You may recall one Sunday night in April, when his holiness Donald Trump had posted a picture of himself in a white robe and red sash, one hand on the forehead of a sick man, light spilling from the other. "Jesus Christ," many likely muttered to themselves. Trump had just attacked Pope Leo in their rolling schism.
The image was gone by Monday morning, however, deleted after conservative Christians called it blasphemy. Marjorie Taylor Greene—by then, a former GOP congresswoman, cast out of the MAGA movement she helped build—called it "an Antichrist spirit." It was read as vanity, largely because it was vanity, delivered with puckish humor. But it was also revealing about how Trump views his relationship with his missionaries, sent out to share the truth; his truth, at any rate.
Because a messiah doesn’t have opponents, he has apostles—and traitors. Today, a new traitor, a new Judas Iscariot, is readying himself to betray the Messiah: Kevin Warsh, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Disagreement cannot be conscience, or statute, or a bad inflation print.
It can only be treachery, committed by someone Trump raised up to their position. This is more than a labored metaphor. It is the mechanism by which Trump sorts every institution he has staffed.
Yesterday, it was pointing at the Judases of the Supreme Court. Today, it points at the Fed. Wednesday, the Fed is expected to raise its benchmark rate by a quarter point, to a range of 3.75 percent to 4 percent, the first increase since July 2023.
Futures markets put the odds above 90 percent. Warsh has held the job for barely four months, and he secured it because Trump handed it to him after years of viciously flaying his predecessor, Jerome "Too Late" Powell, for refusing to cut rates faster. As Trump sees it, higher rates are needlessly holding back the American economy.
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