Donald Trump posts a lot of election conspiracy theories online, and he posts a lot of racist memes, too. But it’s not every day that he makes an elections-conspiracy-theory post that is also insanely racist. Yesterday, he shared a one-minute video alleging that mysterious “4G wireless chips” were discovered “embedded” in a 2020 Michigan voting machine, leading to the “transmission of electronic data” and the manufacture of votes for Joe Biden. The video ends with a hard cut to a totally unrelated clip: two seconds of Barack and Michelle Obama’s grinning heads AI-superimposed onto the bodies of dancing apes.

There’s no political benefit to this, and there will be no political price. It’s just the stuff he likes.

Programming note: JVL is off again today, so no Triad this afternoon, but there will be a Secret Pod. The Triad will be back Monday. Happy Friday.

The President and His Ministers

by Andrew Egger

For American Christians not all-in on MAGA, yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast was one long parade of bleakness and despair. There was the outrageous presence of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who cast his authoritarianism and barbarity as a God-blessed spiritual struggle against his country’s Satanist gangs. There was the full-service tongue-bath for Donald Trump from speaker after speaker: Televangelist Trump ally Paula White called him “the greatest champion of faith that we have ever had,” a man who has “brought religion back to this nation and beyond.” And there was Trump’s own ordinary barrage of tasteless, cruel obscenity, including in his mockery of the very idea that Democrats would attend the event: “I don’t know how a person of faith can vote for a Democrat, I really don’t,” he said.

But the most interesting moment of the breakfast came when Trump turned briefly to another topic: the contemplation of his own soul.

Unsurprisingly, at his age, Trump has the afterlife on his mind a lot. It pops up at odd times: He’ll be mid-rant about criminal illegals, or the dastardly fake news, or America’s Dawning Golden Age, and suddenly he’ll be giving himself a spiritual scorecard: “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible,” he’ll muse; or “I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me