While we might like to believe there are rules to the great game, there are none except doing everything possible to advance your own and your party’s power.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a religious figure healing the sick. He was dressed in robes with glowing hands, leaning over a prone man while what appeared to be angels flew in the background along with eagles, an American flag, and even the Statue of Liberty. Some claimed he was Jesus, others a saint. A day earlier, he had posted a message that was highly critical of Pope Leo XIV after the pontiff himself had criticized the war in Iran. The President described him as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” “catering to the Radical Left,” and “hurting the Catholic Church” before telling reporters “I am not a fan of Pope Leo.” Like clockwork, detractors and some supporters on social media erupted, claiming the President had gone too far for around the millionth and one time by my admittedly guesswork of a count. The progressive “explainer” website Vox.com, for example, claimed he was “pivoting to blasphemy,” writing to “celebrate the second Sunday of Easter, President Donald Trump appears to have decided that blasphemy might be the best option.” In their view, “Picking a fight with the spiritual leader for more than 50 million Americans was a risky move, if not unprecedented for Trump, and he faced immediate pushback from some otherwise right-leaning Catholics. But somehow, things only got worse from there: Trump followed up with an AI-generated image depicting him as Jesus Christ healing the sick, as he’s flanked by symbols of America and both military and spiked figures floating like angels behind him. It was that second sacrilege that expanded the blowback into a full-on political crisis: This time not only from Catholics, but from evangelicals and other denominations — including many who are typically aligned with Trump.” From there, Vox proceeded to quote right leaning individuals and supporters of the President who were not thrilled. “I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” evangelical writer Megan Basham commented, “but he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.” “God shall not be mocked,” noted Riley Gaines, the former swimmer, now conservative activist. “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit,” insisted former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has recently become one of the President’s fiercest critics.
How did the President respond? He deleted the tweet and claimed with a straight face that he had no idea the image had religious overtones. “I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with the Red Cross,” he insisted despite the evidence of the image itself. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better.,” he continued with the charade as if anyone could possibly believe. Personally, I was reminded of the moment in 2024 when he attended a conference of black journalists after Vice President Kamala Harris assumed her anointed role as candidate, replacing her boss, President Joe Biden in the proverbial eleventh hour. At the time, President Trump was asked whether or not Vice President Harris was a “DEI hire” and whether he would condemn Republicans who said as much. After questioning what the letters even meant in this context, President Trump said the unthinkable and the patently ridiculous at the same time, “I’ve known [Kamala] a long time indirectly. She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black. I respect either one.” Of course, it’s almost impossible to believe the President wasn’t aware that the Vice President had regularly been described as the first black person to occupy the role in history, but it didn’t really matter. The point was not to be honest in the sense that most of us consider telling the truth. It was instead to make a point about the absurdity of identify-based politics, a point made through sheer shamelessness. Nor was President Trump quite finished on Monday. As the cameras were rolling, a woman arrived at the door to the Oval Office with a shirt emblazoned Door Dash Grandma and two bags of McDonalds to deliver lunch in a moment that was obviously staged. The President, however, insisted otherwise, claiming the woman had somehow been let onto the White House grounds and directed to the entrance in plain view of the media by accident, as though any Uber Eats or Door Dash driver in the world can just mosy up with a delivery for the gardner, only to tell him how she had benefited from an additional $11,000 in tax deductions because of the no tax on tips provisions in the Big Beautiful Bill. What are the odds?
While these events were unfolding, Democrat Representative Eric Swalwell found himself in the midst of a full blown political crisis after several women came forward accusing him of a years-long pattern of sexual assault and even rape. By Monday morning, he had dropped out of the California governor’s race and by that same evening, he resigned his seat in the House of Representatives. Though these revelations were supposedly new, this is not the first time Representative Swalwell was involved in a sexual scandal. In December 2020, it was revealed that a Chinese spy known as “Fang Fang” had infiltrated the Congressman’s inner circle and the pair had engaged in sexual relations multiple times. As Axios reported at the time, “Fang took part in fundraising activity for Swalwell’s 2014 re-election campaign, according to a Bay Area political operative and a current U.S. intelligence official. Swalwell’s office was directly aware of these activities on its behalf, the political operative said. That same political operative, who witnessed Fang fundraising on Swalwell’s behalf, found no evidence of illegal contributions…Fang helped place at least one intern in Swalwell’s office, according to those same two people, and interacted with Swalwell at multiple events over the course of several years.” Nor was Representative Swalwell the only politician targeted. “She also engaged in sexual or romantic relationships with at least two mayors of Midwestern cities over a period of about three years, according to one U.S. intelligence official and one former elected official…At least two separate sexual interactions with elected officials, including one of these Midwestern mayors, were caught on FBI electronic surveillance of Fang, according to two intelligence officials.” After the FBI alerted Representative Swalwell’s office, Fang Fang left the country sometime in 2015, but after the story broke, the media expressed very little interest in whether the Congressman’s sexual predilections might have gotten him into further trouble. If you are going to sleep with a Chinese spy you barely know, who else are you sleeping with and what sort of trouble might you cause?
Though the average person might have been at least a little taken aback by these revelations, especially considering they were still engaged in extracurricular sexual activity – the good Representative is married with three children – I don’t think most people are surprised to learn that politicians aren’t average by any means. Rather than transform into the Congressional equivalent of a wallflower, Representative Swalwell proceeded to position himself as a chief critic of President Trump, telling every camera in sight that he was unfit for office and the truth would come out one day to the point where he actually served as an impeachment manager of all things – after his affair with Fang Fang and after the women who have come forward claimed he had begun sexually abusing them. According to reporters who have suddenly decided it was time to come clean, rumors had been “swirling” about his behavior since the earliest days of his career, placing his escapades long before Fang Fang and throughout his entire time in Congress. Steven Tavares claimed “I’ve covered Eric Swalwell since he was a member of the Dublin City Council. Shortly after being elected to Congress in 2013, his behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local government and the Alameda County Democratic Party.” Another reporter noted the same, then promptly denied any and all responsibility for actually covering the story, “Rumors about Eric Swalwell’s sexual misconduct have swirled in DC for years. I first heard these rumors in 2020, in the course of my other reporting about Swalwell. I was neither a politics reporter nor a women’s issue reporter, so I could not chase them down.” Knowing all this and likely more, what does Representative Swalwell do? Choose to run for governor rather than keep a low profile, citing his background and family values of all things as a reason to support him in the first place. “Eric Swalwell, the fiercest face of the Democratic resistance, was raised by Republicans in Dublin, California…One of the reasons Eric fights so hard for regular people, is because he is one, and because he’s had many of their jobs…In his sparse spare hours, Eric has also founded a tech company – an AI political organizing tool. And has also become a television and film producer, having made two films and developed two television shows. Eric and his wife Brittany, a small business owner in hospitality who refuses to read the TV pilot Eric developed, are the pleased parents of three children: Nelson, Cricket, and Hank…The kids have not chosen a political party, but Eric has heard Nelson tell his younger siblings that Democrats ‘just had better ideas.’”
Perhaps needless to say, some have found the timing of these long known revelations rather convenient. Because the governor of California is now decided by a bizarre primary system, where the top two vote getters in an open contest face off in the general election even if they are of the same party, too many Democrats in the race made it possible for there to be a Republican only race in November. Clearly, that couldn’t be allowed, so Representative Swalwell was sacrificed for the sins everyone already knew about anyway, but that’s beyond the scope of this post save as an example of the utter shamelessness of politics in general. While we might like to believe there are rules to the great game, there are none except doing everything possible to advance your own and your party’s power, a reality that should have been made plain since Thomas Jefferson conducted a shadow campaign against his friend and President John Adams while he was Vice President. President Trump is currently the leading practitioner of the art, as evidenced by these three little stories, and they hate him for it. Representative Swalwell fancied himself in the same league, but he wasn’t and suddenly became expendable. At this point, however, it’s an open question whether the media has become even more shameless than the politicians they supposedly hold to account.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 