Donald Trump was at Pope Francis’s funeral for all of 14 minutes on Saturday. It was actually 14 hours, but you get the point.

The trip was so short, one wonders why he bothered. Trump tramples on decorum as a matter of course, so nobody would’ve been surprised if he just sent a Hallmark card with a watercolor picture of a tree and a lake on it: “Sorry for your loss. DJT.”

According to The New York Times, Trump “told aides he wanted to make it back to his golf resort in New Jersey before the end of the day.” Just another reminder that the biggest loser of the Trump era is still satire.

At one point during his short stay, Trump had someone drag two gilded metal chairs with red cushions into the middle of a marble atrium in St. Peter’s Basilica, where he sat, alone, with Volodymyr Zelensky. It was the first meeting between the two since Trump and Vance set Zelensky up for a televised dressing-down at the White House, a display which already lives in infamy as one of the more embarrassingly unseemly spectacles in the modern history of US statecraft.

Trump’s famous for believing (and in a lot of cases, for acting upon) whatever the last person he spoke to says about a given issue. Normally that’s a liability, but in this case it worked in the interest of the free world. Shortly after he spoke to Zelensky, Trump had a revelation which he shared on TruthSocial. “There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas over the last few days,” he said. “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along.” (Cue Neal Page: “Do you think so?“)

Who knows if Trump talked to Putin before he threatened to “deal with” Moscow “differently,” perhaps with secondary sanctions, if “too many people” keep dying. That is: It’s entirely possible this is just another choreographed faux tiff to obscure Trump’s otherwise transparent affinity for Putin. But if, instead, this was an example of Trump’s “last person I spoke to” bias, then maybe it’ll result in a better deal for Kyiv. Whatever the case, expect war headlines in the days ahead.

Additionally — and I mentioned this in the new Weekly — the administration ran afoul last week of a conservative, Trump-appointed federal judge in Louisiana who, political loyalties aside, couldn’t bring himself to ignore what looked like the unlawful deportation of a toddler with a US birth certificate, which is to say a US citizen.

The New Orleans-born two-year-old was apprehended with her mother and sister when the three of them showed up for a routine immigration check. To state the obvious: That’s why you shouldn’t show up for immigration checks when Trump’s president.

The administration’s argument is, basically, that the mother insisted on taking the toddler back to Honduras with her. But the judge, Terry Doughty, expressed serious reservations about the process.

Attorneys for the family logged a petition demanding the young girl’s release from ICE detention, which they (correctly) deemed unlawful. That petition was filed in the name of a custodian appointed by the girl’s father who was only allowed to speak with the mother for approximately 60 seconds. That wasn’t enough time for the two to agree on a plan.

Long story short, ICE then had the mother write a short declaration — in Spanish — stating that she wished the child to remain in her custody. At that point, they were thrown onto a plane and shipped off to Honduras.

I have questions. So do you, hopefully. And so does Doughty, the above-mentioned judge. The administration doesn’t have to answer my questions, nor yours, but at least until the Reichstag fire, they do have to answer Doughty’s. It’s “of course illegal and unconstitutional to deport, detain for deportation, or recommend deportation of a US citizen,” he wrote, citing precedent, and continuing as follows:

The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that. Seeking the path of least resistance, the Court called counsel for the Government at 12:19 p.m. CST, so that we could speak with [the child’s] mother and survey her consent and custodial rights. The Court was independently aware at the time that the plane, tail number N570TA, was above the Gulf of America. The Court was then called back by counsel for the Government at 1:06 p.m. CST, informing the Court that a call with [the child’s] mother would not be possible, because she (and presumably [the child]) had just been released in Honduras. In the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a US citizen with no meaningful process, IT IS ORDERED that the matter be set for hearing at 9:00 a.m. on May 16, 2025, at the Monroe Federal Courthouse, 201 Jackson St, Monroe, LA, 71201.

As a quick aside: Courts are compelled now, apparently, to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” I suppose that means Trump can unilaterally rename Greenland for the purposes of judicial proceedings too.

Anyway, this case offers more evidence that America’s sliding down the slippery slope. We’ve gone from deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members in defiance of contemporaneously-issued court orders to accidentally deporting individuals in defiance of preexisting court orders to now deporting US citizens in defiance of the actual law.

To state the obvious: This is going to continue. The administration’s going to push and push and push until the Supreme Court shoves back. I realize — and most of you realize — that Trump and Pam Bondi have already defied a SCOTUS order, but I’d argue we haven’t yet reached a crossing the Rubicon moment where the general public‘s aware that the administration’s in open defiance of SCOTUS.

Eventually, if the law still matters at all, the justices will draw a line, and if that line-drawing exercise is a 7-2 affair (i.e., if Thomas and Alito are the only ones siding with the administration), Trump won’t be able to blame liberals. Historically, the public recognized the court’s authority. Indeed, that’s really the only source of hard power the court has in the event push comes to absolute shove, which it might soon.

“It is not possible to have trials for millions and millions of people,” Trump said Sunday. “We know who the Criminals are, and we must get them out of the USA and FAST!”

That’s not gonna work. It can’t work. We can’t go down that road. We can’t have a system where the basis for deportation, let alone deportation to a maximum security facility in a foreign country, is based not on due process but on the notion that “We know who the criminals are.” To the extent horror can be funny, that’s a comically terrifying prospect.

If we go down that road — if SCOTUS lets us go down that road — then every US president from now on will be free to judge any one of us “a criminal,” and we’ll have no recourse, particularly in a country where the legal profession has been cowed by the executive.