The less popular Trump gets, the more shameless his open lawlessness becomes. This weekend, an old Trump campaign ad was back on airwaves across the country, with Trump railing against the “communists, Marxists, and fascists,” vowing to expel the “deep state” and “warmongers,” and declaring this “the final battle.”

In 2024, the ad was paid for by the Trump campaign. Now, the ad discloses, it is “paid for by the U.S. Government.” Your tax dollars at work. Happy Monday.

Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, speaks to members of the media on April 21, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

by William Kristol

When Pope Leo XIV speaks, Americans tend to listen. He is, after all, the first American pope.

On the other hand, there’ve been scores of American cardinals since the first was appointed in 1875. Those of us who aren’t in the Church don’t necessarily hear much about what they have to say.

I read about what Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington, said yesterday thanks to Christopher Hale’s excellent newsletter, Letters from Leo, which covers developments in the Catholic Church. Last night, Hale reported on McElroy’s speech at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C.

A word about McElroy. He was born in San Francisco in 1954 and graduated from Harvard in 1975, where he studied history. He took an M.A. in American history the next year at Stanford. He then attended seminary and was ordained in the priesthood in 1980. As a priest, he pursued further studies, earning a degree in moral theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University. His dissertation was on the great liberal American Catholic theologian, John Courtney Murray, whose writings in the mid-twentieth century sought to reconcile Catholicism and American liberal democracy and to ground a defense of religious pluralism and religious freedom in both liberal and Catholic thought.

After rising through the church’s ranks to become bishop of San Diego, McElroy was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2022, and then archbishop of Washington in March 2025. A couple of months later, he participated in the conclave that elected his fellow American, Cardinal Robert Prevost, pope.

As Hale explains, the occasion for McElroy’s speech was the church’s annual day of recognition of migrants and refugees. The cardinal’s text was the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he pulled no punches. We as a nation have not been good Samaritans.

For the last year and a half, the people of the United States have witnessed the suffering of the undocumented in our midst, purposely and strategically magnified by our government, and for the most part, we have simply passed on by.

Indeed, McElroy explained, we have failed to live up to the two great legacies that shape America’s duty to the stranger: the command in Deuteronomy that “you shall not violate the rights of the alien or the orphan,” and the words of Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty. The cardinal deplored the fact that, in the last eighteen months, our country has traded that legacy for “suspicion, division, cruelty, and violence.” And in abandoning the words of Deuteronomy and the Statue of Liberty, “we are losing our soul as a nation.”

McElroy noted that there are more than a million people who had been living here legally who have now lost or are losing temporary protected status. “These refugees never broke any law,” he said. They are being deported because “the bigotry that has often tarnished American immigration history is rampant once again in our nation.”

McElroy’s words particularly hit home for me. I’d returned the day before from the Bulwark event in Dayton, Ohio, on behalf of the Haitian Support Center in nearby Springfield, where we visited Friday afternoon.

It was inspiring to see the fortitude of immigrants we met there. It was heartening to see how many citizens are rallying to their support, coming from elsewhere in Ohio to bring food packages to Haitian families who have lost their work permits so have no income, and who now can’t venture outside their homes for fear of ICE.

It’s also inspiring that so many of you in the Bulwark community have contributed to support the Haitians in Springfield. When I wrote Friday morning, donations amounted to an already impressive $85,000. This morning they stand at more than $340,000.

So that’s all uplifting. But I must also say that it’s depressing and infuriating to see the city of Springfield and its people suffering under a cruel and unjust assault from our own government.

Our government’s policies are appalling and shameful. And so, as Cardinal McElroy put it yesterday, we need not to avert our eyes but to “recognize the evil that is being carried out in our name and fight every dimension of it.” And we need to “seek to convert our political representatives from tolerating this evil, or replace them.”

In five weeks, we can replace a whole bunch of them.

• Could a Wave THIS Big Actually Happen? Dems who lived through past bloodbaths see something similar happening—in reverse, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.

• Suddenly, Democrats Have a Path to a HUGE Senate Majority… Live from Dayton, Ohio, JVL, SARAH, and TIM recorded a bonus Buckeye edition of The Next Level.

• Trump Said It Out Loud. His Cabinet Says It Never Happened. WILL SALETAN meticulously breaks down Todd Blanche’s defense of Trump’s press crackdown, Mike Waltz getting confronted with the president’s own words, and the shifting story about the war with Iran.

• Reddit AMA with Catherine Rampell: Monday from 2 to 4 p.m. ET. This is your chance to ask her anything about prices, housing, jobs, tariffs, immigration and the policy debates shaping the economy. Go to r/politics on Monday to join in.

• Just How Crazy is the White House Right Now? On The Bulwark on Sunday, BILL KRISTOL talks with former Trump White House deputy press secretary SARAH MATTHEWS about Republicans distancing themselves from Trump and why she fears things could get more reckless after the midterms.

BLOOD MONEY: Ever since he decapitated Venezuela’s government last year by arresting President Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump has pursued a policy toward the South American nation that can best be described as ‘Make Colonialism Great Again.’ The White House didn’t just help itself to Venezuela’s oil reserves—it also immediately began opening up U.S. access to the country’s notoriously corrupt gold market. The New York Times reports:

In early March, as President Trump basked in the success of a military intervention in Venezuela, he joined Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the West Wing for a private celebration. A businessman also attended, and brought along a pile of gold.

The president looked approvingly at the 10 Venezuelan gold bars stacked in the Roosevelt Room, across from the Oval Office, White House officials recalled. Aides took photos and joked about keeping the gold.

Mr. Trump himself had once blacklisted Venezuelan gold, declaring that it destroyed the environment, poisoned people and financed gangsters and corrupt military officials. But after Mr. Trump toppled the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, his view changed.

On the same day that the bars arrived at the White House, the Trump administration issued a new policy allowing traders to import Venezuelan gold from one of the world’s most violent and corrupt mining regions. The first supplies would come from a state-owned mining company that remained a designated U.S. national security threat.

The Times investigation is full of staggering details about how Trump has brokered deals between U.S. business interests and, functionally, Venezuelan criminal interests—so much so that Venezuelan gold is now piling up in U.S. warehouses, with refiners unwilling to touch it lest they violate laws about financing gangs, environmental destruction, or corruption. Read the whole thing.

WHEN DONALD MET DARIO: Donald Trump’s position on AI existential risk is simple: What, you worrywarts don’t think I can handle it? Days after insisting that he wants to leave the regulation of AI development “exactly where it is”—in other words, not regulated at all—the president again said last night that “we will straighten it out if and when a problem occurs.”

“I don’t worry about it,” Trump said. “We’re leading, and we’re building tremendous, you know, trillions of dollars worth of places. And why should we give that up?”

Will meeting with one of America’s leading AI worriers change his mind? Last night, Trump reportedly had dinner with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Amodei is in a strange position: He’s head of a company that leads an industry that Trump consistently champions and defends, but he’s also repeatedly feuded with the Trump administration—in fact, that government still considers the company a “supply chain risk.” Furthermore, many in MAGA are convinced Amodei is a left-wing wacko. We’ll be eager to hear how that meeting went if we get reporting out of it today.

YOU GET A BAG OF CASH! AND YOU GET A BAG OF CASH!: Companies investing in the AI boom, blindsided by the spike in public opposition to data center development, are now pulling out every carrot they can think of to woo communities into accepting new construction. But many of those communities are still saying, “no, thanks.” The Wall Street Journal reports:

The letters started arriving in June, from a big developer who said he would give $10,000 to every family in town. They could spend it on anything. “Really whatever you want,” the developer wrote.

To get the money, the township just needed to let NorthPoint Development build its data center, the first of 15 buildings the firm planned on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills. Then, $10,000 checks would go out to each of the 4,500 households there. It would be a $45 million payout, the developer wrote.

For many in Hazle Township, which has a median household income of about $60,000, a payout of $10,000 would be a significant sum. Even after taxes, it could cover about six months of rent for a two-bedroom apartment or many more months of groceries or fuel.

But regardless of income, job status or location, few of the people in Hazle Township interviewed by The Wall Street Journal indicated that they are eager to welcome the data center for the payout.

Read the whole thing.