Bishop Who Confronted Trump: This Is Truth He Needed to Hear
The bishop who urged Donald Trump to “have mercy” on LGBTQ children and immigrant families offered new insight on what made her challenge the incoming president to his face, telling The View hosts that she “was trying to speak a truth that I felt needed to be said.”
Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop at Washington National Cathedral, made her comments directly to Trump during the church’s Tuesday service, in the presence of his Vice President JD Vance and their wives Melania Trump and Usha Vance.
“I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country,” Budde said, including “gay, lesbian, and transgender children...some who fear for their lives,” and immigrant “communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away.” She added, “The vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”
Budde is a spiritual leader for 88 Episcopal congregations and 10 Episcopal schools in Washington, D.C. and some Maryland counties, according to the church’s website. She became Washington’s ninth bishop in 2011, after serving as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis for 18 years. Trump was unimpressed by her sermon.
The president told reporters outside the church that he didn’t think it was a “good service,” and then took to Truth Social to berate the bishop later that day, calling Budde a “radical left hard line Trump hater” who was “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.”
Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville is one of many on the right echoing Trump’s irritated reaction to the bishop’s comments. “For this bishop to do this to President Trump after a weekend of... talking about God more than ever” was “spew[ing] hate,” he said on Newsmax, adding, “it just absolutely amazes me how far these people go.”
“I had what I felt was on my heart to say and I had to leave it to them, to all of us, to take from whatever my words were to heart in whichever way they could and leave, as they say, leave the rest to God,” Rev. Budde said on The View, adding that she tried not to take in the sour facial expressions from Trump as she spoke.“I’ve been preaching for a long time and I’ve long since given up trying to read people’s body language as I’m preaching,” she explained, “because I would be wrong most of the time.”
That said, Budde agreed with the View hosts that her message had been “misconstrued and politicized,” asking, “How could it not be?”
“We’re in a hyper-political climate,” she continued. “One of the things I cautioned about is the culture of contempt in which we live that immediately rushes to the worst possible interpretations of what people are saying, and to put them in categories.”
Though the bishop called Trump’s ICE policies “heartbreaking,” she said she would welcome the opportunity to speak one-on-one with him—but only under one condition. “I’ve never been invited into a one-on-one conversation with President Trump and I would welcome that opportunity,” she said Wednesday when host Alyssa Farah Griffin suggested a private conversation would have been more appropriate.
“I have no idea how that would go,” she continued, but “I can assure him and everyone listening that I would be as respectful as I would with any person and certainly of his office, for which I have great deal of respect. But, the invitation would have to come from him.”
