Trump in Disbelief as Bishop Calls Him Out in Inaugural Prayer

President Donald Trump was directly called out to his face during a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral Tuesday.

Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and their spouses were in attendance for the church service at the progressive institution, and had to listen as the Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal bishop at the cathedral, delivered a direct appeal to the president to conclude her sermon.

“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families—some who fear for their lives,” Budde said, but didn’t stop at LGBTQ rights, going on to address Trump’s plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

“The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals—they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” Budde continued.

The bishop then called on Trump “to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.”

It was a bold address for a Christian leader to make to the famously thin-skinned president to his face, particularly since Trump has been avoiding confrontational appearances and interviews for several months. When asked about the prayer event later Tuesday, Trump was dismissive, telling the press that the service was “not too exciting” and “they can do much better.”

Supporters of the president were none too happy with Budde’s remarks, with Representative Mike Collins posting that the bishop should be “added to the deportation list” and pundit Charlie Kirk saying that “she disgraced herself with a lecture you’d hear on CNN or an episode of The View.”

But, following Trump’s inauguration, Budde has the honor of being the first person to publicly confront the president to his face, at a time when many Americans will be looking for some form of hope in the face of what could be a very dark four years. Perhaps Trump’s other opponents should take inspiration in their attempts to thwart the president’s immediate agenda.

The Fraternal Order of Police refuses to comment on Donald Trump’s massive pardons of January 6 insurrectionists, including those guilty of assaulting Capitol Police officers.

“The Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump for president. They congratulated him on his win in November,” wrote S.V. Dáte of Huff Post. “Here is what they had to say when I just asked them about Trump releasing HUNDREDS of violent felons who assaulted cops: ‘We don’t have a statement about that.’”

Trump pardoned over 1,500 people in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Some of them, like Julian Khater, who pepper-sprayed Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick in the face, clearly committed violence against police and were found guilty of doing so (Sicknick died the day after the attack). Yet one of the most vocal, most powerful police unions in America has nothing to say about the cops who were under attack by supporters of the candidate they endorsed.

“Those who participated in the assaults, looting, and trespassing must be arrested and held to account,’ the Order wrote on X just six months after January 6, 2021.

Buried in Donald Trump’s rescission of dozens of Biden administration executive orders, the president has reversed a rule that thwarted the power of lobbyists in Washington. 

Biden’s Executive Order 13989, titled “Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel,” required members of the executive branch to sign an ethics pledge stating they would not receive gifts from lobbyists or lobbying organizations. 

The Biden-era pledge also included several clauses related to a “revolving door ban,” which prohibited all employees entering the government from working with regulations and contracts related to their former employer or former clients for a period of two years from their appointment. 

The revolving door ban also prohibits lobbyists joining the government from working on matters that they had personally lobbied for or engaged in, participating in the “specific issue area in which that particular matter falls,” or seeking employment with an agency they had lobbied within two years of their appointment. 

The pledge included a “golden parachute” agreement, where employees had to agree not to accept payment from their former employer to join the administration. 

The ethics commitment was part of Biden’s efforts to crack down on shadow lobbying, by which former government officials are able to influence policy without registering as lobbyists. 

Clearly, Trump doesn’t have the same concerns. At the start of his first administration, Trump imposed a similar, even harsher rule against lobbying that prevented his former employees from lobbying for five years. He repealed that order in 2021. Dozens of Trump’s aides were able to get round that rule anyway because it was only ever weakly enforced, according to Open Secrets.   

Trump has rescinded the Biden version of that executive order as part of one of his own first executive orders that repealed more than 75 of Biden’s executive orders. 

Under Trump, it will be legal to bribe politicians again, the revolving door of Washington will continue to swing, and calls to “drain the swamp” will fade into nothing more than a dull murmur. 

New York City Mayor Eric Adams sat for an interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, completing his conservative evolution in desperate hopes for a pardon from President Trump.

“The Eric Adams interview. Out tonight” Carlson posted on X Tuesday, with a teaser of said interview attached. 

“People often say ‘Well you know, you don’t sound like a Democrat.… You seem to have left the party,” Adams said in the clip, with dramatic music playing in the background. “No, the party left me, and it left working-class people.” 

Adams went on to state that his indictment on five federal corruption charges was simply punishment for speaking out against Democrats’ handling of the border. He took a more Trump-adjacent tone on the matter, referring to undocumented immigrants as “dangerous” people who “snuck in” to this country. 

The clip continues as Adams and Carlson exchange some back and forth. Carlson posits that New York may have “committed an act of insurrection” by declaring itself a sanctuary city. Adams noted that immigrants shouldn’t be “rounded up in the middle of the night” but bristled at the notion of New York being a sanctuary city. “We’re not welcoming them; we’re very clear.” 

“We were getting Venezuelan gang leaders that were coming to the city creating crimes,” Adams continued. 

“And so you tell the president and his aides this, and what do they say?” asked Carlson.

“Be a good Democrat, Eric.” 

This interview is Adams’s latest stop on his quest for a presidential pardon. The embattled mayor is doing everything he can to align himself with the MAGA right. He requested a meeting with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, in December, met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, and was at Trump’s inauguration yucking it up with Jake and Logan Paul. 

The Trump administration on Monday revoked a Biden administration order that prohibited Immigration and Customs Enforcement from detaining undocumented immigrants near schools, places of worship, and other “sensitive locations.”

In a statement the following day, Trump’s acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman announced that the Biden administration’s guidelines on these areas were being rescinded, as well as an end to what the Trump administration has termed the “the broad abuse of humanitarian parole.”

“Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest. The Trump Administration will not tie the hands of our brave law enforcement, and instead trusts them to use common sense,” the statement said.

The policy change has been in the works for months, as the conservative manifesto Project 2025 included provisions on ICE being allowed to make arrests anywhere. NBC News reported last month about Trump’s plans to end the restrictions on where immigration arrests can take place.

The Biden administration’s order dates back to rules issued in 2011 under the Obama administration. In October 2021, DHS Secretary Antonio Mayorkas expanded the locations to include domestic violence shelters, food banks, counseling facilities, disaster response centers, churches, rallies, and parades.

The move is a return to, and possibly expansion of, the policy under the first Trump administration. From 2017 to 2020, there were at least “63 planned and five exigent ICE arrests at or near a sensitive location,” according to an NBC analysis of ICE data. It’s directly targeting what’s known as the sanctuary movement, which seeks to protect undocumented immigrants seeking refuge at places of worship.

With the Trump administration’s policy change, the public will likely see images and videos of ICE detaining immigrants without regard to the location, in places where children, the sick, and worshippers are present. It seems as though the ugly P.R. resulting from such raids is a secondary concern to Trump, who wants to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible. Perhaps the spectacle may be the whole point.