By Maureen Dowd / The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The cardinal should go to confession.
Timothy Dolan let a white-tie charity dinner in New York showcase that most uncharitable of men, Donald Trump.
At the annual Al Smith dinner, Dolan suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities. Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor.
“We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the New York fat cats. “It’s a person who has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”
Trump also offered this beauty: “I used to think the Democrats were crazy for saying that men have periods. But then I met Tim Walz.” When Trump joked about keeping Doug Emhoff away from nannies, even he admitted that it was “too tough.”
As he did in 2016 when he crudely attacked Hillary Clinton as she sat on the dais, Trump added a rancid cloud to what used to be a good-tempered bipartisan roast.
Dolan could have stood up and told Trump “Enough!” We have been longing for that voice of authority who could deliver the Joseph Welch line — “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — to our modern Joe McCarthy. It is the church’s job, after all, to teach right from wrong.
Instead of telling Trump he was over the line, Dolan enabled him in his blasphemous effort to cast his campaign as a quasi-religious crusade and himself as a saintly martyr saved by God. The conservative cardinal didn’t care about soiling the legacy of Smith, the great Democratic patriot.
Like Trump, Smith, the “Happy Warrior,” was a native New Yorker — half Irish and half Italian. His track was the reverse of Trump’s, starting in politics and ending in skyscrapers. Smith was born into an Irish community nestled under the Brooklyn Bridge and left school at 14, after his father died, to help his family by working at the Fulton Fish Market. When his political career ended, he became president of the corporation that built the Empire State Building. From his office in the sky, he could see the street he grew up on.
The gregarious four-term governor of New York believed deeply in lifting up the less fortunate, and in America’s founding principles. Emotionally devastated after helping investigate the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed scores of women and girls in 1911, he crusaded to create laws for safer working conditions.
Anti-Catholic bigotry destroyed his presidential bid in 1928, and he hated bigotry of all kinds. Early on he decried lynching, racial violence, the Ku Klux Klan and Naziism. He would have detested Trump, a bigot cynically stoking racial fears and bloodthirsty impulses to get elected.
Unlike Trump, Smith was a man of faith. He died with a prayer on his lips, next to his parish priest. He had no patience for bickering and was praised in his obits as “warmhearted” and “honest as the noonday sun.”
Despite Trump’s contention this past week that he has a “good heart” and that his father had a “big, big heart,” both Trumps’ hearts were cold. Young Donald helped his dad, Fred, refuse Black tenants.
Trump is proudly amoral. He disdains the Christian values I was taught by nuns and priests. His only values are self-interest and self-gratification. He has replaced a code of ethics with the Narcissus pool.
Certainly Dolan is happy with Trump’s abortion crackdown. But can’t he see that Trump is corroding our country’s moral core? Trying to steal an election violates the Eighth Commandment. And Trump has broken the commandments about cheating and lying and coveting.
As Anne Applebaum points out in The Atlantic, Trump uses the language of Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to rouse hate and violence. This, while sacrilegiously calling Jan. 6, 2021, a “day of love.” He compares the jailed rioting thugs to the Japanese interned in World War II. It’s not a big leap to saying migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and calling his political opponents “vermin,” given his belief — inherited from his father with the “big heart” — in superior genes and bloodlines.
This past week, he called Democrats “evil,” “dangerous” and the “enemy from within,” limning them as a bigger threat than Russia and China, a threat that he said might require him to sic the military on his opponents. He denounced the national treasure Nancy Pelosi, who is a devout Catholic, and her husband, who was attacked with a hammer by a far-right conspiracy theorist, as “sick” and “evil.”
The echoes of McCarthyism reverberated when Trump was asked at a town hall whether he really believed the debunked story that Haitian immigrants were eating neighbors’ cats and dogs. “I was just saying what has been reported,” an unrepentant Trump replied. “All I do is report.”
The pols on the dais looked like a Last Supper for this unnerving election. Hopefully it’s not a Last Supper for the Republic.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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