Trump’s antics and the highest human value

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 11, 2025

I confess to an occasional secret chuckle over President Trump’s more outrageous statements—like the one about annexing Canada to the United States (which Canadians, at least, ought not to think funny). But I suppose a good Catholic ought not even to smile at the deliberately bizarre provocations of a sitting President. On the other hand, I am acutely aware of how severely many bishops and even Pope Francis respond to the non-Catholic Trump’s excesses as compared with their muted or non-existent criticism of the self-professed Catholic Biden’s far more destructive abortion and gender policies—not to mention his abject refusal to address the problems of uncontrolled immigration.

I can’t help but wonder if we might be getting yet another lesson in “permissible outrage”. According to the permissible outrage theory, it is perfectly acceptable to vociferously condemn imprudent statements and decisions which are out of step with the values of the dominant secular culture, but it is completely unacceptable to denounce policies and decisions which are intrinsically immoral in all circumstances. As a case in point, compare the recent reaction of high-ranking Catholic prelates to Trump’s immigration policies with the reaction of these same Catholic prelates to Biden’s abortion and gender policies.

Based on this comparison, for example, I have little sympathy for Cardinal McElroy’s characterization of Trump’s immigration policies as a “war of fear and terror”, or even for Pope Francis’ direct denunciation of Trump’s efforts. I don’t withhold my sympathy for these critics because I am in favor of mass deportation of poor immigrants desperately seeking a better life. Rather, I withhold it because I insist on knowing where these critics were when it was a question of President Biden’s far more evil abortion, sex and gender policies.

Biden’s policies were far more subversive of the common good. They deliberately distorted and violated the natural law—the law in our very nature that must be apprehended and obeyed to achieve both personal and social health and happiness. So while I find some of Trump’s remarks, and even some of his policies, outrageous (as he so very clearly intends), I can occasionally risk a secret chuckle even as I hope and expect that his various forms of posturing are designed primarily to secure a more beneficial long-term policy. Trump’s approach is not generally to speak softly but carry a big stick; it is to speak loudly and gain a rational concession. Or at least I believe this interpretation is possible.

Sources of Catholic strategy

That does not mean I am in favor of mass deportations of illegal immigrants. Obviously it is better to accept what has been wrought through bad political leadership in the past and proceed now to implement a solidly prudential immigration policy with adequate controls. That’s not a simple task, but it is clearly simpler—and far less harmful to those involved—than the mass deportation of millions of desperate immigrants who have already arrived. At the same time, I must stress the need for a spiritual and psychological shift among the majority of “legitimate” Americans. A population that is committed to ongoing personal pleasure—at the expense of life-long marriage, bearing and raising well-formed children, and hard work—is doomed to be replaced regardless of immigration policies and their enforcement.

This is why it seems now that Donald Trump is at least no less likely to hit upon effective strategies for improving life in the United States than is Pope Francis. Francis’ appointment of Cardinal McElroy to head the Washington archdiocese is the blunder of a man who considers a passive alignment with the dominant secular culture of the West on sex-and-gender issues as a better response than apostolic witness through the preaching of the Gospel. In Francis we have a Pope who regards the more vibrant sectors of the Church in the United States as dangerously flawed, a Pope who seems to think that passivity in the face of cultural disintegration is a more effective path to Catholic credibility than the creation of a vibrant Catholic counter culture.

And culture includes politics. Pope Saint John Paul II, who inspired a whole generation of Catholics by his courageously Catholic moral clarity, gained the credibility to speak truth to power in complex situations which required considerable prudence. Pope Francis, who only very rarely fails to hedge every controversial Catholic teaching with a forest of caveats, exceptions and conditions leaves the Church not knowing where she really stands on anything but the virtues of private devotions and an ill-defined fraternal love.

The result is predictable—a growing tendency among serious Catholics to prefer Trump’s outrageous remarks to papal statements that are “nuanced” to the point of moral paralysis. Donald Trump is not a Catholic, nor are his policies shaped by a firm grasp of Catholic principles, but he does exhibit a refreshing capacity to fill the moral vacuum that is so characteristic of today’s status quo. This is often dismissed as the road to fascism, but the question is never raised as to whether one fascism or another is so very different from the bureaucratic manipulations of an immoral omni-State. Instead, the typical warnings against fascism seem foolishly to take for granted that the status quo is just fine.

Sadly, a case can be made that omni-bureaucratization is actually the new fascism, though a fascism untethered to particular nations and peoples, which means it is really just an alternative form of ideological rule. In any case, political affairs are far more likely to tend toward fascism if the Church persists in muting her moral teachings to accommodate a secular hegemony. If there has ever been a fascist regime in the name of Christ, I’d like to know about it. Instead, nearly every form of tyrannical or ideological government, including every post-Christian government in the West, has been based on secular or even pagan values.

Therefore we should never deal in false dichotomies, regardless of the temptation; we should never strive for one sort of secularist dream over another. Strong Catholic teaching and strong Catholic formation are the only antidote to ideologies and fascisms of every kind. All genuinely Catholic socio-political strategy must be based on truth, not on Catholic accommodation. There must be an effort to convert souls to Christ, with the secondary intention of accommodating society to the Church rather than the Church to society. And this simply does not happen when the Church teaches that the highest value is human respect, or even that the highest value is freedom from legal restraint. It happens only when the Church teaches that the highest value is Jesus Christ—and explains precisely what that means for how we live.