The Midterm Psyop in a Cassock

How Trad Inc. learned to sneer at Trump, tiptoe around Leo, and train conservative Catholics to stay home while the Democrats smile

The New Double Standard

There is something deeply rotten in the current traditional Catholic media ecosystem, and two recent Trad Inc. podcasts put it on full display. They want their audience to believe they are the sober men in the room, the mature men, the spiritual men, the men too elevated to get caught up in vulgar partisanship. But the act falls apart the moment you listen closely. Anthony Abbate of Avoiding Babylon explicitly says he does not want to “add to the chorus of people who are lambasting the pope,” and then almost immediately pivots into a prolonged denunciation of Trump, MAGA Catholics, voting, and the Republican base.

That is the whole trick. Leo gets the kid-gloves. Trump gets the flamethrower. The pope who visits mosques, speaks the language of interreligious fraternity, and keeps generating scandal after scandal is treated as a sad but predictable fact of postconciliar life. The non-Catholic American president, by contrast, becomes the true menace, the real obsession, the daily fixation. Abbate treats Leo’s mosque appearance as just another instance of the same old conciliar naïveté, while insisting he will not join those “lambasting the pope.” In other words, Leo may continue dismantling Catholic seriousness in public, but the real emergency is that conservatives are still voting Republican.

Axelrod, Access, and the Shape of the Narrative

And the timing is not random. On April 9, the Holy See’s own press bulletin listed David M. Axelrod among Leo XIV’s audiences.

Now, no public document proves some formal Vatican-Democratic election task force. That would be too easy. But politics rarely works that way. More often it works through converging incentives, useful idiots, flattering access, and mutually beneficial narratives. So let us state the point carefully: there is no smoking gun proving coordination, but there is more than enough to explain why conservative Catholics would suspect that the Trump-Leo conflict is being leveraged to demoralize the right ahead of the midterms. The audience with Axelrod is real. The clash between Leo and Trump is real. The influencer push to treat voting as pointless or morally unserious is real.

“Voting Is Silly” and Other Gifts to the Left

That last point matters most. In the interview with Matt Gaspers, Abbate does not merely criticize Trump’s rhetoric. He goes further. He says “MAGA is effectively dead,” repeats the line that there is “no more MAGA,” and then, when the subject turns to politics, dismisses the entire matter with: “the whole voting thing is just kind of silly at this point.” He even says he is “done with” the lesser-of-two-evils argument. That is political disarmament dressed up as spiritual depth.

And political disarmament always benefits someone. It never floats in the air as a pure abstraction. If conservative Catholics stay home, the people who benefit are not monks in the desert. It is the Democratic Party. It is the machine that wants open borders, judicial warfare, ideological education, bureaucratic harassment of dissidents, and every anti-Christian social program the modern left can invent. Abbate and Gaspers protest that they are not trying to get people to vote Democrat. They do not need to. Getting right-leaning Catholics to disengage is enough. The effect is what matters, and the effect of telling disgusted conservatives that voting is “silly” is to help the other side.

The Pose of Being “Above Politics”

This is where the faux-spiritual pose becomes unbearable. These men want the credit for being above politics while intervening in politics in the most useful possible way for the left. They want to wash their hands like Pilate and still shape the crowd. They want to say, “We are not Democrats,” while pushing exactly the kind of despair, fragmentation, and abstention that Democrats need from the Catholic right. It is a very convenient moral vanity.

Leo Gets Explained Away

The same selective outrage appears in how they treat Leo himself. The Vatican confirmed that Leo visited the Grand Mosque of Algiers on April 13, described it as a “divine and sacred space,” and said he paused there in silent meditation. Vatican News presented the visit as part of his effort to promote mutual respect and peacebuilding, while major wire coverage described the Algeria trip as centered on Christian-Muslim coexistence and peace amid the conflict with Iran.

So let us be plain. When Catholics recoil at those optics, they are not crazy. They are not unstable. They are not “ruining their souls” by noticing what is right in front of them. Even if the defenders insist on diplomatic protocol, the symbolism is still the symbolism: the pope of the conciliar church keeps making gestures that flatten the unique claims of Catholicism into a theater of dialogue, coexistence, and generic reverence. That is the issue. And yet the same voices who can speak for an hour with volcanic indignation about Trump suddenly rediscover nuance, patience, restraint, and pastoral tenderness when Leo is the scandal.

That is why the interview is so revealing. Abbate says Leo’s conduct is basically what one should expect from a “postconciliar pope.” Exactly. He already knows the pattern. He knows the disease. He knows the crisis is ecclesial. Yet he still insists the faithful should not “lambast the pope,” because persecution may be coming. So the laity are supposed to absorb the scandal, lower their voices, and save their fury for Trump and the GOP. That is domestication.

Fury for the Right, Softness for Rome

(Anthony Abbate referring to Deacon Nick Donnelly as a “sede moron” who worships Trump as his Messiah for stating that Leo can’t expect not to get pushback if he steps into politics.)

Even worse, they compensate for their softness toward Leo by becoming hysterical toward ordinary Catholics who refuse to play along. In the same interview, the discussion turns toward people in the sede camp and toward online critics. Suddenly the language becomes feverish. Now we hear about a “Judas spirit,” about poison, betrayal, handing Catholics over, and all the rest. The heat that should be directed at Rome’s public humiliations of the faith gets redirected toward fellow Catholics on the right. The watchdogs bare their teeth only when conservatives complain too loudly.

That inversion is the signature disease of Trad Inc. in the Leo era. They can endure endless ambiguity from Rome. They can endure interreligious gestures, soft diplomacy, media-friendly humanitarianism, and the public dilution of Catholic distinctiveness. What they cannot endure is a conservative Catholic drawing the obvious conclusion that Leo is disastrous. Then the scolds come out. Then the lectures begin. Then everyone is accused of extremism, imprudence, obsession, or political idolatry.

Trump as the Permanent Decoy

And notice the deeper dishonesty in their framing of Trump. I am not saying a Catholic must canonize every Trump post, every rhetorical flourish, or every tactical blunder. That would be absurd. But there is a world of difference between criticizing Trump from the right and using Trump as the permanent decoy that keeps your audience from staring directly at Rome. Abbate and Gaspers claim they are simply telling hard truths. But the “hard truth” they keep telling always seems to leave the same practical impression on the audience: distrust MAGA, stop treating elections seriously, stop expecting political resistance to matter, and stop going after Leo too hard. The pattern is too convenient to miss.

Why the Midterm Hypothesis Makes Sense

(Leo smiling for a photo op with Illinois Governor JB Pritzker who supports abortion until birth)

This is why the midterm hypothesis is not crazy. It does not require a secret memo. It only requires recognizing how narrative warfare works. A liberal American pope publicly clashes with Trump. Democratic operatives, including Axelrod, clearly have Vatican access. The Catholic commentariat amplifies every Trump provocation while muting or rationalizing Leo’s scandals. Conservative Catholics are then gently nudged toward the conclusion that politics is disgusting, voting is futile, and Republican support is spiritually suspect. That sequence does not need formal coordination to function. It functions because every piece points in the same direction.

Why Pro-MAGA Catholics Should Not Take the Bait

And this is where pro-MAGA Catholics need to recover their nerve. The Democratic alternative is not some harmless corrective to Trump’s excesses. It is a machine of cultural liquidation. It hates borders, hierarchy, masculine authority, national cohesion, and the remains of Christian moral order. It will use courts, schools, HR departments, federal agencies, NGOs, and the media to punish resistance. A traditional Catholic who helps that machine by staying home out of cultivated disgust is not making a noble withdrawal from worldly compromise, but helping his own enemies.

The Real Indictment

That is the final indictment of these interviews. They are not brave. They are not penetrating. They are not even especially intelligent. They are evasive. They take a Catholic audience already scandalized by Rome and try to redirect that scandal toward a more politically useful target. They perform outrage where it is safe and perform restraint where it is costly. They are furious at the vulgar Protestant politician and oddly tender toward the conciliar pope. They speak as though Trump’s provocations are the end of the world while Leo’s continual humiliations of Catholic seriousness are just the weather.

Enough.

If Trad Inc. wants to spend 2026 teaching conservatives to despair of politics while Leo walks deeper into the religion of dialogue, they should at least have the honesty to admit what they are doing. Do not tell us voting is silly while the left sharpens its knives for the midterms. Do not tell us not to lambast the pope while Rome keeps feeding scandal to the world. Do not sneer at Trump-loving Catholics for being too political when your own selective outrage is accomplishing Democratic political goals better than any campaign ad could.

There is even a video of Abbate dismissing Leo’s Pachamama prostration as “nothing scandalous about it.” The hypocrisy becomes almost too perfect. The man who can stomach that wants to lecture conservatives about political judgment. The clown show writes itself.

(Video courtesy of Sede Picante)

Trad Inc. should be ashamed. Not because they criticized Trump. A man on the right can do that. They should be ashamed because they used Trump to distract from Leo, used spiritual language to demobilize conservatives, and used Catholic media to soften the faithful for the very people destroying both Church and country.

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