Maybe this is what it felt like when Constantine’s Easter message dropped?

Plus: diplomacy with Iran, epistemological slop, and more

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Maybe this is what it felt like when Constantine’s Easter message dropped?

(via Gage Skidmore)

This past Sunday, the White House published a presidential message on Holy Week, 2025. It is a remarkable document—as in, I find myself compelled to remark upon it.

Now I understand, of course, that President Trump did not write this message. It’s not that modern presidents never directly contribute to this sort of thing, but Trump’s voice is so distinctive and the language here so specific that I feel safe guessing this is not his handiwork.

But he did presumably approve it, or approved the people who approved it, and however those internal machinations went, here we are with a statement in which Donald Trump—who famously said he has never asked God for forgiveness and sat under the dubious tutelage of The Power of Positive Thinking author Norman Vincent Peele—reels off the details of “the Paschal Triduum” and “the Mass of the Lord’s Supper” and Christ’s willingness to suffer because of his “deep and abiding love for all His creation.”

I confess I was surprised by this. But then I thought: Perhaps this is not out of the ordinary. Perhaps I simply missed similar messages the last time around.

So I checked the online archives of the first Trump White House. As it turns out, this is not the first such message—but it is, so far as I can tell, only the second. Trump apparently issued a message in 2020, but not the three years prior.

Then I considered that maybe there was no Easter message for 2017, 2018, and 2019 on the White House website because he had tweeted instead. Those were Twitter-heavy times. But no—he has apparently never used the word in any of his 59,000 tweets:

That’s not to say the first Trump administration only marked the holiday once. On the contrary, Easter egg rolls were faithfully observed at the White House in 2017, 2018, and 2019. On these occasions, the president discussed topics like military spending and Melania Trump’s efforts to “keep this incredible house or building, or whatever you want to call it—because there really is no name for it; it is special—and we keep it in tip-top shape. We call it sometimes tippy-top shape.”

So far as I can tell, Jesus never came up. I searched every relevant page I found:

Naturally, the 2020 Easter egg roll was canceled for COVID. And it was then that Trump issued what seems to be his first Easter message and also made remarks on Easter, the Christian holiday—as opposed to Easter, the spring rite of egg rolls and tippy top houses or buildings or whatever—in the presence of a clergyman.

The 2020 message is barely shorter than the 2025 version, but it has quite a different feel. More than half is about the pandemic. There’s a quote from 1 Peter that I think misses the sense of the subsequent verse that this is specifically about gifts of the Spirit to Christians, not just any gift from God, and also the true but awkward observation that the “coronavirus will not stop Easter.” (Did anyone think it would?) Trump does affirm that at Easter we celebrate “the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the gift of eternal life,” but on balance, COVID feels like the greater matter at hand.

The remarks Trump made with Bishop Harry Jackson, a Pentecostal pastor who gave an Easter blessing (after effusive praise for Trump), are along the same lines.

Trump starts with summary statement: “On this Good Friday, Christians from all around the world remember the suffering and death upon the cross of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. At Easter Sunday, we will celebrate his glorious resurrection.” But from there he rapidly pivots to the pandemic, the greatness of the American people, and prayer.

Cut a couple additional uses of “Easter,” and the statement would work for anyone who affirms the Old Testament as Scripture. Cut a rather oddly excerpted quotation of Isaiah 60:2 and 60:20 and it’d work for just about any monotheist.

Like the 2020 Easter message, these remarks have more religious flavor than anything I can find for 2017-2019. But all the 2020 content is about on par with comparable statements from the Biden administration over the next four years, which is to say, pretty squarely in the standard American political vocabulary of God: Christian, but not, like, too into it, ya know? Not, like, weird about it.

The 2025 message is weird about it.