Caldwell writes Apr. 17, 2026:
Geostrategists used to fret over the “Eastern Question” or the Maginot Line or the Missile Gap. Today there is no doubt that the overriding geostrategic question of our day is whether the President of the United States is playing with a full deck. With the US-Israeli war on Iran failing, and depleting much of both countries’ non-nuclear defenses, with the Strait of Hormuz closed and western economies spiraling toward depression, Donald Trump greeted the world on Easter morning with a message to Iran’s leaders to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” then threatened the next day to wipe out Iranian civilization.
He then denounced the Pope for having imparted Catholic teachings on just and unjust war. As a kind of grand finale, Trump posted an image of himself dressed up as Jesus Christ and appearing to heal the dead, with light glowing out of his palm where Jesus’ stigmata would be. The writer Matthew Walther, besides describing the post as, for Catholics, “the most profoundly offensive act imaginable, a grave public sin that brings shame to, and invites God’s judgment upon, our nation,” also noted that in the long annals of western government, replete as they are with mad kings, no leader had presented himself as Jesus in quite this way.
Caldwell is better than this. This is Caldwell in full ritual-purification mode, and it confirms the diagnosis from the previous essay rather than complicating it. The same analytical lapse runs through both pieces, now harder to miss because the second essay is less disguised.
The rhetorical architecture is the prosecutor’s brief. He opens with Trump’s most offensive Easter post, the Jesus image, and cites Matthew Walther calling it the most profoundly offensive act imaginable for Catholics. He names it as a grave public sin that invites God’s judgment upon the nation. He stacks the Pope denunciation, the threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, and the crude Strait of Hormuz message into a single moral indictment. He moves to the competence question with the “full deck” line and repeats it as a set-piece aphorism. He pathologizes Trump’s management style through Norman Vincent Peale and Landslide by Michael Wolff. He catalogs the shrinking advisor circle and treats it as symptomatic. He closes on the prediction that Trump may prefer being thought a villain to being thought a chump. Every move in the essay points the same direction: this man is morally polluted, cognitively impaired, and strategically useless. Allies should recoil.
This is Jeffrey Alexander’s five-factor ritual construction done in journalistic prose. Caldwell is attempting to establish consensus that the events are polluting, to show pollution reaching the center through the Jesus image and the Pope attack, to activate moral authority (Catholic teaching, just-war tradition, the Pope himself), to mobilize a differentiated countercenter (Meloni, the European defenders, the Catholic right), and to perform the symbolic separation of the pure from the impure. The essay is a purification ritual aimed at Trump from inside the coalition that once defended him.
Caldwell has shifted tactics without changing his misreading. The March obituary pronounced Trumpism dead. The April essay, which appears roughly a month later, concedes that Trumpism is still there and works instead to detach it from Trump personally. The new line is that Trump has been suckered out of his presidency for the second time, that a change has come over him, that he has exhausted the ability of others to cooperate. The movement can survive. The man must be sacrificed. This is a retreat from the first essay but only a tactical one. He has moved from burying the coalition to attempting a symbolic regicide within it. The method is the same: performative ritual prosecution by a writer who assumes the prosecution will take.
The Catholic framing is the key Caldwell move and the one that shows the carrier-group position most clearly. Caldwell is Catholic. The Pope is his natural symbolic authority. Catholic just-war teaching is a vocabulary he commands. Meloni is a Catholic national-populist he has written about with sympathy. The essay reads the Iran war and the Jesus post through a Catholic-national-conservative lens and treats the violation of that lens as a coalition-wide violation. It is not a coalition-wide violation. The American evangelical Christian Zionist wing of Trump’s base, which outnumbers the Catholic national-conservative wing many times over, read Trump’s actions completely differently. They approved the Iran strikes. They did not care about the Jesus image in the way Catholics did. They never looked to the Pope for guidance. Caldwell writes as if Catholic moral authority were the coalition’s shared sacred center. It is not. It is the sacred center of the subfaction he inhabits.
This is the substitution now happening again with a sharper Catholic accent. The subfaction’s priest mistakes his liturgy for the coalition’s liturgy.
The Michael Wolff citation is revealing in a different way. Caldwell takes Landslide by Michael Wolff, which most of his conservative readers would have dismissed in 2021 as hostile journalism, and uses it now as authoritative analysis of Trump’s managerial decline. The cross-coalition citation signals that Caldwell is no longer writing for a readership that shares his old tribal filters. He is writing for the broader elite audience that reads Wolff, and he is using Wolff to lend weight to a case against Trump that the old Trump-sympathetic right would reject as Resistance journalism. The essay’s intended audience has widened, which means its coalition position has shifted. He is speaking to the Catholic-national-conservative subfaction and to the broader anti-Trump respectable audience simultaneously. The two audiences overlap on the Iran war and on Trump’s character. They do not overlap on much else. Caldwell is writing into that overlap.
The Meloni paragraph is the saddest line in the essay. He treats Trump’s attack on Meloni as the moment the last patient European defender was spurned. Meloni is the national-populist Caldwell wants the movement to be. She is Catholic, restrained in affect, fluent in the high European political vocabulary, willing to defend the Pope on principle. She is, in other words, a European version of Caldwell’s preferred American. The essay’s emotional core is the wound the Catholic national-conservative subfaction feels when the American leader of the broader populist coalition turns on the European leader who most closely resembles its own ideal. That is a real wound. It is not, however, a coalition-wide wound. Most of Trump’s base does not know who Meloni is and does not care that Trump attacked her.
Alexander’s framework predicts what will happen to this essay. It will land hard among Catholic national conservatives and among the respectable anti-Trump center. It will be quoted in The Atlantic and The Bulwark and by Catholic writers who want permission to break with Trump on moral grounds. It will not penetrate the populist base’s media ecology. Rogan will not read it aloud. Megyn Kelly will not circulate it. The coalition’s five ritual conditions remain unaligned. The essay performs purification symbolism that has no purifying effect because the consensus, the institutional authority, the countercenter, and the liminal ritual space required for such symbolism to land are absent.
Caldwell’s best work treats elite rituals as performances that stop working when the underlying coalition conditions thin out. His whole Age of Entitlement thesis depends on this insight. When he writes about civil-rights ritual losing its hold, he is brilliant. When he writes against Trump, he forgets the insight and attempts a ritual purification on his own side under conditions where it cannot land. The April essay is the second consecutive example. Two in a row is a pattern, not a lapse.
What has happened, I think, is that Trump’s Iran turn hit Caldwell’s Catholic and anti-war nerve hard enough to override the Alliance Theory instincts he otherwise deploys with unusual skill. He has responded by writing as a priest of his own subfaction rather than as an analyst of the coalition. The essays are better written than what the average anti-Trump commentator produces. They are also running the same ritual software the Washington press corps has been running for a decade with the same lack of effect. Caldwell used to notice when rituals stopped working. These two essays are what it looks like when a diagnostician of failed rituals starts performing one.
The charitable reading is that he is doing exactly what a coalition intellectual should do when his coalition’s leader has crossed a line the intellectual cannot accept: he is registering the break publicly, for the record, knowing the break will not be registered by the base. That is an honorable function. But it is not the function Caldwell built his career performing. It is not diagnosis. It is witness. A Catholic writer bearing witness against an American president’s sacrilege is a coherent role, and a defensible one. It is just a role that requires giving up the pretense that one is describing coalition realities rather than performing inside them.
