Barr said he was planning to vote for him in November 2024.

The rightward shift of the Catholic Church under John Paul II and Benedict XVI ended with the papacy of Francis, whose embrace of the poor lent a counterbalance not just to conservative American cardinals but to the ultraconservative rot of MAGA Catholics and the gold-plated bordello morality of Mar-a-Lago. In February 2025, Francis publicly criticized the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies and even called out Vance’s sinister contortion of Catholic doctrine to defend the administration’s actions. This was after Vance accused the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops of not being “a good partner in common-sense immigration enforcement.” The ailing Francis agreed to meet with Vance last Easter Sunday and then died the next day. The advent of Leo XIV, the first American pope, has offered hope for those brave enough to challenge Trump’s immigration policies, which Leo has called “inhuman” and not in line with the church’s “pro-life” teachings.

Already there’s a photo of Leo that I can’t get out of my head. While traveling to Turkey last November to meet with Christian leaders, he strolled the aisles of the papal plane to greet members of the Vatican press corps, many of whom presented him with token gifts. CBS News’s Chris Livesay outdid them all by giving Leo a family heirloom: a baseball bat once owned by Chicago White Sox legend Nellie Fox. As a longtime White Sox fan, the pope was thrilled, wondering how Livesay got the bat through security and onto the plane.

That photo of a calm and gentle man holding a bat seemed oddly prophetic. With anyone else, we might think of Robert De Niro in The Untouchables or Teddy Roosevelt’s advice to speak softly and carry a big stick. The wooden object symbolically held by popes is a shepherd’s crook, not an implement of play that can also be a lethal weapon. Still, I took this impromptu image as a tell on Leo’s commitment to getting his faith’s house in order, a reminder of the hard way which in Catholic rhetoric is “the way of the Cross”—basically doing the things you don’t want to do (like getting arrested and crucified) for the good of others. Externally, protesting priests from Leo’s hometown were getting roughed up and pepper-sprayed by ICE and Border Patrol. But it’s internally where a baseball bat might come in handy: cracking down on American bishops whose sneering ultraconservatism has made a mockery of Christ’s words.

In November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops put out a video denouncing the vilification and unjust treatment of immigrants by American immigration officials. In December, Leo appointed a fellow Chicagoan who has worked among the poor in Latin America, Bishop Ronald A. Hicks, to replace the retiring Trump apologist Timothy Dolan as Archbishop of New York. A Fox & Friends regular, Dolan outraged many when he praised the deceased Charlie Kirk as a “modern-day St. Paul.” (Dolan has been such a moral creep for so long I often wonder if he’s even Christian.)

The MAGA Catholicism of Barr and Vance preaches the hard way to the poor and the easy way to their own elite class. Long before the red hats, Republicans promised the easy way with everything, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s “buy now, pay never” Easy Street casino capitalism that gutted the American middle class even before Trump started bankrupting casinos. The MAGA normalization of greed and narcissism with the teachings of Jesus has turned into a form of black arts since Trump 1. At his Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve bash, Trump auctioned off a portrait of Jesus that an artist onstage painted in real time for his audience of oligarchs. The winning bid of $2.75 million will supposedly go to charities (although with Trump, who knows?), but $2.75 million is a drop in the bucket for a man who pocketed nearly $1.5 billion from the American presidency in just one year, according to the New York Times Editorial Board. A day after the auction, “Bet Against Christ’s Return Pays 5.5% Annual Gain on Polymarket” was an actual headline on the Bloomberg website.

MAGA Republicans as a demographic have shed that most precious Catholic asset: a conscience. What I remember from both Catholic school and Graham Greene is that it’s your own conscience rather than the wrath of God that does you in. Trump’s lifelong intellectual and moral deficiencies lead one to believe that he never had a conscience to begin with. “Have you ever in your life encountered a character as wretched as Donald Trump?” the New Yorker’s David Remnick asked in regard to Trump’s cruel denigration of Rob Reiner after his and his wife’s deaths. Remnick pointed to an interview with Piers Morgan in which Reiner called the murder of Charlie Kirk “an absolute horror” that “should never happen to anybody.” Reiner went on: “I’m Jewish and I believe in the teachings of Jesus and I believe in do unto others and I believe in forgiveness.” He called Erika Kirk’s forgiveness of her husband’s killer the right response: “What she said, to me, was beautiful. She forgave his assassin, and I think that is admirable.” Trump famously begged to differ when he shared the stage with Erika Kirk at her husband’s memorial: “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.”

Conscience alone will not make you brave enough for the hard way. Courage comes from being able to take moral responsibility as an individual, and that comes from having both a conscience and an imagination (empathy). I’m sure that a lot of good but nonreligious Americans wonder why this Catholic fixation on the global poor when there are so many other social justice issues regarding identity and personal freedom. I would answer in the form of a question: Why do Democratic Socialist and not especially religious countries like Finland and Norway manage to have an electorate that cares about the welfare of one another? Maybe because the greatest right of their fellow citizens that they choose to defend is the right to a financial livelihood regardless of who their parents are.

What’s missing in secular American identity is the incentive to take individual responsibility for collective problems. This country has often coasted on a kind of tipping-point decency, whereby selfish and nihilistic people will go along with norms because of numbers. But when that critical mass no longer holds, you have the country we live in now. Leo and the good Catholics are trying to get Americans to live in a world where the poor are a daily presence in our lives even if they are nowhere near us. You can put up border walls and live in gated communities, but as St. Vincent de Paul told the seventeenth-century French: “The poor are our masters.” Maybe deep down the Catholic clergy know that it all doesn’t start with being able to love an imagined god but being able to love flesh-and-blood strangers.

We’ve seen many Americans who have taken the hard way in the face of Donald Trump’s inhumanity. I’m grateful that Jimmy Kimmel’s network stood up for him and the show’s employees, but life is more precarious outside Hollywood. There is a growing number of DOJ prosecutors who have resigned rather than defy the Constitution—noncelebrities who chose the hard way of forfeiting paychecks. In journalism, the Associated Press stood up for a map, and PBS and NPR scored points just by remaining themselves. And perhaps most of all we have the residents of Minnesota fighting the good fight for all of us as we go about our remunerative lives without being threatened by DHS on the street and in our homes.

It does seem like the courage of Minnesota is having an effect on the top brass of the U.S. Catholic Church. On MLK Day, Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago; Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington; and Cardinal Joseph Tobin, archbishop of Newark issued a statement saying that the country’s “moral role in confronting evil around the world” is in question for the first time in decades. Though they don’t mention Trump by name, they cite policy on Venezuela, Ukraine, and Greenland as raising moral questions about military force, saying that it “must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy.”

In this strange time where no one good has the power to steward this country for the good, you take moral leadership where you find it. If that means listening to people who believe in a god that we doubt is real but who actually care about real people, well why not. §