From Pontiff To Third Term?

It's not a joke, it's considerably more serious.

Editor’s note:

I realize I haven’t been posting on a regular cadence for the past few days. That’s because I’ve been wrapped up in work and other projects. I’ve also been considering TLM, its direction, and what kind of work I want to publish. This article reflects the type of work you’ll see in the future. It’s in a category called “The Grey Zone,”¹ which I will explain fully in the future. For now, I hope you enjoy.

I’ll send subscribers an email explaining the long-term plan for the publication.

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Donald Trump wields agitation the way Michelangelo wielded a chisel—transforming outrage into political sculpture with unnerving precision. As the conclave convenes next week, Trump would have himself anointed Supreme Pontiff.

There are, of course, a few challenges:

• He’s not Catholic (to my knowledge)

• He’s not ordained (a priest)

• He’s not a Bishop

• He’s not a Cardinal

• The College of the Cardinals has never elevated anyone who was not ordained, and it has not elevated anyone who was not among its own ranks for the last 700+ years.

Besides those challenges, he’s qualified to be the Supreme Pontiff, head of the Holy See, head of the Catholic Church, steward of over 1.5 billion Catholic faithful, and servant of God and his son, Jesus Christ.

Except, of course, for that last part, because just as a personal observation, Donald Trump doesn’t seem to like to serve anyone but himself.

The image posted to Elon Musk’s Goebbelsian fever dream social media platform, “X,” depicts the President as the supreme pontiff. Of course, predictably, this causes outrage among Catholics, bishops, and MSNBC goes into apoplectic meltdown mode. Conservative media chortling, no doubt, about “owning the libs.”

While I realize that everyone remains shocked that gambling is going on in the casino, this event deserves more than outrage. It is another sign of a severe breakdown of domestic and international systems.

This piece is a prelude to the type of writing that will become the standard here at The Long Memo. I’m done with performative outrage and ranting. Although it was cathartic, it’s not helpful. When I saw that image on Friday, I realized what’s happening now. What we’re witnessing doesn’t happen often, but we’re beginning a significant shift in world political structures.

That may sound alarmist, or “tin foil hat,” type talk, but it’s not. I’m a political scientist. A damn good one, actually. A realist. But well-versed in all of the doctrines of international relations, American government, and political theory. Right now? None of the things “we know” fully explain what is happening. If anyone says different? They’re whistling in the dark.

But you may look at this “Pope thing,” and say, “Well, that’s Trump being Trump again.”

And, far be it from me to say you’re wrong. That is Trump being Trump. But this is not something to just be outraged about. This is not something to just dismiss and ignore. It’s not yet another thing he’s doing that’s “illegal.” It’s not just another thing to be mad about. It signals how the entire global system is eroding and breaking down.

From now on, there will be two types of people: those tuned into the signal and those who are not.

If you’re one of those people, the rest of this article will make sense to you. I assure you, nobody is going to write anything remotely like this. Not on Substack. Not TNR, The Atlantic, The New Yorker.

Nobody.

A Collapse of Normative Boundaries

Trump’s papal cosplay isn’t about trolling Catholicism—it’s a symbolic invasion of a sacred, transnational institution. It’s not a joke. It’s not even about religion. It’s a declaration: no symbol, no office, no title is off-limits anymore.

In other words, I have no decency. I have no shame.²

We should pause to consider the image itself. This was not posted to a meme site. It was not satire. It was not a joke. It was posted by the President of the United States of America on a platform that his administration designated as an official channel for government communication.

This was not irony.

It was a sovereign act.

I have no decency. I have no shame.

In democracies, norms do the heavy lifting that laws can’t. They create the unwritten architecture of legitimacy—the behavioral expectations that sustain trust, regulate discourse, and prevent democratic institutions from being gamed by bad-faith actors.

Political theorist Jane Mansbridge wrote extensively about the role of “deliberative norms”—the shared commitments to truth-seeking, respect, reciprocity, and mutual restraint that enable democracy to function even when interests diverge. These norms aren’t enshrined in law. They only survive when elites voluntarily uphold them—and when violating them carries social or political cost.

But Trump’s entire political method is a war on those invisible contracts. He doesn’t just cross lines—he erases the meaning of having lines at all. Each transgression becomes a new baseline. Each violation becomes retroactively normalized by the failure to confront it.

This is how he bullies. This is how he breaks things. No one expects someone to simply declare themselves Pope. No one expects a president to fire Inspectors General, to dismiss the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or to ignore every prior tradition of governance. But Trump doesn’t operate within those expectations.

When someone tells him, “That’s not how this is normally done,” his answer is simple: “You’re fired.”

This makes him different from past norm-breakers. He doesn’t want to shift norms—he wants to annihilate them. Combine that with the power to fire, to purge, to retaliate—and you get a potent one-two punch.

Because once norms collapse, there’s nothing left but power.

Bullies like Trump instinctively understand that norms are only effective if they’re defended. So they test them—publicly, performatively, relentlessly. And when defenders hesitate, even momentarily, that hesitation becomes precedent.

This is why the Pope meme matters. Not because anyone thinks he wants to be Pope. But because he is asserting symbolic dominion over yet another institution that once stood above the political fray.

The presidency was the first altar. The court system, the second. Now it’s the Church.

To Trump, the Church is just another institution to humiliate and absorb. So he mocks it. He roils it. He stirs it into conflict—not as a critique, but as an act of dominance.

Remember: it was a woman of faith who publicly rebuked him on his first day in office. Trump doesn’t forget slights. He escalates them.

There are no shared norms for Trump. No traditions he seeks to uphold. And certainly no roles he sees himself as subordinate to. That’s why he could never be Pope—because to be Pope is, by definition, to be a servant of God. Trump cannot, by nature or disposition, serve anyone but himself.

Trump’s destruction of norms and structures (and he is not alone, but certainly the most brazen) leaves behind institutional, legal, and symbolic wreckage.

In the absence of shared norms, nothing prevents the next symbolic capture—only the question of how fast, and how numb we’ve become.

The rest of the media see this as some kind of trolling or slight. The Church sees it as an affront. The Republicans see it as a joke.

Put simply? It’s an attack.

It’s an attack on the normative structures we rely upon that allow us to make sense of the world.

Proto-Caesarism & AI-Mythmaking

Trump’s papal cosplay isn’t satire. It’s not even self-parody. It’s Caesar cosplay in the AI age—a declaration of symbolic sovereignty over a realm he neither belongs to nor respects. He’s not running for pope. He’s proclaiming that the role itself is meaningless unless it can be worn, mocked, and subsumed.

This is what political theorist Philip Pettit would call neo-republican domination—a style of power that doesn’t rely on law but on the ability to impose one’s will without resistance. Trump isn’t asking the Church for recognition. He’s asserting supremacy through the meme itself.

It’s not satire—it’s narrative assertion. “Why not me?” he signals. And millions nod, because symbolic transgression is now the currency of political loyalty.

As a former Republican, I once had to tolerate the “fundamentalist faithful”—the so-called religious right. Now that same bloc cheers while Trump mocks Catholicism. (Excessus non peccatum est. Est dogma.)

Even in a pre-digital world, this would be dangerous. But in the age of generative AI, it’s something else entirely.

You don’t need legitimacy—you need visual plausibility. You don’t need votes—you need reaction loops. Deepfakes, AI-generated portraits, and mythic visual stylings turn once-sacred offices into algorithmic costume changes.

In this reality, symbolic authority isn’t earned—it’s fabricated. The image is the claim. Circulation is anointing.

This is Caesarism without legions. A coronation not by sword, but by saturation.

The Trump-as-Pope image wasn’t meant to provoke thought. It was a test of the boundaries of symbolic power: Will anyone say “no,” or is virality its own form of legitimacy?

He ran the same experiment with his AI-generated “Trump Gaza” video—casting himself as a messianic liberator in an active war zone. Dressed in armor, flanked by fighters, styled like a warlord saint, the video wasn’t policy. It wasn’t parody. It was myth.

An AI fantasia where Trump is bound not by law, but by the limits of imagination and shareability.

It’s performance as supremacy—in a world where no one holds the stage long enough to refute it.

Trump understands, consciously or not, that institutions no longer govern us. We are governed by narrative—and by those who can dominate it.

The rule of law? Negotiable.

The rules of attention? Absolute.

While “H.R.-whatever” winds its way through the House, Trump governs through memes and myth—issuing doctrine by algorithm.

Papal Symbolism As Populist Weapon

The papacy is global, transnational, and hierarchical—the perfect foil for Trump’s populist, anti-elite, “divine right of ratings” ethos. It’s one of the last standing institutions still claiming moral authority without electoral legitimacy³, and that’s precisely why it had to be targeted. It comes at the same time he tells The Atlantic that he “runs the country and the world.” That is not a coincidence.

By digitally declaring himself pope—even as a “joke”—Trump is:

• Undermining the concept of sacred succession

• Usurping a non-electoral form of legitimacy

• Tapping into the same authoritarian energy that fueled Mussolini’s Lateran Accords and Bolsonaro’s Pentecostal fusionism

This isn’t just a meme—it’s a theological power grab dressed in postmodern irony.

Trump’s base doesn’t care that he’s not Catholic, not ordained, and not eligible. In fact, that’s the point. To them, eligibility is gatekeeping, and gatekeeping is elitism. The very existence of rules is proof that someone is trying to keep Trump out.

So when he dons the robes, even digitally, it’s not blasphemy. It’s sovereignty. It’s claiming divine sanction by algorithmic acclaim.

The message to the base is clear:

“I’m not just your president. I’m your pope. I’m your prophet. I’m the only source of spiritual legitimacy now.”

What’s more staggering is that a significant portion of the public accepts this premise—if not literally, then symbolically. And that’s all that matters.

This is not without precedent. Some may be loath to compare Trump to Hitler. However, if the analytical shoe fits:

To build total sovereignty in the Third Reich, the Nazis had to do more than dominate politics—they had to displace the spiritual center of German life. The Church, with its competing claims to moral authority, universal truth, and allegiance to something higher than the state, was an existential threat to the Nazi vision of total control.

At first, the Nazi approach was strategic. They didn’t confront the Church directly—they co-opted it, hoping to neuter it from within. The regime signed the Reichskonkordat with the Vatican in 1933, promising to respect Church autonomy in exchange for political neutrality. But this was a ruse: once the Nazis had international legitimacy, they moved to isolate and weaken the Church step by step.

• Clergy were surveilled, censored, and arrested.

• Catholic youth organizations were dissolved and replaced with Hitler Youth.

• Sermons were monitored for “subversive” content.

• Crosses were replaced with swastikas in schools and public buildings.

The goal wasn’t just political dominance—it was spiritual monopoly. The Church was incompatible with the Nazi state because it taught that loyalty to God outranked loyalty to Führer. That had to be eradicated.

What emerged in its place was a kind of political theocracy—Nazism as religion. Hitler as messiah. The Volk as a sacred community. The party rallies as liturgical events. Nazi iconography took on the gravity of ritual, and opposition to it was not dissent—it was heresy.

This is what authoritarianism demands: not just obedience, but removing any alternate source of meaning.

Trump isn’t Hitler. But the structure of the playbook is familiar.

You cannot have a Caesar and a Christ.

So you either kneel before the state—or you get the church out of the way.

In authoritarian populism, spiritual authority is just one more tool to be bent, co-opted, and reshaped to fit the moment's needs. The papacy becomes less a religious office and more a narrative mask—a relic of symbolic power waiting to be rebranded.

And if the Church won’t crown him, the timeline will.

Power Grab & Vacuum Signaling

While widely respected, Pope Francis represented the last centrist anchor of global religious authority. His death creates a legitimacy vacuum, and Trump instinctively moves to fill it—if only performatively. In a world increasingly unmoored from stable institutions, even the spiritual becomes fair game for narrative capture. For an unscrupulous bad-faith actor like Trump, it is an opportunity to exploit that could not be passed up.

Trump’s power plays have never been about governance. They’re about dominion—symbolic conquest disguised as improvisational bravado. Just like his previous gestures:

• Declaring himself the “chosen one”

• Holding a Bible upside down outside St. John’s Church

• Touting “loyal generals” like they’re Roman legions

Each act is a signal: not to build anything, but to claim everything.

But this moment isn’t just about Trump.

It’s about the broader erosion of centrist legitimacy across the global order.

That’s something that I think people need to start understanding.

There’s this idea, wish, hope, whatever, that the zealot’s bullet finds him. Or that he chokes on a cookie. Or that God strikes him with a bolt of lightning. Or that he has a massive coronary, stroke, blood clot, whatever.

However one might feel about any of those (and an infinite number of other) outcomes, Donald Trump is irrelevant to the phenomenon afoot in the world. He’s a symptom of a much deeper problem, and he is a catalyst for many of the things happening in the world, but he is not a cause.

Individuals are playing a role in the world, but we do so collectively and individually. Pope Francis did so collectively as a centrist moderating view, attempting to heal the Catholic Church after tremendous upheaval and scandal. How he’ll be judged remains to be seen by historians.

While Francis stood as a rare example of transnational, nonpartisan moral authority, he did so in a time when centrist figures everywhere—Macron in France, Carney in Canada, even Scholz in Germany—are losing traction, relevance, and narrative control.

Centrists are getting their asses kicked. Not because their ideas failed, but because they’re playing a game that no longer rewards restraint. In an attention economy that values outrage over order, centrism becomes background noise, and those who can seize symbolic power—no matter how absurdly—command the stage.

Francis, in many ways, was the last adult in the room on the global stage. With him gone, the symbolic high ground is up for grabs. And Trump, ever the opportunist, knows that power hates a vacuum.

In the Grey Zone, you don’t wait to be offered the throne. You post yourself wearing the crown—and dare the world to stop you.

The Dry Run

The AI pope image isn’t about Catholicism. It’s not even about religion.

It’s about testing whether the idea of permanent, unquestioned, symbolic authority can be floated into the mainstream—without resistance, without consequences, and with just enough irony to walk it back if needed.

By posting the image before the conclave even convenes, Trump isn’t just trolling—he’s preempting the College of Cardinals. He’s hijacking the symbolic transition before the institutional process can even begin.

In doing so, he collapses the distinction between legitimacy granted and authority performed. The Church follows ritual, deliberation, and sacred consensus. Trump posts a meme. And in the timeline-driven logic of the Grey Zone, the first image wins. The crowd sees the robes on Trump before they see white smoke from the Sistine Chapel. That’s not parody—that’s claim staking. He doesn’t wait for the vote. He declares the outcome and dares the world to catch up.

Trump has no illusions. He knows he’s not going to be elected Pope (although, possibly he may have some delusion. I’m not sure he believed he was going to win the Presidency.) This is about seeing what’s going to happen. It’s about putting it out there. Seeing where the cracks are, who reacts, how fast, and how hard.

That image was a dry run. Not for a papacy. But for something potentially far more audacious.

A third term? President for life? Circumvention of Congress? Firing the Fed Chair?

That’s what this is really about.

It’s going to be something along those lines. It’s going to be crossing a redline that is going to be “over here” (in America) that is as preposterous as a guy who isn’t Catholic, isn’t a priest, isn’t a bishop, isn’t a Cardinal, declaring himself the Supreme Pontiff, is with respect to the Holy See. It’s the ultimate syllogism of Trumpian logic.

Trump isn’t just trying to claim sacred symbolism. He’s trying to see what happens when he puts on the robes of total sovereignty—no term limits, no opposition, no institutional checks. The papal meme is a rehearsal. It’s the costume fitting for a role he’s already preparing for.

We’ve seen this two-step before.

• First, float the unthinkable:
  “Maybe I’ll stay longer than two terms.”
  “Maybe we’ll suspend the election.”
  “Maybe I’ll just declare victory and stay.”

  “I should fire the Fed Chair.”
  ”Congress can’t decide a budget. I’ll decide how the money gets spent.”
  

• Then, watch the response.
  If the system laughs? That’s useful.
  If it recoils? Even better.
  Because now he knows where the soft points are.

And once that outrage dissipates, he returns to the same terrain—but with a new mask, a new myth, and this time, intention.

The Pope meme is not the destination. It’s the narrative scaffolding—a symbolic test to see if people flinch at the visual of unchallenged, divinely cloaked authority. If they don’t?

Then we’re halfway there already.

Because if he can wear the robes of Saint Peter today, what’s to stop him from declaring himself President for Life tomorrow?

I don’t believe that being president “forever” is his goal at the moment (I might be, but I don’t think he will live that long or make it that far). But, these acts where he floats what appears to be the most outrageous ideas are not likely to be the act of some mania. This is a calculated act of a rational actor who understands that the rules of “the Grey Zone” are changing.

In the Grey Zone, the only thing that matters is who seizes the image first—and how long it takes before people stop laughing.

And Trump?

Trump stopped laughing a long time ago.

Conclusion: The World to Come

This wasn’t about a joke.

It wasn’t about religion.

And it wasn’t about Trump being Trump.

It was about how symbolic power now moves—how institutional legitimacy is collapsing faster than we’re willing to admit, and how performative sovereignty is filling every vacuum we refuse to guard.

Trump doesn’t need to win elections the normal way anymore.

He doesn’t need to hold office.

He doesn’t need your permission.

He just needs to keep posting.

Congress can do whatever it does.

Governments can do whatever they do.

Cardinals do whatever they do. Maybe one day there will be white smoke.

Trump’s already declared himself the Supreme Pontiff. (“Pontifex Maximus Gula I” if I have anything to say about it.)

And if we keep laughing instead of confronting what it means—he wins.

The image is the ideology now. The robe is the crown.

And in the Grey Zone, whoever grabs the symbol first defines the world the rest of us have to live in.

That’s what this was really about.

He stopped laughing, so should you.

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If This Hit You Where It Should Have…

This is the first installment in a new category I’m calling The Grey Zone—a space to track what happens when institutions collapse but power still moves… when memes matter more than mandates… and when spectacle becomes governance.

If this made sense to you, keep reading.
If it disturbed you, good. It should have.
If it felt uncomfortably accurate—welcome. You’re already one of us.

👉 Share this with someone who still thinks it's all just trolling.
👉 Subscribe if you haven’t.
👉 And stay tuned. The next moves are already in motion.

1. I call the phenomenon we’re witnessing “Grey Zone Politics.” It’s a form of power that operates through fluid structures. It’s not institutionalism, because institutions are no longer the primary vessels of legitimacy. It’s not realism or neorealism, though power still determines many outcomes. It’s not constructivism either, because meaning here isn’t formed through shared norms—it’s formed through coercive performance.

Grey Zone Politics lives in the space between these models.
It borrows the mechanics of realism, but bypasses the state.
It shapes new institutional behaviors, but not through rules or durability.
It manipulates identity and belief, but not by consensus—by saturation.

What we’re experiencing is a politics not of governance, but of symbolic domination—where legitimacy is performed, memetically affirmed, and virally enforced.

There’s no coherent model for it yet. So for now, I call it what it is:

The Grey Zone.

2. A deliberate echo of attorney Joseph Welch’s legendary rebuke to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

It was a line that ended McCarthy’s career—because the system still recognized shame as a limiting force. But Trump is what happens when that line stops working.

And the link isn’t just thematic—it’s personal. McCarthy’s chief counsel during those hearings was Roy Cohn, who went on to mentor Trump, teach him how to wield scandal as spectacle, and instill in him a worldview where power comes from never admitting fault, never apologizing, and always attacking.

Cohn was the bridge. Trump is the inheritor.

There is no decency. And now, no price for lacking it.

3. The papacy is the world’s only non-hereditary, absolute, elected monarchy—a political and spiritual paradox. The Pope holds supreme, unchecked authority over a billion followers, but only gains that power through a cloistered, elite election process within the College of Cardinals. There is no separation of powers. No term limits. No external accountability. Once elected, the Pope is sovereign in the purest sense—answerable only to God.

That structure matters in the context of this piece because it represents exactly what Trump both envies and rejects. He envies the unchallenged authority, the total symbolic dominion. But he rejects the idea that legitimacy must be conferred by any institution—or even God. Trump doesn’t want to be chosen. He wants to declare himself chosen—and let the reaction ratify the act.

By digitally crowning himself Pope, Trump bypasses the conclave. There is no smoke. No vote. Just a meme—and the crowd. The image circulates, gains traction, and that attention becomes its own anointing. It generates its own result.

You can almost see it: Trump, eyes closed, slouched in the Oval Office, hearing the Latin in his head (although in all honesty, I doubt he heard latin because I presume the man is a buffoon, but en arguendo, humor me):

“Acceptasne electionem de te canonice factam in Summum Pontificem?”
(Do you accept your canonical election as the Supreme Pontiff?)

“Quo nomine vis vocari?”
(By what name do you wish to be called?)

I’m sure he’s heard from aides and advisors that he’d make an incredible pope. I’m sure they fawned over the image. In the Grey Zone, titles don’t have to be earned. They just have to stick—even if only in the mind of the man who posts them.