The Indifferent Middle

Easter’s message is not passive hope but defiance, a refusal to let cruelty, corruption, and war become the ordinary background noise of American life.

Good morning and Happy Easter! Personally, I have never been fully comfortable with the language of hope, because hope can so easily become a substitute for agency. But Easter, at its best, is not about passive wishing. It is about defiance. It is about refusing to let cruelty and death claim the final word, and insisting instead that what is broken must be confronted, mourned, and fought to repair. That is why Pope Leo’s Easter message landed with such force this morning. He warned against a world “growing accustomed to violence,” against the indifference that lets evil settle in and become ordinary. “We cannot continue to be indifferent,” he said. “And we cannot resign ourselves to evil.” On a morning like this, that feels less like a homily than a demand.

If indifference is the temptation, Donald Trump is doing everything possible to make brutality feel normal. After the rescue of the missing U.S. airman from Iran, a moment that might have prompted even a flicker of sobriety in a minimally functional human being, Trump instead lurched further into apocalyptic war theater. As the Associated Press reported, he followed the rescue with an expletive-laced threat to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, writing: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” AP noted that both sides in the conflict have already struck civilian targets, raising warnings of potential war crimes. Trump looked at a dangerous regional war, a downed fighter, a high-risk recovery mission, and decided the appropriate presidential register was part mob boss, part end-times carnival barker.

The details only make his swagger look more grotesque. The New York Times’ reporting on the rescue makes clear that this was not some clean Hollywood triumph but a huge, perilous special-operations mission inside hostile territory after an F-15E was shot down over Iran and one of its crew members spent more than a day evading capture while injured. The operation reportedly required extraordinary deception, massive military assets, and frantic efforts to keep Iranian forces from reaching him first. AP adds an especially telling detail: two U.S. transport planes in the rescue mission were disabled by technical problems and then blown up by American forces so they would not be captured. This was not a show of smooth imperial mastery. It was a dangerous, messy, escalating operation that left Trump bragging over a battlefield littered with more lost aircraft.

Trump’s earlier “Glory be to GOD!” bleat is so unnerving because it sounded bizarrely borrowed even by his standards. “Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” he wrote. “Time is running out — 48 hours before all Hell will reign (sic) down on them. Glory be to GOD!” That was already the voice of a man dressing threats of mass violence in borrowed sacred language. Now he has escalated from “Glory be to GOD!” to “Praise be to Allah,” which reads like a feverish attempt to wrap state violence in whatever divine-sounding phrase happens to fit the performance.

Economist Paul Krugman, not exactly a man prone to dropping everything for random presidential gibberish, was alarmed enough to break format again this morning. He began by invoking Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right” as a reminder of what moral seriousness in wartime is supposed to sound like. Then he set Trump beside it, and the contrast was damning: Lincoln’s humility and resolve against Trump’s profanity, sadism, and threats to civilian infrastructure. Krugman asked the question that ought to chill everyone: if Trump really orders the destruction of civilian infrastructure, will the military obey? Here we are not just wondering what unhinged thing Trump will say next, but whether the systems supposedly designed to restrain criminality have already been hollowed out enough to carry it forward. When mainstream observers start sounding like the fire alarm instead of the weather report, it is because the smoke is already in the room.

While Trump snarls about “Power Plant Day” and “Bridge Day,” the human wreckage keeps spreading beyond the people he imagines as pieces on his board. The Wall Street Journal reports that roughly 2,000 ships with more than 20,000 seafarers are stranded in and around the Persian Gulf, many for more than a month, with food and fresh water running low and crew changes nearly impossible. One captain, Rakesh Ranjan Singh, died after a medical emergency aboard his ship while it sat stranded off Dubai. Sailors are washing with condensation from air conditioners, fishing off the sides of tankers, and broadcasting survival tips over marine radio while missiles pass overhead and supply costs spiral. So let’s be clear: this is a floating humanitarian crisis created by men who will never spend one anxious night rationing water in a metal hull under a war sky.

Since cruelty is never content to occupy only one corner of the regime, the same administration that can always find the energy for menace somehow cannot manage to release money Congress already approved for global HIV work. NPR reports that Congress funded PEPFAR at nearly the previous year’s level, but that the State Department is withholding or slow-walking funds anyway, leaving life-saving programs in limbo. Clinics are cutting trainings, support groups are collapsing, staff face layoffs, and programs that millions depend on for treatment are being pushed toward what one CDC official called a “controlled demolition.” PEPFAR is one of the most successful humanitarian initiatives the United States ever built, credited with saving 26 million lives. The Trump administration seems determined to treat it the way a raccoon treats a well-organized pantry: with panic, vandalism, and a disturbing lack of shame.

Back home, Jamie Raskin is now openly describing the USPTO as if it has been dragooned into one more Trump fixer operation. In a blistering statement, he accused the office of abandoning its neutral role and stepping in to file trademark applications for Trump’s bizarre “Board of Peace,” which he described as a shadowy slush-fund scheme with no clear structure or accountability. As Raskin put it, the USPTO had allowed itself to “stand in as a straw trademark holder to cover up for this slush fund,” and in doing so appeared to help legitimize an entity whose legal and governmental status is murky at best. He went further, arguing that by filing the trademark at all, the administration was effectively admitting “that the Board of Peace is not really a governmental entity at all. It’s a purveyor of influence operating for profit.” Raskin’s point was not merely that this is sleazy. It was that the trademark filing itself appears to undermine the claim that the entity is governmental at all, while putting the USPTO in the absurd position of acting as both owner and adjudicator. In Trump’s America, even the word peace apparently has to be privatized, laundered, and stuffed into a gold-plated shell company before it can be paraded around for applause.

That may be the connecting thread this Easter morning: not simply violence, but the insistence that everything human must be converted into a spectacle of domination. War becomes branding. Rescue becomes chest-thumping content. Peace becomes a trademark. Public health becomes a hostage negotiation. Civilian suffering becomes background noise. And indifference, the thing Pope Leo warned against, is what allows all of it to keep moving, one fresh obscenity at a time, until people start talking as though this is just how things are now.

Whatever else Easter means, it ought to mean at least this much: we do not have to resign ourselves to evil just because it is loud, repetitive, and wrapped in the trappings of power. Defiance is simply the refusal to let cruelty write the final version of reality unchallenged. Peace be upon you!