Avignon Presidency: Popes, Antipopes and Rival Crowns
How Hegseth created a holy war within a holy war—and JD Vance became Trump’s antipope.
International Abuser
Imagine your spouse gets blackout drunk, goes into a rage, threatens to kill you, puts a gun to your head, and passes out.
If you’ve been following the news from anywhere in the world, you don’t really have to imagine this. It’s how most of us feel after the last few days.
We have been collectively forced into an arranged marriage with a deviant abuser who has escalated his abuse to the point of death threats. The whole world is justifiably traumatized, frightened, and looking for an escape from his madness.
But now imagine what it would be like to be a family in Iran, while Fox News and Israeli television gleefully display countdown clocks to Trump’s deadline of annihilating your “whole civilization.” This is not how you win hearts and minds. This is how you entrench generational hatred, and produce terrorism.
Trump’s threat of genocide was in and of itself an international crime in at least three ways, including violating the Geneva Convention. His manufactured last-minute TACO did nothing to mitigate his criminality. It just proved his message was designed to terrorize civilians to begin with.
Operation Epic Blunder
The war on Iran is already one of the worst blunders in world military history. Opening the aperture from the war, Trump’s improvisational, ill-planned attack served the interests of nearly every other major power except America.
Iran has not just survived; they have geopolitical leverage and access to wealth they couldn’t have dreamed of before the war: no sanctions, a toll booth on the Strait of Hormuz, all of their enriched uranium, and a younger, more radical leader.
Russia’s failing war economy was saved by Trump lowering sanctions on their oil. The U.S. military depleted stocks of ammunition which might have gone to Ukraine. And attention is being diverted from Putin’s war crimes, while he sends drones and intelligence to Iran to kill American soldiers.
Israel has emerged as a fully-formed predator-state capable of yoking itself to the U.S. Armed Forces to carry out its genocidal goals. Netanyahu’s “life mission” is to destroy Iran, and both his political and legal defense strategies rely on never-ending war to stay in power. His duplicitous pitch to Trump in the Situation Room was the spark that set it all in motion.
To achieve these regal benefits for other nations, the American taxpayer has already been charged over $250 billion in military expenditures alone. This does not account for the cost to the consumer due to increase in prices—which will be just as staggering.
Divine Strikes
Nevertheless, Wednesday morning, while doing his best Colin Jost impression, “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth declared victory. According to him, the violence carried out in Iran, including the strike that killed 175 schoolgirls, was protected by “divine providence.”
“Our troops, our American warriors deserve the credit for this day, but God deserves all the glory. Tens of thousands of sorties, refuels, and strikes carried out under the protection of divine providence, a massive effort with miraculous protection. Duke 44 Bravo spoke for all of us. God is good.“
Hegseth’s persistently unconstitutional, aggressive insertion of evangelical Christianity as motivation for the military is dangerous enough, but he’s also set up a kind of holy war within his holy war—between Protestants and Catholics. The Friday morning before the war began, Hegseth held a Christian prayer meeting in the Pentagon—but only for Protestants. Catholics were not invited.
Idolatry
Hegseth’s bigotry is consistent with his christofascist cult leader Doug Wilson, who says Catholics should not be able to practice their faith in public because he considers it idolatry.
“the republic would not grant permission for any public displays of idolatry… a stout Protestant republic could not allow a Virgin Mary parade because it would be public idolatry… Sorry, but there it is. You guys shouldn’t be doing that.”
This view is also reflected in recent reporting that Hegseth’s subordinates invited the Pope’s ambassador to the United States, apostolic nuncio Christophe Pierre. to the Pentagon and threatened him:
“America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, per the FP. “The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
Vatican officials were reportedly so shocked that this caused a planned visit by the first American pope to be canceled.
When asked about this threat, newly-christened Catholic JD Vance, who recently published a book about his faith with a Methodist Church on the cover, demurred, initially claiming not to know who the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See was.
But the threat to the representatives of the Vatican in the Pentagon was reinforced by “one official reaching for a 14th century weapon and invoking the Avignon Papacy”—a period where a series of popes were controlled by the French crown, and the papacy was located in Avignon, France, not Rome.
Antipopes and Rival Crowns
Philip IV aka Philip the Fair (1268-1314) was an authoritarian ruler in feudalist France who ruthlessly sought out power, and demanded total subordination from his vassals. He picked fights with many nations during his reign, and installed his own relatives on other countries’ thrones.
At the turn of the 14th century, Philip IV wanted obedience from the Roman Church, placing taxes on clergy and banning them from administration of law. In retaliation, Pope Boniface VIII excommunicated the French king.
In 1301, Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Salvator Mundi, retracting all privileges granted to the French king by previous popes, and a few weeks later Ausculta fili with charges against the king, summoning him before a council to Rome. In a bold assertion of papal sovereignty, Boniface declared that “God has placed us over the Kings and Kingdoms.”
In response, Philip wrote “Your venerable conceitedness may know, that we are nobody’s vassal in temporal matters”
This conflict ultimately led to Philip IV sending troops to attack the pope’s residence in 1303 and captured him for several days. Boniface VIII, 68, died a month later.
In the ensuing two years, Philip exerted pressure on the papacy, and got a deadlocked group of cardinals to elect a French pope in 1305, who immediately decided not to move to Rome and instead stayed in Avignon, beginning a century-long decline in the independence and authority of the Church.
Building on his success at capturing the Church, Philip moved on to expelling Jews from France in 1306, and banned the Knights Templar a year later.
The next seven popes were all French, and to varying degrees beholden to the French crown. It wasn’t until 1376 that the papacy once again returned to Rome. But what might have been a return to normalcy instead gave rise to the Western Schism—for several decades there were rival popes called antipopes, who disputed the elected Bishop of Rome for the papacy.
Avignon Presidency
Without overextending the metaphor, there are worthwhile parallels to draw between the Avignon Papacy and a decade of Trump.
The U.S. government in 2026, like the papacy in the 14th century is not exactly a puppet-state, but it not a fully independent country either. The “pope” in this case is Donald Trump, who is increasingly controlled by foreign leaders, and has no interest in the will of his own people. One minute he’s beholden to King Putin, the next to King Netanyahu. One minute he’s going to end Iran‘s “whole civilization,” the next he wants to get into business with them.
“Pope” Trump has also created an antipope of sorts, his own Vice President, who was campaigning for white nationalist autocrat Viktor Orbán in Hungary during Trump’s threat to Iran, but will now lead the “negotiation” with the Iranian regime in Pakistan—alongside parasitic grifters Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
JD Vance’s own faith appeared conveniently for his political ambitions. His conversion from being a self-described atheist to Catholicism happened just months before Peter Thiel, who is not Catholic but is deeply connected to Opus Dei, gave Vance $15 million to run for Senate. It was the largest private donation ever to a Senate candidate up to that point.
In short, the antipope is backed up by the Antichrist.
Schisma Inevitabilis
Just as the corrupt Avignon Papacy inevitably led to a schism in the Roman Church, the Avignon Presidency will lead to a schism in the American government, and maybe in the entire country. The central purpose of the government is to protect and defend American citizens. Its duty is not to a president; its duty is to the Constitution.
But like the medieval Church, the U.S. government has lost its way. It no longer serves its central purpose. It is a hollowed-out shell controlled by a mad medieval pope who has lost his support—and his mind.
This was Trump’s reaction Thursday after several of his most loyal court jesters spoke out against his war of choice on Iran. He attacked the very people who brought him to the throne he so badly coveted.
Trump knows the schism in his regime has arrived. The Avignon Presidency is crumbling. JD Vance, the antipope, is consolidating his forces. And the foreign kings Trump sold his soul to—Putin and Netanyahu—are making more and more impossible demands. Trump will not survive another 33 months.
The only question is whether We The People still get a vote on the outcome, or are we destined to be mere observers to the rise of the antipope.
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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson
Threads: jimstewartson
Jim, Thanks for the history lesson that is so applicable to our situation today. History is rhyming for sure.
Excellent synopsis you've written tonight,Jim. So well executed, that even I could understand what this vice president doesn't know. Thank you, and will reStack ASAP 🙏