It was going to be just another Monday, but then JD Vance killed the pope

Before JD Vance killed the pope, this column was going to be devoted to Trump Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth being exposed for leaking sensitive details about a military mission on Signal—again. But this time it wasn't to the gaggle of Trump underlings that stirred up controversy the last time we heard this story.

No, this time we found out that Hegseth was blabbing about the mission to his wife, his brother, and his personal effing lawyer for some reason. Yes, on Signal again.

[T]he information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.

Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.

None of those people need to know the flight schedules of US military aircraft conducting a secret military mission—operational details like that are closely guarded because, in general, the military would very much prefer that the people with anti-aircraft missiles not know the exact hour and minute they ought to be looking up. Your average or slightly-below-average military grunt, of the sort that National Guardsman Pete Hegseth was before he was elevated into secretarydom for being the person with the most white nationalist tattoos on Donald Trump's favored television programs, would be dragged out of the barracks in chains for sharing MISSION FKING FLIGHT SCHEDULES, and recent history includes examples of men with multiple stars on their uniforms getting busted for less.

So it's a very big story! And it would have been the biggest story, had JD Vance not decided to spend his Easter weekend murdering the pope.

And it's a juicy story, too. The New York Times cited not one, not two, but four "people with knowledge of the chat" in their reporting, and that's an especially interesting number because in the last few days, that's the number of Hegseth top aides and advisers Hegseth has lost, with three of them being ejected from the building for allegedly leaking information Pete Hegseth didn't want leaked and a fourth apparently resigning in what we can only presume to be disgust. Several of those names were also on this newly reported Signal chat, so if you're wondering who might have had both knowledge of Hegseth brazenly brushing off military security protocols and motive to see Drinky Pete knocked down a few shelves, well, there you go. We don't need a Sherlock Holmes for this one.

In normal times, in an administration not fully staffed with aspiring criminals and giddy saboteurs of the national defense, Hegseth would have been fired before the end of this sentence. Oh look, he wasn't. Well, that doesn't mean it's not still coming.

That would have been the major story of the week, had JD Vance not killed the pope. That's of course presuming that nobody else in Trump's orbit did anything worse for five whole days, which is not a bet anyone would take—considering, after all, that this is an administration in which any random brickhead on any random day might up and kill the pope.

There's been other administration news as well. Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had her bag lifted out from under her nose while dining in a Washington, DC, restaurant.

The Secret Service, which provides security for Noem, reviewed security camera footage at the restaurant and saw an unknown white male wearing a medical mask steal her bag and leave the restaurant, a law enforcement source said.

The thief got away with Noem’s driver’s license, medication, apartment keys, passport, DHS access badge, makeup bag, blank checks, and about $3,000 in cash.

That which provides security for Noem part is oddly phrased, in that it appears to be evading the question of whether Some Random Dude lifted the bag of the Homeland Security secretary under the nose of not-particularly-alert Secret Service agents. If so, we appear to be dealing with a true master spy here.

Agent Twilight reporting. I have infiltrated the restaurant and yoinked the personal belongings of the top domestic security official in this country. Her security detail was no match for my stealthy 'walk right up and do it' technique.

We also have to wonder why Noem was carrying $3000 in cash on her while tooling around downtown DC, given that in every other context in which you hear somebody's been found with $3000 in cash it's held up as proof that that person is a drug dealer, a gang leader, a human trafficker, or take-your-pick. We've been repeatedly told that there is no non-criminal reason anyone would be carrying $3000 in cash on them, and it's an especially common refrain from the spokescreatures working under the person just caught with $3000 in cash on her.

Why did she have $3000 and her passport on her? Was she headed abroad to purchase a particularly interesting dog?

Who targeted her, and why? Was it Pete Hegseth? Did Pete Hegseth know the secretary of Homeland Security was walking around with $3000 in cash, because it came up in a Signal chat meant to share sensitive military secrets? Did he need $3000 to buy hard liquor, given that the man is about to have a hard week?

Reporters would no doubt demand to know the answers, had JD Vance not blown up the news cycle by traveling to Vatican City, looking the pope in the eye, and then killing him.

Then there's the other explosive stories. The stories of tourists and US citizens alike being rounded up and thrown into detention for days by ICE agents who seem relieved to be finally acting out their inner Hitlers. The market is tanking again, probably because it just dawned on the press that JD Vance has pope-killing powers and no adult supervision. Watchdogs keep seeing signs that the administration is preparing to defy the Supreme Court by sending more unknown victims to an El Salvador-run torture prison, even after the court took the rather extreme weekend step of issuing an official Slow Your Roll order to the administration forbidding them from doing it.

The nation is in absolute chaos no matter where you look, and every individual news story is a scandal that would have taken up weeks worth of news cycles all on its own in any administration but this one. It used to be a given that presidents and their lackeys could not commit crimes, back before a consolidated media landscape and consolidated Supreme Court deranged lunatic landscape both revised that national opinion with their own, newly revised declarations of meh.

And all of that was before JD Vance, the ostensible Vice President of the United States, murdered the actual bonafide pope.

We don't know why Vance killed the pope. We know only that they met. The last publicly available pictures taken of His Holiness Pope Francis before he died show the pope eying Vance somewhat distastefully, as if he were looking at a bug that had scuttled in. We cannot glean any particularly useful information from this, however, as nearly everyone who meets JD Vance looks at him with the same look; Vance has Resting Bug Face, it seems, and more so in person than mere pictures can convey.

But on the other hand, Pope Francis is—or was—the pope. It is possible that the Holy See holy saw something he shouldn't have, in Vance's weirdly disproportionate features. Perhaps Pope Francis realized, in those minutes, that he was looking at the devil's own pool boy, and it shook him to his core.

Was that enough for Vance to kill him? Did Vance know what the pope would see, and did he plan the meeting for that very purpose? Or was it for smaller reasons?

Perhaps Vance tried to sit on the pope's favorite and most comfortable couch, and the pope, having heard all the rumors, stopped him. Perhaps it enraged Vance; perhaps that is the meaning of the look the two men shared shortly before the pope's death. There are no pictures of Vance pointedly rubbing his behind on Vatican City's most treasured couch, after His Holiness went to meet his maker, but we cannot say it didn't happen. Not with JD Vance. Not with any of Trump's bug-like minions, in fact.

There has been growing speculation, given [gestures broadly], that the Antichrist is real and that Donald Trump is him. The evidence for this is that while it is possible to find good in anyone, no matter how vile, there has never been anyone who has seen a mote of good in Donald J. Trump no matter how long they examine him. He is not good to his family. He does not like dogs. He leaves nobody better off than when he first found them, excepting that he drags each person down to a lower, more base and animalistic and outright evil nature than they showed up with—which, for some, admittedly amounts to career advancement. He cannot even play the fiddle, which is the bare minimum expected of anyone looking to destroy their nation through rank incompetence. No emotions other than anger and cruelty; no talents save cheating at golf; no artistry to the man at all, only gold and more gold.

But all of that is speculation, and few of us know enough about such matters to do more than speculate. It is possible Trump is not the Antichrist, as unlikely as that seems. Perhaps we are all misreading our prophecies; perhaps the true Antichrist is the friends Trump made along the way.

We do not know. We only know that Damien 'JD' Couchfucker killed the pope. He killed him just by looking at him, which is about the only development anyone could think of that would put JD back in position as the administration's top villain even after all that stuff Pete Hegseth has done and is doing.

And we don't even know why he did it.