This holy week saw the Catholic Pope, Leo XIV, clash sharply with the American Secretary of War, Peter Hegseth, and by implication his master, Donald Trump, about prayers for "overwhelming violence" against the Persians and their allies. God didn't listen to people calling for violence, said the Pope, who has long made clear a general disapproval of US President Trump's actions, including his partnership with Israel in the slaughter of Palestinians, his war against the environment, and his policy of indiscriminate mass deportations against non-citizens from the United States.

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Leo has not only attacked the mass deportations by Trump's department of immigration and customs enforcement - ICE, equivalent to Australia's Border Force - against immigrants and their children. He and, soon after, the American Catholic bishops in a joint pastoral letter also attacked what they call "dehumanising rhetoric and violence" and the creation of a climate of fear and anxiety.

Leo, of course, is a true-blue American from Chicago, even if he spent much of his early career as a missionary in South America. His familiarity with the ways of American politics, and the structural deficiencies of US Catholic leadership has not endeared him either to many American bishops, or to Trumpites.

To Leo, the US does not get any moral credit for the belief, held by some, that America was especially selected by God as a sanctuary, much as the garden of Eden before the Fall. This belief is usually known as American exceptionalism. It holds that white Protestant settlers had a God-given licence to kill Native Americans, enslave black Africans, make peons of Latinos and burn witches. Leo may think instead that the US is especially blameworthy, or that it may have special duties to mankind because it has been given, or has taken, so much.

Leo has seemed to think that America ought to set an example of a Christian culture based on the Sermon on the Mount rather than the Old Testament. He is not attracted to the Hegseth Christian warrior ethos, which appears to me to have its origins in the crusades and mass slaughter of Jews and Muslims a thousand years ago.

The Pope's criticism irritated Trump, who called Leo "beyond woke". But at this particular moment of his Thousand Year Reich, Trump is not looking to make fresh enemies among people who voted for him in 2024. America's House of Representatives has its two-year elections in about seven months, and early opinion polling suggests that Trump could lose control of the House of Representatives, and even possibly the Senate. That would spell the end of legislative control by the Republicans, or the Trump Republicans, over the President's agenda. It could enable Democrats to repeal some Trump legislation, and perhaps to restore some legislation that Trump had effectively repealed, for example important parts of Barack Obama's health insurance legislation. It could permit the introduction of impeachment actions against Trump himself and some of his officials.

Alienating Catholics could cost Trump control of Congress

Control of Congress could give Democrats charge of the investigation agenda, whereby it could launch embarrassing investigations into associations between Republican donations and favours to donors. It could enable further pursuit of the Epstein allegations. If the Democrats got a majority in the Senate, it could put an end to deeply partisan judicial appointments and perhaps impeach some Supreme Court judges over plain and obvious ethical violations, such as the receipt of favours from litigants before the court.

It is far from uncommon for incumbents to lose ground in mid-term elections, but Trump has such a narrow majority in both houses that virtually any loss of seats would deprive him of control. A president without control is a lame duck, virtually unable to promote an agenda, sometimes unable even to preserve in place any achievements already accomplished. Given the partisan bitterness of the Trump terms, how much more delicious than usual it would be for Democrats to make miserable and impotent the end of Trump's........

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