The Jobless, the Shackled, and the Green Patriarch

Trump presides over mass unemployment, humiliates South Korea, and seeks a borrowed halo from a man who calls pollution a sin.

Good morning! The American Dream is starting to look like one of those boarded-up strip malls where the only thing still open is the payday lender. New data show long-term unemployment at its highest level since the pandemic: nearly two million people out of work for six months or more, their savings gone, their benefits exhausted, their résumés going stale in real time. One in four unemployed workers has now slipped into that limbo, a place economists describe as “low-hire, low-fire.” Translation: nobody’s expanding, nobody’s moving, and if you’re the unlucky one who lost your job, you may as well be throwing your résumé into the ocean.

The human cost is brutal. IT veterans with hundreds of unanswered applications, paralegals six months behind on rent, college grads sending out résumés like confetti only to hear the same polite “not at this time.” And all the while, Trump insists the economy is “very strong,” that groceries are down, energy is down, everything is down except, of course, housing, which is somehow Jerome Powell’s fault. He says this while millions of Americans are watching their prospects evaporate like a mirage in the desert. It’s the kind of gaslighting that would make even a realtor blush.

Meanwhile, on the international stage, Trump is doing for U.S. credibility what termites do for wood. The Hyundai battery plant in Georgia, a $12 billion project years in the making, is gone, kaput, pulled out by Seoul after ICE decided the best way to welcome 300 South Korean engineers was to shackle them on camera and release the footage like it was a Marvel trailer. Those workers were supposed to train Americans to run the plant. Instead, they were shipped home in handcuffs to a hero’s welcome, while Trump logged onto Truth Social to beg them to come back, insisting he doesn’t want to “frighten or dis-incentivize” foreign investors. Small problem: nothing says “welcome to America” quite like being frog-marched onto a bus by masked ICE agents.

South Korea’s President Lee has started describing White House visits as “Zelensky moments,” shorthand for the ritual humiliation Trump inflicts on his allies. And during their Oval Office meeting, Lee delivered one of the sharper digs in recent diplomatic history. With a straight face, he told Trump he looked forward to seeing him build a Trump Tower in Pyongyang and play golf with Kim Jong-un, a nod to Trump’s bizarre, years-long infatuation with the North Korean dictator and his delusions of wheeling real estate into one of the most closed societies on Earth. Anyone else in the room would’ve caught the sarcasm. Trump grinned like a man being pickpocketed while complimenting the thief’s watch, too dim to realize he was the punchline.

And now the so-called “South Korea trade deal” that Trump once bragged about has vanished into thin air, with his own commerce secretary admitting on CNBC there was never a signed deal at all. Pay the tariffs or else, that’s the message. And “or else” turned out to mean South Korea yanking billions in investment and walking away from the very projects Trump claimed as proof of American resurgence.

And then there was Trump’s math. Asked about the U.S. Navy bombing a Venezuelan fishing boat, killing eleven people and raising questions of legality, Trump waved it off by claiming that “300 million people died last year from drugs.” Three. Hundred. Million. That’s nearly the entire population of the United States, wiped out by fentanyl in a single year. If it were true, we’d be broadcasting this roundup from a ghost town with tumbleweeds running the servers. But in Trump’s head, numbers are just props: casualties inflated to apocalyptic proportions so he can justify war crimes as law enforcement. Eleven dead Venezuelans? Just collateral in a fantasy where America is already a mass grave, and arithmetic is all the absolution he needs.

Back home, Trump’s public remarks have become a kind of word salad tossed with gasoline. Over the weekend, while trying to memorialize Charlie Kirk, he veered into Venezuela, TikTok, Qatar, NATO, and Grover Cleveland trivia, bragging about his youth vote numbers thanks to TikTok and crediting Kirk for bringing him “numbers nobody’s ever come close to in the Republican Party.” Asked whether the First Lady would attend Kirk’s memorial, Trump shrugged that he hadn’t thought about it, because he’s been “thinking about other things.” Which about sums up his approach to governance: brief, performative piety for a fallen ally, then back to the grievance buffet.

And then comes today’s pièce de résistance: a bilateral meeting with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the so-called “Green Patriarch.” On one side of the table, a global religious leader who has spent decades declaring that poisoning the planet is a sin, that the poor and marginalized bear the brunt of ecological collapse, that humanity must repent for its abuse of creation. On the other, a president whose idea of creation care is strip-mining the EPA, scrapping emissions tracking, and declaring fossil fuels blessed and multiplied. Trump wants the halo effect of a saintly patriarch; Bartholomew wants to remind the world that morality doesn’t end where ExxonMobil’s balance sheet begins.

The contrast is staggering: Bartholomew preaches interconnectedness, stewardship, and justice; Trump brags about energy dominance, tariffs, and handcuffing the very workers who were supposed to help us rebuild our industrial base. It’s hard to imagine two men less aligned. One sees ecological destruction as a crime against God. The other treats God’s creation like a distressed property to be flipped and resold with gold-leaf signage.

So today, as Trump poses for a photo with a man known worldwide as the “Green Patriarch,” remember the bigger picture. Millions of Americans are stranded in long-term unemployment. Billions in foreign investment are fleeing thanks to ICE theatrics and tariff tantrums. Our president is rambling about TikTok and Grover Cleveland while promising to personally broker peace between two leaders who “hate each other so much they can’t breathe.” And now, into this circus, walks a patriarch whose life’s work is protecting the planet from the very policies Trump has made his brand.

The only question is whether Bartholomew will sanctify the meeting with moral gravitas or whether Trump will reduce it to another photo op, one more borrowed halo for a man who can’t stop torching everything around him. Either way, the contrast will be impossible to ignore.

Quick closing note: I hit my self-imposed weekend deadline. The deep-dive is live and marching out to the world; FB readers should see it this afternoon.