Colleague Jeff Sadow wrote a nice piece today on Governor Jeff Landry, President Trump, and Greenland. I invite you to read it—it is valuable insight.

I don’t know Dr Sadow personally so I don’t know how he takes things, but certainly my piece today is an addition, not a rebuttal. And the reason for that is crucial—everyone is moving through these times on different sidewalks and at different paces and for different purposes under God.

Each person has to find their own sidewalk.

I read his article and nodded along more than once, because Dr Sadow is not wrong to point out Trump’s use of strategic ambiguity and his penchant for baiting the Mockingbird media regime into fraying hair follicles on the loudest part of the story (usually provided by Trump’s mouth) while quieter moves happen elsewhere.

I used to live and write in that octave.

I would have thought the same thing in a different phase: Art of War instincts, double-entendres, pretend blows, strategic misdirection, and the satisfaction of watching Mockingbird analysts play their own hands to such an obvious and embarrassing degree. And there is still a place for that kind of analysis, because narrative warfare is real. It’s not only political. It is spiritual. The public mind is a contested space, and the modern world is built to keep us reactive, fragmented, and dependent on it inside an ever-shifting array of pretend dialectics.

What I am learning to recognize is that they are pretend blows in themselves.

I am learning—slowly, not cleanly—that being able to interpret the chessboard is not the same thing as being free of it.

And the stakes have forced me to say that out loud. I’m talking eternal stakes here.

Greenland, the Art of War, and the Children

Whatever Greenland becomes in the next few months, and whatever Governor Landry accomplishes on that trip, the deeper question for me is whether all this strategic ambiguity is buying time for something that actually matters, or simply consuming time that could have been used for repentance and repair. The truth is, I kept telling myself for years that the “big reveal” was coming. The “big arrest.” That the tactical fog and misdirection would eventually clear and the righteous hammer would finally fall on the worst of humanity’s crimes. I told myself that the slow pace was deliberate, that the quiet was strategic, that the absence of visible action was the setup for decisive action—precisely because the pace was necessary to give as many people as possible a chance to wake up to exactly what is going on and thus go all in with God.

Thing is, despite my different route in recent months, I still think precisely that. It is amazing how God can take most any means there—to get you… there.

For some, hope deferred has stopped being a strategy and started becoming an excuse. For others, including myself, the hope has transformed into praying more and more people use the Trump window to take it there as well.

Thank God Trump won. And I mean that in a way most liberals won’t even grasp.

No, Trump has not moved enough—at least not visibly and not decisively—on child exploitation, trafficking, and the darker crimes that sit behind those words when you stop treating them like headlines. I’m not claiming omniscience, and I’m not pretending I know everything happening behind closed doors. I’m saying what any honest person can say: if this is the central battlefield for the soul of a nation, and that is what got me behind Trump in the first place, the movement has not matched the moment.

MAGA would have risen in droves for those kids had General Trump simply said the word.

And that deferment—or refusal—has forced a recalibration in me.

Not into cynicism. Into order.

Greenland, the Art of War, and a Life of Order

The Greenland analysis is likely correct. Yet for me, even if the chain-yanking and strategic ambiguity are useful tools in foreign policy, those tools cannot become the center of my interior life. A man can spend his whole life interpreting tactics and still never kneel in humility. A man can be correct about propaganda and still be governed by it. A man can “see through” the media and still be addicted to the theater.

I learned this very real phenomenon in my personal life. Just because you understand someone has borderline personality disorder and know how to help them intellectually doesn’t mean you’re going to help them, or that the friendship is “meant to be.”

I hope you take my confessions not as quirks, but as calls.

If Trump’s chaos buys us time, then the question is what we are supposed to do with the time.

I think the answer is not primarily political. And it’s not blazoning “Christ is King” on social media. That isn’t enough. There are still too many denominations of Christianity and definitions of Christ to think a quick hashtag is going to save us.

No, the answer is difficult. It is controversial. It is a sword.

It is sacramental.

It is the kind of time that should be spent relearning how to live like Christians again—confessing sin instead of just analyzing villains, fasting instead of just posting, praying instead of just tracking the flights, teaching our children the faith instead of outsourcing knowledge to the cell phone and locker room. I’m not saying ignore politics. I’m saying put it in its proper place. Follow it, yes. Understand it, yes. But do not let it colonize our souls.

Christmas and Epiphany are seasons for this very reason—just two of the many long spells provided by the Church’s old (and replaced) liturgical calendar to nurture our spiritual lives. These have been lost, most of them, with Christmas season and Epiphanytide being swept away with the spectacle of Mardi Gras and Valentine’s Day—both special Catholic days hijacked by the monster.

My prayer for all of us is that we set our focus on Christmas and Epiphany as marching orders from the Church—the Church that once was. While the world is training us to flit back and forth like a kitten and a finger, the Church is training us to watch and pray with eyes set toward the east. While the world is training us to trust our discernment to electronic screens and talking heads, the Church is training us to examine our own conscience. While the world is training us to find salvation in policies and personalities, the Church is training us to find it where it actually is: in Christ, in the Cross, in the sacraments, in obedience to a Tradition that must be sought out in the attic, not in the new shiny pews.

Final Thoughts

Everyone advances at his own pace, yes.

But the stakes are high.

I don’t write that as my own strategic double, but as a reality check. Some people are still waking up to media manipulation, and even some who have been awake for a long time haven’t realized that Mockingbird changed its tune.

Sometimes the bait comes from the left.

Sometimes it comes from the “safe zone.”

The “alt-right” was once treated like the refuge for those who refused the script, and yet more than a few of its loudest corners have outed themselves as a new kind of corralling mechanism—controlled opposition with different branding. Still others are only now seeing the dialectic game, the binary trap, the insanity that comes from blind tribal loyalties, the way anger seeks an anchor and parties and personalities offer one on demand.

I’m still not free in every way I should be. God is patient, and so we should be patient.

But patience is not passivity.

If you read the Bible, you know opportunity has a shelf life. Even windows cloud over time. If this moment has any mercy in it—and it does—it is that the fog and the spectacle, whether produced by enemies or wielded by allies, has exposed how easily the public mind can be managed.

The court of public opinion I wrote on for so long alongside narrative warfare? Still in play. Still paramount.

Because exposure is a gift if we use it. It becomes our eventual judgment if we waste it. My plea to my own tribe, to my own friends, to myself, is simple: let’s not confuse tactical brilliance with moral deliverance. Let’s not treat political ambiguity as a substitute for spiritual clarity. Let’s not be so impressed with the performance that we forget why God is writing this story for us in the first place.

If Trump’s style is buying daylight, then daylight is for building—confession, prayer, disciplined attention, a life that can recognize manipulation without being consumed by it. A life that refuses the easy addiction of commentary when what the world really needs is holiness.

And if we do that, then even the theater has been turned against the enemy. Even the chain-yanking has served something higher. Even Greenland can become, in its own small way, a reminder that the most important battlefield is not out there in Nuuk or Washington, but in here—where Christ either reigns, or does not.