Double Horror: Migrants illegally hunted like animals by ICE and exploited by people who take advantage of them

NEW BEDFORD, Massachusetts opinion published in the Boston Globe by Marcela Garcia:

New Bedford reels from ICE crackdown

Adrian Ventura sees federal immigration agents hanging around Acushnet Avenue, the heart of New Bedford’s Latino and Spanish-speaking community, almost every day — always in dark, unmarked SUVs with tinted windows.

Ventura, a former undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who now leads New Bedford’s Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores, a labor advocacy group, said it seems like the city has been singled out for aggressive enforcement under the Trump administration.

“We haven’t seen the same type of enforcement activity in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance,” Ventura told me in Spanish.

Ventura said he’s even witnessed the agents parked in front of St. Anthony of Padua, the Roman Catholic church on Acushnet.

The federal presence has cast a chill on the avenue, which is lined with check cashing stores and establishments with Spanish names adorned with Guatemalan and Honduran flags selling tortillas and other Latino foods.

While there is no up-to-date official count, Ventura told me that his organization has recorded 27 immigration-related arrests in New Bedford since the new administration took office on Jan. 20. “There has to be more, those are only the arrests we know of.”

While there is no up-to-date official count, Ventura told me that his organization has recorded 27 immigration-related arrests in New Bedford since the new administration took office on Jan. 20. “There has to be more, those are only the arrests we know of.”

“We’re very stressed out,” he said.

Last month, the wider public caught a glimpse of the atmosphere in the port city, where roughly 20,000 residents, or 1 in 5, are foreign born.

In a jarring video that went viral, heavily armed, unidentified federal agents surround a car they had just pulled over on a quiet New Bedford street. Inside, Juan Francisco Mendez, a 29-year-old Guatemalan father, sat with his wife, calmly telling the men outside that his lawyer was on the way.

Moments later, one agent retrieved an axe-like tool and shattered the rear window; glass exploded everywhere and Mendez was pulled from the car and arrested. The whole time his wife had been filming the incident, her voice trembling.

Mendez did not have a criminal record and appeared to be in the country legally. Last week, a judge ordered him released.

But the footage has become a visceral symbol of what many advocates believe is a campaign of intimidation targeting New Bedford’s immigrants, especially the roughly 10,000 people who lack work authorization. They now have to weigh the risks of their every move.

Ventura is worried the workplace raids, much like the notorious 2007 operation at the Michael Bianco Inc. textile factory, could be next. That raid resulted in the arrest of 361 undocumented immigrants.

There’s a more subtle impact of the federal crackdown: It may lead to more wage theft and harassment because victims will probably be too scared to come forward.

It’s a well-documented issue: Unauthorized workers fuel New Bedford’s fishing industry, the city’s major economic engine. It’s often referred to as the country’s most lucrative fishing port based on the market value of its product.

The industry has also been a hotspot for labor violations, as reported by my Globe colleague Katie Johnston, who found in 2023, that migrant children were working grueling shifts in the city’s fish plants. Many used fake IDs to secure jobs through staffing agencies, while employers and agencies evaded responsibility, citing difficulties in verifying age and identity.

Ventura is now working on a wage-theft complaint he received from Mariana, a Guatemalan unauthorized immigrant who lives in Providence. Mariana is an alias; she agreed to talk to me if I didn’t use her real name because she is afraid of the repercussions of going public.

Mariana just turned 18 last month but has been working full time at a seafood-processing plant in New Bedford for more than a year. She does everything: cleaning fish, packing boxes, labeling product. Mariana told me that she got the job through a staffing agency. She works varying hours every week — sometimes it’s 8-hour days, sometimes 11-hour days — but, on average, the weekly check she gets from the agency is in the $500-$600 range.

But out of that check, she has to pay around $160 “to the boss who gives us a ride every week,” she told me in Spanish. That would be a third-party transportation provider, a Guatemalan man who provides roundtrip transportation for the workers — around 15 to 18 people each ride — from Providence to New Bedford, she said.

“It’s not fair. He tells us, ‘if you don’t pay, there is no job.’ People are afraid of speaking up. They don’t want to lose their jobs,” Mariana said. Or worse — they don’t want to be reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and be arrested.

She’s always afraid during the 40-minute ride in the van “because we can be stopped at any moment” by federal immigration authorities.

On Sunday — Mother’s Day — Acushnet Avenue looked a little deserted, with only a few families venturing out to celebrate with their mothers in the area’s restaurants. 

A grocery store was pretty much empty, an employee telling me that there would normally be a line at the register. A flier from a local advocacy group posted by the cash register advertised services to immigrants: Call us and we’ll shop for you; need to cash a check? We’ll do it for you.

The chill in the air may be the whole point of Trump’s crackdown. But the real winners will be exploitative employers, unscrupulous staffing agencies, and everyone else who stands to profit when immigrants recede back into the shadows. 😞😟😢

Marcela García is a Boston Globe columnist.

Pope Leo XIV address to media calls for end to abusive communications and promotes journalism for peace

Echo transcript address to the world media by Pope XIV:

Pope Leo XIV asks journalists to use communication as a tool for peace

ADDRESS OF THE HOLY FATHER LEO XIV
TO REPRESENTATIVES OF THE MEDIA
Audience Hall
Monday, 12 May 2025

Pope Leo XIV arrives for an audience with thousands of journalists and media workers at Paul VI Audience Hall in Vatican City. The audience with journalists has become a tradition among newly elected popes. Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Good morning and thank you for this wonderful reception! They say when they clap at the beginning it does not matter much, if you are still awake at the end and you still want to applaud…thank you very much!

Brothers and sisters,  I welcome you, representatives of the media from around the world. Thank you for the work you have done and continue to do in these days, which is truly a time of grace for the Church.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus proclaimed: “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Mt 5:9). This is a Beatitude that challenges all of us, but it is particularly relevant to you, calling each one of you to strive for a different kind of communication, one that does not seek consensus at all costs, does not use aggressive words, does not follow the culture of competition and never separates the search for truth from the love with which we must humbly seek it. Peace begins with each one of us: in the way we look at others, listen to others and speak about others. In this sense, the way we communicate is of fundamental importance: we must say “no” to the war of words and images, we must reject the paradigm of war.

Let me, therefore, reiterate today the Church’s solidarity with journalists who are imprisoned for seeking to report the truth, and with these words I also ask for the release of these imprisoned journalists. The Church recognises in these witnesses – I am thinking of those who report on war even at the cost of their lives – the courage of those who defend dignity, justice and the right of people to be informed, because only informed individuals can make free choices. The suffering of these imprisoned journalists challenges the conscience of nations and the international community, calling on all of us to safeguard the precious gift of free speech and of the press.

Thank you, dear friends, for your service to the truth. You have been in Rome these past few weeks to report on the Church, its diversity and, at the same time, its unity. You were present during the liturgies of Holy Week and then reported on the sorrow felt over the death of Pope Francis, which nevertheless took place in the light of Easter. That same Easter faith drew us into the spirit of the Conclave, during which you worked long and tiring days. Yet, even on this occasion, you managed to recount the beauty of Christ’s love that unites and makes us one people, guided by the Good Shepherd.

We are living in times that are both difficult to navigate and to recount. They present a challenge for all of us but it is one that we should not run away from. On the contrary, they demand that each one of us, in our different roles and services, never give in to mediocrity. The Church must face the challenges posed by the times. In the same way, communication and journalism do not exist outside of time and history. Saint Augustine reminds of this when he said, “Let us live well and the times will be good. We are the times” (Discourse 80.8).

Thank you, therefore, for what you have done to move beyond stereotypes and clichés through which we often interpret Christian life and the life of the Church itself. Thank you because you have captured the essence of who we are and conveyed it to the whole world through every form of media possible.

Today, one of the most important challenges is to promote communication that can bring us out of the “Tower of Babel” in which we sometimes find ourselves, out of the confusion of loveless languages that are often ideological or partisan. Therefore, your service, with the words you use and the style you adopt, is crucial. As you know, communication is not only the transmission of information, but it is also the creation of a culture, of human and digital environments that become spaces for dialogue and discussion. In looking at how technology is developing, this mission becomes ever more necessary. I am thinking in particular of artificial intelligence, with its immense potential, which nevertheless requires responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all, so that it can benefit all of humanity. This responsibility concerns everyone in proportion to his or her age and role in society.

Dear friends, we will get to know each other better over time. We have experienced – we can say together – truly special days. We have shared them through every form of media: TV, radio, internet, and social media. I sincerely hope that each of us can say that these days unveiled a little bit of the mystery of our humanity and left us with a desire for love and peace. For this reason, I repeat to you today the invitation made by Pope Francis in his message for this year’s World Day of Social Communications: let us disarm communication of all prejudice and resentment, fanaticism and even hatred; let us free it from aggression. We do not need loud, forceful communication, but rather communication that is capable of listening and of gathering the voices of the weak who have no voice. Let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the world. Disarmed and disarming communication allows us to share a different view of the world and to act in a manner consistent with our human dignity.

You are at the forefront of reporting on conflicts and aspirations for peace, on situations of injustice and poverty, and on the silent work of so many people striving to create a better world. For this reason, I ask you to choose consciously and courageously the path of communication in favour of peace.🕊️

Thank you all and may God bless you! ✝️☦️

Donald Trump lives in a swirl of anger, retribution and economic fantasies. IOW- Trump is crazy!

Opinion letter published in the Northhampton Daily Hampshire Gazette, by Stephen Armstrong, in Hadley.

In my January letter to the editor, I promised I would not write another Trump letter for four years if he or she would publish that one. But, since then, I have sent two others. The Gazette is forcing me to consider whether I am a habitual liar. Oh, well. Perhaps I am, but nowhere near our 100-day super-president. 

Today, I am thinking about the “real” effects of this man’s economic fantasies, his vaunted worldwide tariffs. We will feel them at the end of May, because by then the number of ships of Chinese goods in American ports will have declined by 30%-40%.

Trump laughs and says that American kids can make do with two dolls, not 30; and isn’t it too bad that American parents will have to spend $2 more per doll❓ (It won’t be $2, by the way: the tariffs- if Trump returns to his fantasy, will be 154% of the value of the doll❗ So much for Barbie.) 

What goads Trump’s fantasies❓ His mental life is simple: he wants to stomp, crush, defile, and run under his feet anyone whom he does not like. Unfortunately, Trump dislikes most of the American public — certainly those who voted against him — many women, most immigrants, and above all China, as impossible as this seems. Trump requires fealty, and China’s only gift of homage to him was Covid, both a personal case where he thought he was Superman to have survived, and a pandemic which claimed 1.1 million Americans, who did not survive.

Anger, aggression, never-ending grievance, and repetitive delusions about his “deal-making” capabilities — these are the powers behind his economic fantasies. In his childish way Trump thinks his fantasies are the “truth.” 

Trump does not care what a doll costs, or how many dolls an American child might want. He thinks of us as though we are over-indulged children, and thus we deserve his lies and contempt.

From Steven Armstrong in Hadley (at least, the name he uses to write letters to the editor)

Emoluments Clause is pseudonym for Grand Grift: Donald Trump violates the Constitution on a daily basis

The Sky-High Corruption of Donald Trump

Echo report published in The Nation by Chris Lehmann.

The Democrats missed their first chance to spotlight Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They shouldn’t miss their second.

Back when outrage over Donald Trump’s blatant Oval Office corruption was still a novelty, a group of former national security officials filed an amicus brief in a 2019, lawsuit Democratic congressional leaders brought over Trump’s repeated violations of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. They cited one scenario as a clear and present threat to US national security interests: “A nation that plays a central role in the balance of power in the Middle East, one of the most fraught regions for U.S. national security in the world [could] curry favor with the President by purchasing real estate from one of his companies.”

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. 

Like much of the grim constitutional prophesying of that bygone era, this hypothetical illustration now looks laughably naive. 

Trump-branded real-estate conflicts in the Middle East still abound, of course—most notoriously via Trump’s son-in-law and erstwhile Middle East envoy Jared Kushner’s billion-dollar dealings with the Saudis. Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. 

In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT (grand grift❗), FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. 

Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.” Yet Trump’s own newly announced deal with the Qatari royal family to deliver him a new Air Force One jet worth $400 million marks a breathtaking new level of presidential corruption. Indeed, the transaction, which has been hastily packaged as a “gift” from the Qatari government to the Pentagon, is a textbook illustration of the imperial corruption that the founders targeted in drafting the Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president from using his office for personal enrichment. Trump announced the deal on the eve of his first Middle East junket in his second term. The president’s visit to Qatar is bound to be steeped in superlative appreciations of his customized Boeing 747-8, which its original owners have quaintly dubbed “a palace in the sky.”

Republican grand grift and Donald Trump's violation of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause

You can instantly gauge the depth of the self-dealing here by Trump’s overheated defense of the transaction. In an X post, the president announced, “The fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT (grand grift❗), FREE OF CHARGE of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist that we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane. Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.”

This outburst showcases every element of the Trumpian defense of corruption, starting with the mind-bending assertion that insulating the presidency from foreign financial influence is somehow a “Crooked” political maneuver, as opposed to a central plank of constitutional governance. There’s also the ludicrous notion that the Qatari emolument is a savvy piece of deal-making, and not a quid-pro-quo arrangement to benefit the donor. The tell here is Trump’s adverbial stipulation that the deal is temporary; if it were such a self-evident boon to the country, shouldn’t it be permanent? 

In reality, of course, ownership of the airborne decadent palace will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation at the end of his term—the deal employs the federal government as a dummy corporation that’s hosting a pass-through arrangement to land the aircraft safely in Trump’s gilded empire of grand grift❗

The Qatari payoff also defies Trump’s bogus image as the heroic savior of American industry, as he’s gone out of his way to engineer a disastrous global trade war in order to preside over a “golden age” in US manufacturing. The American aerospace giant Boeing has an existing $5 billion contract to replace both Air Force One jets—a project that’s now five years behind its delivery date with reported company losses of more than $2.5 billion. 

$400 million 💲Donald Trump's BribeJet

Part of that overrun is due to the technical challenges of outfitting a plane with the basic security and communications safeguards required in a presidential aircraft—indeed, the economies Trump boasts he’s achieving in the Qatari “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE” will soon evaporate when the government will have to essentially disassemble and rebuild the craft to ensure that it operates free of foreign surveillance.

Beyond that, though, Boeing has become a purveyor of hazardous and performance-challenged aircraft thanks to a regime of financialized corporate governance that scorns basic engineering protocols and safeguards. 

In other words, Trump is scurrying to a foreign monarchy to meet his air travel demands because the American contractor originally charged with producing a pair of Air Force Ones has failed to meet its obligations under a Trumpian model of commerce that privileges stock buybacks over performance fundamentals. 

Small wonder, then, that Trump’s own tirade trails off into a phoned-in show of rancor: “Anybody can do that! The Democrats are World Class Losers!!! MAGA”

But, alas, Trump isn’t wrong to call out Democratic fecklessness. During Trump’s first term, Democratic congressional leaders failed to bring emoluments charges in their impeachment actions against the president. That’s why national security advisers were reduced to weighing in on a civil suit against Trump for his many emoluments violations, which ranged from trademark deals with China for the Trump Organization to the proposed use of his Doral golf compound for a G-7 meeting to his doubling of the Mar-a-Lago initiation fee to $200,000 shortly after his election. 

And the civil suit eventually ran aground once it reached the US Supreme Court, which predictably declared the issue moot after Trump completed his first term. (Indeed, the Trump-stacked right-wing court is itself a plain instance of executive branch corruption run amok, but that is a sermon for another occasion.)

The timorousness of Democratic leaders in the face of such blatant abuse of power failed to exploit a political opportunity. 

At the time, Trump was using the Oval Office to benefit himself on a scale unseen in the annals of presidential corruption—and exposing his fraudulent business practices would upend the chief basis of his demagogic appeal as a master dealmaker. 

Instead, Democrats first homed in on the effort to bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with a military aid package and then sought to impeach Trump for fomenting the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Both of those shameful criminal episodes were founded in Trump’s bedrock conviction that he’s an unparalleled gamer of the governing racket, and the effort to police them in Congress would have been greatly advanced by emoluments charges undercutting Trump’s phony standing as a maestro of the deal.

The same core dynamic holds true today—there’s nothing stopping Democrats from stressing the ways in which Trump’s corruption is integral to how he rules and to his transformation of the federal government into a transactional mob syndicate enforced by goons such as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, and Kash Patel. 

Indeed, the impeachment resolution introduced last month by Michigan Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar includes an article on “bribery and corruption” that cites the Emoluments Clause. A Democratic Party serious about combating MAGA authoritarianism and graft could start by reversing its policy of treating Thanedar like a fringe pariah.

Instead, Congress’s functional silence on emoluments has further enabled the posture of MAGA impunity in Trump’s second term, which has, among other things, transformed January 6 into a model of right-wing governance. Congress’s dilatory treatment of Trumpian corruption is also why, for all Trump’s whining over the Qatar deal, Democratic responses somehow manage to be worse. “Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement on X. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with legroom.” No, Chuck—nothing says “failing to do your job” like thinking you can combat executive-branch influence-peddling with some staffer’s pathetic idea of a social media zinger.

Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. He is the author, most recently, of The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream (Melville House, 2016).

Donald Trump is accepting a BribeJet from Qatar. Grifter Trump

big shiny things

Report published in New York Magazine Intelligencer

by Jeff Wise

You’ll Pay for the Upgrades to Trump’s Luxury 747 From Qatar
The “new” Air Force One is a grift. (IOW, Swindling❗)

You’d think that no one needs a new jet less than Donald Trump, who already owns his own customized Boeing 757 and, as president, has free use of a pair of heavily modified 747 jumbo jets that collectively make up Air Force One.

But both of his current rides suffer significant disadvantages that Qatar’s “flying palace” 747 would overcome. Over the weekend, ABC News and others reported the country’s royal family is set to donate a jet to the U.S. Air Force in order to be upgraded to carry the president — then transfer its ownership to Trump’s presidential library when he leaves office.

Air Force One’s main drawback for Trump is that he can’t take the planes with him after the White House. Though ownership of what I’ll call the BribeJet will technically be transferred from the Qatari government to the U.S., the point of the transaction is clearly to benefit Trump personally, as he will have exclusive use of it for the rest of his life.

BribeJet’s advantage over Trump’s own aging 757, which he has dubbed “Trump Force One,” is that it is vastly more opulent. As I previously reported, the 757 is a venerable workhorse whose primary virtue is that it looks impressive to those who don’t know much about luxury jets. Originally built as an airliner in the early 1990s, it served as a workhorse for the now-defunct low-cost carriers Sterling Airlines in Denmark and TAESA Airlines in Mexico, where it likely racked up many thousands of hours of flight time. It was then purchased and converted to a private jet by Paul Allen before being sold to Trump.

Trump routinely misrepresented the plane’s value and luxuriousness in the media, claiming that it cost $100 million (used aircraft of that discontinued model would more likely fetch $5 to $8 million) and that it had “special” engines installed (it carried standard 757 ones). 

After Donald Trump took office in 2017 and began flying Air Force One, his 757 was left to languish at an airfield in upstate New York with one of its engines removed and the other wrapped in plastic. After he lost the 2020 election, Trump sent the plane for renovation in Texas and often used it as a backdrop during campaign rallies.

Qatar’s 747, in contrast, was built by Boeing specifically as a private jet for the royal family. It was one of two acquired in 2012, and added to Qatar Amiri Flight, a fleet of aircraft that the country’s government maintains for the use of its royal families. (In 2018, Qatar tried to sell the other one but then decided instead to give it to Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a move that prompted outrage from Turkish opposition politicians.

Used infrequently by the royal family, the BribeJet has so far only accumulated about 1,000 hours, meaning it was flown only two hours per week, on average. According to Bloomberg, its interior was outfitted in “creamy white and tan furnishings, rugs, and artwork,” by the fabled Parisian interior design firm of Cabinet Albert Pinto, which accented the décor with “custom-made Tai Ping rugs, sycamore, and wacapou wood fixtures, and artwork by Alexander Calder.” According to a prospectus circulated when the aircraft was put up for sale in 2020, it features a master bedroom and a guest bedroom tucked into the 747’s upper deck, each with its own en suite bathroom and shower. As with any custom decoration, the aircraft was outfitted to the particular tastes and needs of the then-owner, which may not match the tastes of subsequent buyers. Among the accessories listed in the prospectus is “oven goat,” whatever that is.

The Qatari 747 is significantly younger than the current iterations of Air Force One, both of which first flew in 1990. “It’s a more capable aircraft — greater range, better fuel efficiency, and a more modern flight deck,” says Ethan Dang, founder of the private-aircraft detailing company Onground Systems. The U.S. government has been planning to replace the aircraft with new models since 2018, at a cost of $3.9 billion, but work has been slowed by the fact that, due the extreme importance of the passengers it carries, everyone working on it has to have a special security clearance. 

Also, the airframes require heavy modifications. Among other things, Air Force One jets are outfitted with an anti-missile defense system, hardening against a nuclear strike, and the ability to refuel inflight. These modifications take time, and at this point the new jets aren’t expected to be delivered until 2029.

It’s not clear how many of these features the Air Force will add to the BribeJet, or what security clearance those working on it will need. In the past, the government has taken every imaginable precaution to ensure that Air Force One will perform flawlessly (that’s why there are two aircraft to fulfill a single role) and will be safe from foreign eavesdropping (which is why workers need high-level security clearance), but the Trump administration has been cavalier about such precautions, with numerous officials appointed without security vetting. Regardless of how much the administration decides to loosen the Air Force’s requirements for the plane, the work is expected to take long enough that Trump’s second term will nearly be over by the time it’s ready for use. Thus, all the taxpayer dollars that are being funneled into its renovation will mostly go toward its use by Trump as a private citizen, not as the president.

Obviously America has yet to recover from the Civil War- One historian explains why

 A lot of learning in this history education essay, about Manisha Sisha's research, reports how the failure of the post Civil War Reconstruction is impacting America today:

Book review by Adam Horchshild

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic Reconstruction 1860-1920

This essay is a book review, authored by Adam Hochschild, published in The New York Review of Books. 

A Maine Writer spoiler: I would not want Mr. Hochschild to be my history teacher. He gives a lukewarm review to Ms. Sisha's research, but I learned a lot by reading his review. 

My take away question raised by Mr. Hochschild's essay is this, "Would Donald Trump have found a right wing proxy Ku Klux Klan MAGA cult if America had succeeded to achieve the intended goals of the post Civil War Reconstruction❓

Thank you Manisha Sisha for writing about the Reconstruction era in American history. Her research may not be expressed the way Mr. Hochild would have written about the subject, but he does justice to describing Ms. Sisha's insightful perspective about how America has not recovered from the Civil War. (My humble opinion).

This short overview was published in an on-line book site: "We are told that the present moment bears a strong resemblance to Reconstruction, the era after the Civil War when the victorious North attempted to create an interracial democracy in the unrepentant South. That effort failed--and that failure serves as a warning today about violent backlash to the mere idea of black equality."

Manisha Sinha is an Indian-born American historian, and the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition (2016) and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (2024).

One Brief Shining Moment essay by Adam Hochschild: Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a (sadly) different America.

In the sweltering days of early July 1913, more than 50,000 men gathered for a most unusual reunion. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, both Union and Confederate veterans from forty-six states traveled to the battlefield. The War Department provided field kitchens, latrines, cots, and long rows of tents. Boy Scouts and other volunteers pitched in to help the elderly pilgrims, a few of whom had to be taken away in horse-drawn ambulances when felled by heatstroke. Hundreds of photographs show the old soldiers, in Panama hats, white shirts, ties, and suspenders, with medals pinned to their dark vests. Their faces bristle with beards, mustaches, and side-whiskers, all gray or white, and they have that slightly shocked, frozen look that people often show in group photos from long ago.

A climax of the reunion came on July 3, when men who had taken part (or said they had taken part) in Pickett’s Charge and its repulse by Union troops met at the stone wall that had been a center of the fighting and shook hands across it. Photographers eagerly caught more images of the two armies’ veterans—some wearing parts of their old uniforms—greeting one another or dining together at long wooden tables. President Woodrow Wilson, the first southerner to occupy the White House in nearly half a century, arrived on July 4 to speak to “these gallant men in blue and gray”:

We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten…. How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic.

Manisha Sinha does not mention the Gettysburg reunion in her provocative The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, but it is an apt symbol of a central argument she makes: despite its surrender in 1865, the South eventually achieved at least a draw over the central issue that the Civil War was fought to resolve—the rights of Black Americans. In President Wilson’s saccharine “the quarrel forgotten,” there was no hint of Abraham Lincoln’s famous words at that same battlefield fifty years earlier about “the unfinished work” of achieving “a new birth of freedom.” And much of what had happened in between was anything but “benign and majestic.”

Just as we talk about the First Republic, the Second Empire, or the Fifth Republic in France, so Sinha divides American history into phases, although the transition from one to another is not so neatly demarcated, sometimes taking years. Her focus is on what she calls our Second Republic: the promise of Reconstruction following the Civil War. This period, she points out, brought not just new rights for the formerly enslaved but hope for women and Native Americans, surprising flashes of solidarity with freedom struggles elsewhere, and “the forgotten origin point of social democracy in the United States.” All of this, however, was destined to be soon replaced by what she calls the American Empire—a regime that resumed seizing land from Native Americans, ruthlessly suppressed organized labor, and acquired its first overseas colonies.

Reconstruction was bitterly opposed by reactionaries, most notably the ghastly president Andrew Johnson (“This is a country for white men,” he wrote, “and…as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men”), who was in office after President Abraham Lincoln’s death in 1865, until 1869. Sinha reminds us why the radical hopes of Reconstruction enraged racists like Johnson. There were corrupt or incompetent officials, to be sure, but besides safeguarding freedom for some four million slaves, Reconstruction was “a brief, shining historical moment” that held open a door to a different America. Both Black and white northern volunteers went south to work as teachers for former slaves who had previously been barred from all education. Even though most Black Americans never got their promised forty acres and a mule, some 25 percent owned at least a small amount of land by the century’s end. The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed them full citizenship and, for men, the right to vote. Johnson, nostalgic for his days as a slave owner (when he had really been, he claimed, “their slave instead of their being mine”), angrily vetoed one civil rights measure after another, but Congress usually overrode him.

The most important Reconstruction agency was established in 1865: the Freedmen’s Bureau, “a sort of proxy state for African Americans” that did everything from helping them settle on public land to protecting them from wage theft and assault by white planters furious at losing their human property. Its schools taught more than 200,000 children over the course of seven years. It ran orphan asylums and more than sixty hospitals, and its medical workers also treated the newly freed in their homes.

All of this was still grossly inadequate to the needs of millions of impoverished men and women newly freed from slavery and surrounded by resentful, armed whites, but nonetheless, Sinha declares, “the Freedmen’s Bureau was the first government social welfare agency in US history.” Among other achievements, it founded and helped fund a number of what today we call HBCUs—historically Black colleges and universities. The most prominent, Howard University, bears the name of General Oliver Otis Howard of Maine, an ardent evangelical who lost an arm in the Civil War and was the Freedmen’s Bureau’s first commissioner.

Much of this picture is largely familiar from the work of historians ranging from W.E.B. Du Bois to Eric Foner. What Sinha adds to it are the intriguing signs of a wider radicalism that flourished, if briefly, as this idealistic moment began. Other historians have noted such connections, but I’ve not seen such an array of them compiled before. A Black division of the Union Army, Sinha writes, “called itself ‘Louverture,’ after the leader of the Haitian Revolution.” The country’s first Black daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune, declared that “whether the victim is called serf in Russia, peasant in Austria, Jew in Prussia, proletarian in France, pariah in India, Negro in the United States, at heart it is the same denial of justice.” One meeting of Black citizens of Illinois in 1866 warned “lovers of…constitutional liberty” of the dangers of a “coup d’état” such as the one staged in France some years earlier by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. Their statement also spoke of “the aboriginal man of America, once the undisputed possessor of this continent,” who was “by coercion” robbed of land.

Indeed, for a time it seemed as if the Second American Republic might promise a better deal for Native Americans. Ely Parker, a Seneca, had served as a Union officer and aide to General Ulysses S. Grant; the surrender terms that Robert E. Lee signed at Appomattox were drafted in Parker’s handwriting. Four years later, when Grant became president, he appointed Parker commissioner of Indian affairs. Parker pushed for a more peaceful policy toward his fellow Native Americans: protection of their land rights, opportunities for education, and more.

The new constitutions that southern states adopted right after the war (almost all soon amended or ignored) were often wide-ranging. Alabama established an agricultural college and property rights for married women, and its constitutional convention resolved that ex-slaves could collect pay from their former owners for the period they were kept enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation—surely America’s first reparations bill. Sinha, who has a frustrating tendency to race through long lists of events, quotes, laws, and resolutions, does not say if anyone was actually able to collect.

Although several of the conventions debated land reform, none of them enacted it. On the other hand, state constitutions created tax-funded public school systems on a wide scale for the first time in the South, with South Carolina…and Texas making attendance mandatory…. They did away with undemocratic laws that penalized the poor, imprisonment for debt, as well as capital and “cruel and unusual” punishment for minor crimes. Most also protected laborers and sharecroppers by giving them the first share, or lien, on the crops they produced.

Finally, during Reconstruction, Black southerners were elected to office for the first time: to the US Senate and House of Representatives and—more than six hundred of them—to state legislatures.

All these advances, of course, were doomed. As southern whites reasserted their power, they swept away the Black officeholders; in 1874 eighty former Confederate officers were elected to Congress, and by 1910 one, Edward Douglass White of Louisiana, was chief justice of the Supreme Court. The early moment of promise had existed only while the defeated South was under military occupation. The last remnants of that came to an end in the Compromise of 1877, following a disputed presidential election. In return for Rutherford B. Hayes entering the White House, all remaining federal troops were withdrawn from the South. That left white southerners free to impose Jim Crow laws and to use poll taxes, lynching, and a ruthless campaign of murder, mutilation, and castration to terrorize Blacks, prevent them from voting, and ensure that the South would remain white-dominated and highly segregated for nearly a century to come.

It was also a South dominated by the wealthy, for poll taxes reduced voting by poor whites as well as Blacks. 

Again, Sinha’s wide perspective covers more than race:

Once in power, conservatives passed laws that adversely affected all poor and working people, including fence laws that cordoned off common grazing lands…. They also rescinded lien laws that protected sharecroppers and wage workers. Virginia…even authorized whipping for petty theft.

Central to the book is her assertion that crushing the Second Republic was a precondition for the rise of the American Empire. The white elites who overthrew Reconstruction, she writes,




helped make possible other antidemocratic policies and forces, from the conquest of the Plains Indians to the establishment of American empire to the crushing of the first mass labor and farmer movements.

The troops withdrawn from the South were then deployed against Native Americans. Gone from power was Ely Parker and his talk of peace. General Howard of the Freedmen’s Bureau later showed a very different spirit as he led a war against the Nez Perce people. “The rise of the Jim Crow South and the conquest of the West, often told as separate stories, were parallel events connected at a fundamental level,” Sinha writes. General William Tecumseh Sherman, leader of the Union Army’s march through Georgia, was in the field again, declaring, “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux even to the extermination of men, women, and children.” Just as the progressives looked overseas, Sinha points out, so did the new empire builders: Sherman sent officers to England to learn how the British were so successful in their colonial wars.

Among those protesting the brutal seizure of Indian lands were many abolitionists. Lydia Maria Child urged in 1868 that “the white and Indian must jointly occupy the country.”
William Lloyd Garrison wrote that “the same contempt is generally felt at the west for the Indians as was felt at the south for the negroes.” He compared a ruthless massacre in Montana to British vengeance following the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Other abolitionists also thought internationally. When the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner argued for civil rights, he compared the treatment of Blacks in the South to the sufferings of the lower castes in India, colonial subjects in Africa, and Chinese immigrants here at home.

The last Indian resistance was crushed in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The big expansion of our overseas empire came eight years later as the United States seized Spain’s colonies, most importantly the Philippines, after the Spanish-American War. Many Confederate veterans had been welcomed back into the US Army for these campaigns. One of them, Major General Joseph Wheeler, got his enemies mixed up and shouted, as his men advanced against Spanish troops in Cuba, “We got the Yankees on the run!”

On the run, also, were labor unionists. Sinha writes that “federal troops, once deployed to secure freedpeople’s rights,” were now “being used on a wide scale to put down striking workers.” In an apt analogy, she reminds us that just as slaveholders had once talked of states’ rights but demanded a federal fugitive slave law, now postwar railroads and industries fended off laws about safety and working hours but demanded that government soldiers suppress unions. And they did, on a huge scale, from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 onward. Intriguingly, Sinha mentions that the Pennsylvania Railroad magnate Tom Scott may have been one of the architects of the Compromise of 1877, although the full story of that fateful bargain will never be known.

It is poignant to imagine the America that could have been if the Second Republic had survived. If Lincoln had lived, or if he had chosen a more enlightened vice-president; if more federal troops had remained in the South; if their presence hadn’t been bargained away…there are many more ifs.

Some of those ifs could have given us a country with less bloodshed and more justice, but I doubt that they would have changed as much as Sinha implies. She writes, for example, that “the conquest of the West after the war…was not inevitable.” I fear it was. As the nineteenth century went on, the powerful new tools of the imperial age—trains and steamboats, the repeating rifle and the machine gun, telegraph lines to send orders to distant troops and officials—enabled colonizers or settlers to seize land across the world at an accelerating pace. It happened on the Great Plains under a capitalist democracy in the United States; it happened in Central Asia and the Caucasus under the absolute monarchy of tsarist Russia; it happened in Africa, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia under a variety of European regimes like Britain, France, and Germany. Even the great Frederick Douglass reflected a touch of this spirit when he said that there might be “a deficiency inherent to the Latin races” and advocated American annexation of what today is the Dominican Republic.

If the Second Republic had lasted longer, would Black Americans be better off today? Surely yes. But even under the best of circumstances, with both an administration and a Congress generous and enlightened, would the victorious North have had the necessary decades-long commitment required to undo the vast gulf in income, wealth, land ownership, education, and more that was slavery’s legacy? I doubt it. Short of revolution—which seldom has ended well—such differences are stubbornly enduring. In every country once blighted by slavery, the huge economic gap between descendants of slaves and masters yawns wide, even on the many Caribbean islands where the former far outnumber the latter and control the government as well.

I wish I could say that Sinha’s writing is as fresh as her perspective. It’s not. Important terms she uses, like the “contraband camps” where refugees fleeing slavery gathered during the Civil War, go undefined and barely described. She piles up cavalcades of detail about matters that are well known, such as the horrific years of terror that restored white supremacy in the South, while she rushes past other eye-catching but less familiar events. She devotes only part of one sentence, for instance, to the proposal by Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire for a federally funded “uniform national system of primary and secondary education.” Versions of this bill passed the Senate three times in the twilight of the Second Republic, but never the House. Think how different America would be if a Black child in the Mississippi Delta had as much money spent on her education as a white one in Silicon Valley.

Sinha also never slows down to paint a narrative picture—whether of a particular community, say, that experienced the dreams and then the crushed hopes of Reconstruction, or of a typical meeting of one of the Black “conventions” of this period that she calls a “missing link” to the twentieth-century civil rights movement. She never gives us full, flesh-and-blood portraits of any of the major figures, especially those like Douglass who had a clear vision of the America that might have been.

Nonetheless, it’s valuable to have her history of unfulfilled hopes. The nation we had become when the frail Union and Confederate veterans clasped hands at Gettysburg in 1913, fell short of the one that at least some of those Union soldiers thought they were fighting for. As the white-haired men met, few Blacks in the South could vote, and in that year alone fifty-one of them were lynched. Native American children were forced to go to the notorious government boarding schools where they were punished if they spoke their native languages. By 1913 the American Empire was well underway; US troops were stationed in Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Nicaragua, and the Philippines, a list that would grow far longer as the decades passed. One crucial promise of the Second Republic—the right to vote—was finally fulfilled in the 1960s with much effort, suffering, and sacrifice of lives. More remain to be realized. Given the new occupant of the White House, we may well find ourselves living under a Third Republic, with which those side-whiskered Confederate veterans might have been very satisfied.

Adam Hochschild’s most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. He is working on a book about American social movements of the 1930s. (May 2025)

Donald Trump is the worst American president of all time. Trump tariffs are terrible for the world's economy!

Echo essay published in the Washington Monthly by Robert J. Shipiro" "devastating capital flight that could leave many of our leading financial institutions insolvent..."

Trump’s Perfect Storm that Could Sink the American Economy

It’s not just the president’s trade-destroying tariffs, erratic shifts in policy, and fiscal recklessness. Look at the rule of law—or lack thereof.

Donald Trump has steered the American economy into a perfect storm. In the book, film, and now in real life, a rare combination of destructive forces comes together and magnifies the damage. This storm could break the U.S. economy.

Trump’s tariffs are the most destructive force. Their first-order damages begin by arbitrarily driving up the prices of every product and input we import, followed by price hikes on most competing products and inputs made here. This will leave less money for everything else, depressing growth and jobs even as inflation accelerates—a textbook definition of stagflation. And these first-order costs are compounded by retaliatory tariffs by the primary targets of Trump’s levies, further slowing jobs, wages, and growth.

Six months ago, our economy grew at a healthy 2.8 percent rate, and inflation had eased sharply. Now, Trump’s policies ushered in rising prices and the first stage of a recession.

His program’s second-order costs follow from the unprecedentedly high tariffs on goods and inputs from our three largest trading partners. The 145 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports and China’s 125 percent retaliatory tariffs have established for now a mutual embargo between the world’s two most important economies, alongside Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on most goods and inputs our companies buy from suppliers in Mexico and Canada.

If these policies remain in place, they will not only raise prices and slow the economy. By mid-summer, their punishing blows will disrupt supply chains, and Americans should expect the types of shortages their grandparents had to endure during World War II. Despite these inescapable second-order costs, Trump and his apprentice dealmakers have yet to begin negotiations with China, Mexico, or Canada—in large part because the president’s personal pique and economic delusions dictate our indefensible positions.

It gets worse. Most U.S. imports from our major trading partners are inputs for U.S. manufacturers, products made by their foreign subsidiaries, or energy we need, and truncating our access to those imports will damage a broad array of separate economic activities related to them. (Hat tip to Brad DeLong.)

Cripple our access to electronic parts from China, vehicles from Canada, or vegetables and fruits from Mexico, and American companies will have no choice but to wind down the jobs and spending for their related marketing, accounting and legal services, transport, and ultimate sales. Our economy will also lose the value American consumers and businesses derive from using those electronics, cars, trucks, and foodstuffs. It will pummel American manufacturers whom Trump claims he wants to help.

If Trump’s inane tariff regime remains in place for six months or longer, its first and second-order effects could trigger a deep recession akin to 1981-1982 and 2008-2009. And unlike those recessions, the Federal Reserve won’t be able to help much. The tariff-driven inflation will limit the central bank’s ability to cut interest rates, a dilemma that drove Trump to threaten Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Equally important, the bond and equity markets’ thumbs-down responses to Trump’s tariffs and threats signal an even more serious problem: Investors are losing confidence in Trump, his presidency, and perhaps the United States. It’s especially true for foreign investors who reinforced the message by moving away from the dollar, because they’re investing less in our stocks and bonds.

If their response to our president’s ineptitude and capriciousness persists, it could be ruinous. The stability of our financial system depends on trillions of dollars in foreign capital. In 2024, foreign investors and governments held $18.4 trillion in U.S. stocks and $8.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, about 30 percent of all our stock and 30 percent of all our bonds. While most American investors will likely wait out the coming storm, foreign investors with $27 trillion in American financial assets have plenty of alternatives. In a word, the United States could face destabilizing capital flight.

To stave off this grim prospect, the Treasury Department and American corporations will have to offer foreign and domestic investors higher returns. (Yields on U.S. treasuries soared after Trump revealed his chaotic tariff regime and have decreased only slightly since then.) So, regardless of what the Fed does, market interest rates may rise even as the economy declines.

It may not be very far off because the Treasury’s challenge to attract funds to keep the government running is coming to a head. The Treasury already planned to float $1.8 trillion in new bonds in 2025, and that burden will increase substantially as the economy weakens. On top of that, Republicans in Congress will very soon approve Trump’s deficit-busting budget, draining $5 trillion in revenues over 10 years for another round of his 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire and perhaps up to $4 trillion more for Trump’s other tax promises, plus another $1.5 trillion in increased defense spending.

Trump and his economic courtiers count on tax cuts and higher spending to ward off recession, and in normal times, they might have been right. But their hopes are delusions under the new conditions they’ve created since the higher interest rates needed to attract the capital the government and U.S. corporations need will thwart most or all of any stimulus.

Our gathering economic storm includes another feature that could drive the economy onto the rocks. Apart from the tariffs, Trump’s aggrieved attacks on the rule of law also threaten the willingness of foreign investors to continue holding and buying American bonds and stocks. Along with the rest of us, they see Trump and his administration unilaterally abrogating contracts, withholding appropriated funds, dismissing court decisions, attacking judges for enforcing their rulings, deporting people without charges or hearings, providing special treatment for large contributors and favored companies, and threatening law firms and universities without any legal basis.

The erosion of the rule of law under Trump can have enormous economic significance for a foreign government, investor, or company with stakes in our economy. They now know that the U.S. government may ignore its contracts with them or decide not to enforce their agreements with others when it serves the political or personal interests of the president. That’s the way the world works in the kleptocratic dictatorships in Russia and Venezuela, and virtually no one invests in their stocks and bonds.

By following their lead, Trump and his apprentices risk devastating capital flight that could leave many of our leading financial institutions insolvent. In addition to his deeply destructive tariffs, Trump’s sweeping campaign against the rule of law in the United States has raised the economic stakes from a rocky business cycle to a potential financial and economic meltdown with terrible consequences.

Republicans including Senator Susan Collins must call for Donald Trump's Impreachment

Donald Trump's Incompetent Cabinet is a cartel of crazy
Echo letter published in The Cap Times in Wisconsin.

Dear Editor: I think I figured out how Donald Trump was able to establish the incompetent Cabinet this time around in, his  Trumpziism "Trump 201".

He probably promised pardons, no matter what the appointment illegally did, even if it was clearly "illegal". They could be considered either the cartel of crazy, or the cartelians. 

A loyalty pledge to Trump apparently takes precedence over the one they took to the Constitution.

The Republicans in the legislative branch are also subservient to Trump and might not get hired anywhere else if they lose an election or retire, so they have to hang on for dear life, agreeing with everything he says, like when he said military personnel and veterans are suckers and losers. 

Town hall audiences are coming out because, just like the Eagles sing, they can't hide their lyin' eyes.

Republicans probably had to wait until 2015, to trot out Donald Trump as a candidate because too many members of the Greatest Generation were still alive before then, and he wouldn't have won a primary. (Senator Susan Collins of Maine proudly spoke often about her father Donald F. Collins, and his World War II heroism. Her father would never have voted for Donald Trump because of the terrible way he treats veterans.)

It's doubtful my relatives, or friends who saw the Great Depression or World War II, would've voted for the disaster in what we have now. They would've seen the true colors shining through, just like Cyndi Lauper.

Since pictures are worth a thousand words, anybody pictured with Trump or Elon Musk, might be pulling a Saint Peter, pretty soon, trying to claim they don't know them before the cock crows three times. (Scripture: Matthew 26:34). 

From Dan Duffy in Delavan, Wisconsin

Pope Leo XIV conclave elected on May 8th a Roman Catholic Marian day of prayer in honor of Our Lady of Pompeii

An American pope, for a time of American crisis.

Echo editorial published in the Boston Globe newspaper:

Newly elected Pope Leo XIV waved to faithful and pilgrims gathered in St. Peter's Square shortly after his election on May 8, Our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV’s first prayer was the Hail Mary in honor of Our Lady of Pompeii. #PopeLeoXIV #HailMary #Pompeii

Nobody should be expecting the pope to lead the resistance to Trump. But hopefully, Leo XIV, as an American, understands the gravity of the moment in his home country.

No sooner had the first American pope been selected Thursday than a modern tradition unfolded: the scrubbing of Robert Francis Prevost’s X feed.

Previously a little-known cardinal from the Chicago area, Prevost was selected by his brother cardinals after several rounds of voting to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. He took the name of Leo XIV (thus forgoing the chance to be history’s first Pope Bob).

His selection in the pomp of a Vatican conclave was a surprise not only because it was unprecedented. 

It had also been widely assumed that due to the global unpopularity of President Trump and the United States in general, no American would be elevated to the papacy to succeed the Argentinian Pope Francis, who died last month.

Leo’s election is an incredible milestone for American Catholics, whose history in this country began as an oppressed minority. And the Catholic Church, which thinks globally and across centuries, probably did not factor the politics of his home country into his appointment.

Still, when the news broke, Americans scrambled for clues as to where this US citizen stood on Trump — and, by implication, how he might use the world’s ultimate bully pulpit to influence his home country and its leadership.

Nobody should be expecting the pope to lead the resistance to Trump. For that matter, we wouldn’t want a religious leader, of any stripe, playing that role in a diverse country like the United States.

Still, it will matter what Leo says. It will matter how and when an American pope talks about America‘s politics, policies, and inevitably important role in the world. It will matter where, when, and how forcefully he deploys the church’s moral authority.

And it will matter how he responds to the Trump administration’s courtship of Catholic voters and attempts to co-opt Catholic doctrine to justify its immigration policies.

When the president harasses or scapegoats immigrants, Leo XIV can push back, as Francis did. 

And there is nobody with more authority to object when JD Vance attempts to use Catholic teachings as a justification for anti-immigrant posturing.

An early sampling of his X posts suggests he would do just that.

Just a few weeks ago, then Archbishop Prevost called Vance “wrong” in an X post after the vice president suggest that a theological concept called “ordo amoris” (suggests that love should not be given indiscriminately) justified the mass deportation campaign threatened by the Trump administration.

He also made or circulated posts in favor of immigration reform, gun control, and COVID-19 vaccines, and called on the church “to reject racism” after the 2020, murder of George Floyd.

Those digital breadcrumbs might seem to place him on the American left, but that would almost certainly be wrong. Leo is very unlikely to be a progressive, in the modern American political sense of the word. He can be expected to maintain the church’s opposition to abortion and gay marriage, for instance. In a 2012 speech, he decried the “homosexual lifestyle.”

But hopefully, as an American, he understands the gravity of the moment in his home country and won’t allow areas where the church agrees with Trump to become excuses to ignore the rest. And simply by sticking to its own principles — the ones conservatives hate, and the ones liberals hate — the pope can demonstrate to other Americans how to remain independent at a time when so much of politics has descended into tribalism.

Sistine Chapel The Last Judgement by Michalangelo

Although we’ll never know what happened inside the Sistine Chapel before the white smoke billowed out of the chimney, perhaps the cardinals chose Leo because he was an American, not despite it.

Maybe the logic behind his selection was that no one was better poised to handle the church’s response to an off-the-rails American administration than a fellow American.

If so, it’s another reason to wish (and to fervently pray for) for Pope Leo’s success.