FROM CALVARY TO THE CAPITOL: Where the Golden Age Meets Golgotha

April 16, 2025 8:51 am

It’s not every day a Latin American president sounds more like a prophet than a politician.

But then again, it’s not every day a US president speaks of Holy Week the way Trump just did—especially with such clarity about the necessity of the Cross before the Resurrection. This is not even something many Christians want to honor. Here is the White House release in its entirety, emphases added:

This Holy Week, Melania and I join in prayer with Christians celebrating the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ—the living Son of God who conquered death, freed us from sin, and unlocked the gates of Heaven for all of humanity.

Beginning with Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and culminating in the Paschal Triduum, which begins on Holy Thursday with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, followed by Good Friday, and reaching its pinnacle in the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night. This week is a time of reflection for Christians to memorialize Jesus’ crucifixion—and to prepare their hearts, minds, and souls for His miraculous Resurrection from the dead.

During this sacred week, we acknowledge that the glory of Easter Sunday cannot come without the sacrifice Jesus Christ made on the cross. In His final hours on Earth, Christ willingly endured excruciating pain, torture, and execution on the cross out of a deep and abiding love for all His creation. Through His suffering, we have redemption. Through His death, we are forgiven of our sins. Through His Resurrection, we have hope of eternal life. On Easter morning, the stone is rolled away, the tomb is empty, and light prevails over darkness—signaling that death does not have the final word.

This Holy Week, my Administration renews its promise to defend the Christian faith in our schools, military, workplaces, hospitals, and halls of government. We will never waver in safeguarding the right to religious liberty, upholding the dignity of life, and protecting God in our public square.

As we focus on Christ’s redeeming sacrifice, we look to His love, humility, and obedience—even in life’s most difficult and uncertain moments. This week, we pray for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon our beloved Nation. We pray that America will remain a beacon of faith, hope, and freedom for the entire world, and we pray to achieve a future that reflects the truth, beauty, and goodness of Christ’s eternal kingdom in Heaven.

May God bless you and your family during this special time of year and may He continue to bless the United States of America.

That’s not a generic Easter platitude. That’s something far more disruptive—and I must say, Trump continues to do things–and utilize specific language–that gives me hope amidst some very understandable concerns being floated about among well-meaning Christian leaders.

In an adjacent story, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele–whose war against cartel terror and international corruption has drawn howls from “human rights” groups–told Trump in the Oval Office on Monday that he has 350 million Americans to “liberate” by ending crime and terrorism in the United States.

“We know that you have a crime problem and a terrorism problem that you need help with. And we’re a small country, but we can help,” Bukele said. “We actually turned the murder capital of the world — that was [what] the journalists called it – the murder capital of the world to the safest country in the Western Hemisphere.”

“And I like to say that we actually liberated millions,” Bukele said, with the line drawing praise from Trump.

“You cannot just, you know, free the criminals and think crime is going to go down magically, you have to imprison them so you can liberate 350 million Americans that are asking for the end of crime and the end of terrorism, and it can be done.”

Not just protect. Not merely govern. Liberate.

This Holy Week, things are getting crazy. The headlines are reading like parables–and not the cute, flannelgraph or stickmen kind either.

Bukele isn’t talking about coming through on a standard-issue campaign promise. He’s describing a spiritual war—one that rages not only in Washington and Wall Street, but in every human soul where power has been misordered and truth sold for silver.

When Trump talks about the Resurrection and Bukele talks about liberation, they’re not just invoking spiritual language to pad a political message—they’re exposing the spiritual void at the heart of modern governance.

FROM BETHANY TO GAZA: Scripture Beside Spies, Judas Beside Modern Statecraft

This doesn’t feel like political theater. If it were, someone else would’ve tried it already. No—this is a crack in the concrete wall that’s kept us from the real story for decades, a rupture through which we finally glimpse the Truth—capital T—that exposes and overwhelms every earthly vanity.

This seems to me like a theological earthquake not unlike the one that rumbled when Christ said “It is consummated” and breathed his last breath on the Cross.

Last February 2024, Bukele spoke at CPAC to a rousing welcome. He dropped several zinging phrases that speak to the suffering and glory dynamic this Holy Week challenges us to internalize. It is also one we have been working to get even our conservative reader base to see–that this goes well beyond the nice suits and back alley deals of politics and very much into the realm of the metaphysical and evil. If you have ever seen some of the gang members he is warring against–including those that perform occult ritual sacrifices of children–you would understand. Here is just a glimpse of his speech we invite you to watch in full:

Mr Bukele told the conference that the next US president have the will and courage to do “whatever it takes” to overcome the “dark forces” that he said were trying to control the US.

He received loud applause for when he attacked institutions including what he called “corrupt judges” and fake news in both his country and the US.

He also repeatedly cast an undefined group of “global elites” as an oppressive enemy with power over the media and politics.

“The people of El Salvador have woken up, and so can you,” he said. “The global elites, they hate our success and they fear yours.”

The question on the table this Holy Week—whether in El Salvador, here in the US, or in Gaza and Israel—is not simply about power, but about what kind of salvation we’re willing to believe in, what kind of salvation we are willing to fight and suffer for.

That bears repeating–what kind of suffering are we willing to endure to get there?

“Dark forces” doesn’t just mean Sleepy Joe Biden, my friends.

Who exactly are these “globalist elites”?

Who exactly are the communists?

Trump’s Holy Week message wasn’t the usual political fare. No tax talk, no job stats, no mugshot memes. Instead, it echoed Isaiah, directly invoking the suffering servant prophecy—words the Church has long recognized as foretelling the Passion of Christ:

The Lord God hath opened my ear, and I do not resist: I have not gone back. I have given my body to the strikers, and my cheeks to them that plucked them: I have not turned away my face from them that rebuked me, and spit upon me. The Lord God is my helper, therefore am I not confounded: therefore have I set my face as a most hard rock, and I know that I shall not be confounded. He is near that justifieth me, who will contend with me? let us stand together, who is my adversary? let him come near to me. Behold the Lord God is my helper: who is he that shall condemn me? Lo, they shall all be destroyed as a garment, the moth shall eat them up. Who is there among you that feareth the Lord, that heareth the voice of his servant, that hath walked in darkness, and hath no light? let him hope in the name of the Lord, and lean upon his God.

His words were not just “religious language.” They were dripping with defiance. Because in 2025 America, using language that is not just Christian but relatively traditional in scope is not accidental. We are ruled by merchants of blood and merchants of narrative—neither of whom can stomach the kind of king who scatters them away in the Temple with their evil money making schemes or who conquers death itself by allowing them to kill him.

These are the same merchants we war against today.

And Bukele? He’s not quoting Isaias, but he is quoting hard math—and making a spiritual point in an Oval Office visit that fits his 2024 CPAC speech seamlessly.

Trump doesn’t need an army. He has 350 million Americans behind him.

Now we know that is not totally correct, given the small number of Americans who don’t support him and the fact that many millions of that 350 number are illegal. But that number is symbolic for a reason, just like the numbers at his rallies back in 2020 compared to the white circles Joe Biden couldn’t fill were symbolic.

The mandate came in 2024. The urgency finally arrived.

But the numbers were always there.

People in this country want the Golden Age, whatever that means. They want the Resurrection. But as I have been saying over and over again, no Resurrection without the Cross of Christ can be trusted—especially given the path America has chosen, culturally and morally, for a long time now. Trump said as much in the second sentence of his Inaugural Address, he has magnified it in this Holy Week release, and it is far past time we all realize the possibilities here–

We may have to hurt a bit before our Easter Sunday arrives.

If we get our Golden Age without a lesson, God is never glorified–and in his perfect justice, he must be. This Holy Week is a call to re-examine where authority actually comes from. Not from press releases. Not from spy programs. Not from compromised votes in compromised elections. We have to move back up the chain, perhaps first understanding the “consent of the governed,” then moving to something even more dangerous–the love of the people for what the truth actually is, and then ultimately finding our way back to the Gospels and the ultimate ruler in Truth himself.

The truth about power—how it’s used to crush dissent. The truth about sin—how we’re lured into it, again and again. The truth about suffering–the need for it to help us see who we really are, and the only kind of king worth dying for.

The parallels between the Gospels and now are unavoidable. While the world crucified Christ for threatening the fragile alliance between religious elites and Roman power, today’s ruling class continues the ritual, crucifying anyone who dares remind the world that Caesar is not God. And in this generation, Trump has become the unlikely scapegoat—not for his virtue, but for his refusal to bow.

The same could be said, in many ways, of Bukele.

Judas had a moneybag and a moral pretext. Christ had a crown of thorns and a silent resolve–the same refusal to bow.

We should ask: how many of our leaders today are just new versions of Judas? Selling fake virtue and token Christianity while pocketing the silver and laughing at our foolhardy (stupid) belief in them.

Every regime has its Judases, those who justify the plan with slogans about “equity” and “fairness,” while pocketing the silver. Every empire has its Pilates, those who shrug off moral responsibility in the name of institutional order. And every crowd eventually picks Barabbas when the costs of the truth start looking too steep.

That’s the symbolic nature of America’s cultural fall. We have shouted for the life of Barabbas for far too long.

But here’s what’s different now: The old script seems to be shifting ever so slightly.

The crowds aren’t shouting “Crucify him!” quite so fast. In fact, they’re starting to notice who’s doing the crucifying and always has. In Bukele’s El Salvador, the contrast is blinding. The man who once had one of the most dangerous countries in the world just cleared the streets of MS-13 with biblical clarity and unapologetic justice. Not with lectures. Not with book clubs. With action.

And he did it while giving glory to God.

In America, we’ve outsourced everything sacred to the state. Charity, replaced by welfare. Worship, replaced by therapeutic entertainment. Education, replaced by propaganda. And justice, replaced by the political whims of lawfare-addicted bureaucrats who treat Scripture as hate speech and the Constitution as toilet paper.

But then Trump says what he says and Bukele says what he says…

And suddenly it’s not just “politics” anymore.

It’s prophecy—gritty, unpopular, sacrificial prophecy. And that’s why the ruling class fears Trump. Not because of what he might do, but because of what his example already means–for truth, for Truth, for the people of America. They are scandalized not of Trump the President, but of Trump the symbol. Just like they were terrified of Lazarus, who was raised from the dead and couldn’t stop being a symbol, couldn’t stop being evidence of a people’s overwhelming desire for change.

Christ gave them their Golden Age in his Resurrection.

But what had to come first?

This is the Gospel that Trump, Bukele, and millions of regular people are pointing to, whether they realize it or not. Not a gospel of comfort, but a gospel of conquest—not by swords, but by suffering love that is tough and triumphant in the face of any and all nails.

Trump has the scars to prove it. So do many of his supporters. And if this generation is willing to endure a little humiliation, a little spit, a little mockery, perhaps even a crown of thorns, we might just earn the right to rise.

Until then, it’s still Holy Week, and the shadow of the cross still falls across Washington–and across us. Liberation is more than just safety from gangs or deep state entrapments. It is freedom from the lies we’ve accepted, the comfort and sin we’ve idolized, the illusions that have kept us stupid. And if Christ’s Resurrection teaches us anything, it’s that the only path to liberation and any Golden Age is through that old rugged Cross.

LEJEUNE RECENT

May everyone named directly or referenced indirectly ask forgiveness and do penance for their sins against America and God. I fight this information war in the spirit of justice and love for the innocent, but I have been reminded of the need for mercy and prayers for our enemies. I am a sinner in need of redemption as well after all, for my sins are many. In the words of Jesus Christ himself, Lord forgive us all, for we know not what we do.