Does Vance Affirm Trump’s Illegal Authority Due to a Papacy?

Vice President J. D. Vance is a Catholic who is advocating a very unhealthy fealty to authoritarianism and applying it to President Donald Trump. We’ve been here before. I suspect it is due to the Catholic papacy.

Barr’s Shabby Handling of The Mueller Report

When Donald Trump served his first term as U.S. president, in 2017-2021, he made lawyer William Barr, a Catholic, his attorney general. At first, Attorney General Barr walked lock-step with President Trump on controversial matters that challenged our legal system.

For instance, when Congress investigated the alleged Russian interference in our 2016 presidential election, which Trump won, Barr later issued a four-page document, in advance of the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report he produced of his official investigation. Barr claimed the Mueller Report exonerated Trump and his people from any alleged collaboration with Russia, and the Mueller Report clearly did not do that.

IMO, Barr had sometimes in his legal career portrayed an unhealthy belief in extreme authoritarianism that became evident in his uncritical support of President Trump. I wrote a blog post about this, dated 9/26/2020, entitled “Is William Barr’s Belief in Authoritarianism Rooted in the Catholic Papacy?” My conclusion was that it did.

However, toward the end of Trump’s first presidential term, Barr wised up somewhat and turned against President Trump about this subject of authoritarianism residing in the office of the president. Then the president fired him. When Trump lost the 2020 election, and he later began his campaign for the 2024 election, I wrote a blog post on 4/29/2022 entitled “Barr Warns Republicans Not to Make Trump President Again.”

Barr and Pence Wised Up about Trump Authority

Also, when Trump was president the first time, to attract the evangelical vote he made Mike Pence—who often professed publicly his evangelical Christian faith—his vice-president. Pence became such a Trump lap dog, even refusing to accuse President Trump of insurrection on J6. And that was despite the fact that Trump seemed to have been okay with those MAGA folks swarming the Capitol and looking for Mike Pence, shouting their chant, “Hang Mike Pence.” But in time, Pence changed and, like Barr, advised the Republican Party it should not make Trump its presidential nominee again.

Vance Does the Same about Trump’s Authority

But this time around, President Trump has been making more certain that his closest people in his presidency will never turn against him like Barr and Pence later did. And the main person is Vice President J. D. Vance, a lawyer educated at Yale University and a Catholic convert.

Vance was mocked a month ago on social media for some things he wrote in an X post that day, supporting President Donald Trump’s desire to be an extremely authoritarian president, even by overturning some of our laws and the Constitution. Referring to the U.S. president, Vance said judges should never be allowed to “control the executive’s power.” Yet we have a democratic system, affirmed in the Constitution, of three equal branches of government which serve as checks and balances on each other. Thus, our judicial branch is responsible for making sure that the executive branch does not overstep its legal authority granted by the Constitution.

Vance continued with his X post, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” So, he was saying judges cannot check the executive power, including the nine justices on the Supreme Court, which is a big part of their job description. Judges don’t tell people how to do their job, as Vance alleged in the irrelevant, and thus inappropriate, examples he gave; rather, judges interpret the law and apply it. And that is what Trump wants to stop—making no judicial checks on his authority and thus power he implements. As soon as Trump started to campaign for the U.S. presidency in 2015-2016 I soon realized this. So, I started blogging that Trump does not believe in our democracy and does not believe in our Constitution. All of this in my book, Bible Predicts Trump Fall.

What Do You Think?

I suspect we’ve got another such case here, with Catholics Vance and Barr having endorsed an extreme authoritarianism and applying it to the president of the USA in which our government, and this idea is generated by Catholic adherence to the papacy. Read my first post about this, above, and, if you so desire, let me know what you think in Comments.