"Oooooh, He Shouldn't Have Said That!"
The brouhaha over Trump's Truth Social post criticizing Pope Leo seems to be settling into a pattern that's established itself since Trump entered presidential politics: Trump says something blunt and on the face of it wildly out of line. Several days of hysteria follow, until other voices provide a reluctant acknowledgement that however clumsily he may have expressed it, Trump has a point. For instance. in July 2019, he told far-left members of congress in "the squad" to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came," which led the House of Representatives to formally censure him for "racist comments". Nevertheless, this led to an overall reassessment of their role, and two of them, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, lost their seats in the 2024 primary cycle. In January 2018, he trolled North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying his own "Nuclear Button" was "much bigger & more powerful...