Donald Trump used a Cabinet meeting to campaign against people in crisis.
The President of the United States gathered his Cabinet at Camp David on Friday — the White House called it the first televised Cabinet meeting at the presidential retreat — and walked the room through the economy, the southern border, Iran. Then he pointed at a surge of migrants crossing into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on the North African coast. At least eighteen people died on July 30 trying to reach the enclave after Morocco loosened its border posture and a Spanish Supreme Court ruling restricted the practice of summary returns at sea. The majority of those who came were Sudanese and Malian nationals fleeing armed conflict. The President looked at the cameras and told the American people to vote Republican in November.
The setting was the message. Camp David has been used for private diplomacy, for negotiations, for the patient work of getting two sides into the same room. Reagan held a Cabinet meeting there in 1982. Clinton held one there in 1995. Neither was televised. The decision to broadcast the session this time, with midterm clocks running, signaled something every Catholic who has watched their bishops wrestle with political stagecraft should recognize: a sacred space pressed into campaign service.
And the people in crisis were not named. They were not asked why they were fleeing. They were not described as human beings with families and reasons and a right to ask for help. There were no condolences. There was no mention of the eighteen who died in the water. There was no offer of aid to the Spanish government now managing the aftermath. They were a warning. They were a prop. This is what the instrumentalization of suffering looks like when it is done on television with the full weight of a presidential Cabinet behind it — the globalization of indifference wearing a flag pin and sitting at the head of the table.
This is not new. George W. Bush used the war on terror the way a man uses a rented suit before the 2006 midterms. Barack Obama invoked the Ebola crisis in 2014 with the same logic. Donald Trump used the migrant caravan in 2018. Every administration I have watched has reached for a foreign or border crisis to make the home electorate afraid at the right political moment. The tradition you claim, Mr. President, calls that what it is: the use of human suffering as a campaign instrument.
But what is new is the staging. The migrant caravan was a thing the President talked about at rallies. The televised Cabinet meeting at Camp David is the federal government itself, with its full weight and architecture, used as a backdrop. The discontinuity between the room and the message is the point. Camp David is supposed to be a place where serious people make serious decisions about the welfare of the people they serve. A place for the work. When the room is the work and the work is a midterm ad, something has shifted from politics into liturgy in the bad sense — the use of sacred space and ritual to invest a political claim with weight it has not earned.
Pope Francis stood at Lampedusa in 2013 and named what you are doing, Mr. President, in the words your tradition claims. He said: “We have fallen into a globalization of indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others; it doesn’t concern me, it doesn’t interest me, it’s none of our business.” He was speaking about the Mediterranean. He was speaking about the people you pointed at on Friday. He was speaking about every one of us who watches the spectacle and absorbs the fear as though it were a reasonable political argument rather than the instrumentalization of human suffering.
In Fratelli Tutti §39, Francis wrote: “For Christians, this way of thinking and acting is unacceptable, since it sets certain political preferences above deep convictions of our faith.” The migrant, in that book, is “set aside, made to feel less worthy, less important, less human.” That is what a Cabinet meeting turned into a campaign ad does to the people it points at.
The Good Samaritan did not cross the road to warn people about the man in the ditch. He crossed the road to help him. That is the whole teaching. When the priest and the Levite passed by, Jesus did not commend them for understanding the political implications of stopping. He used them as the negative example of what the tradition you claim calls righteousness.
You can stop, Mr. President. The Cabinet is capable of governing. Camp David is capable of being what it has been — a place where serious people make serious decisions about the welfare of the people they serve. The migrant can be named as a person instead of a warning. The eighteen who died in the water off Ceuta can be mourned as human beings, with their names and their families, rather than counted as the cost of somebody else’s midterm. That is a choice available to you today. But as long as you sit at that table and point at people in crisis and say vote for me or this will happen to you, you are not governing. You are selling fear. And the tradition you claim calls that what it is.