Vatican Conclave Chooses Trump As Next Pontiff
Gold Smoke Rising From The Sistine Chapel’s Chimney Signaled Election Of Pope Donald I
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In a move that took Roman Catholics by surprise, the Vatican's Conclave of Cardinals was locked out of Saint Peter's Basilica instead of being locked in while they considered who to choose as the new pontiff.
Overnight, the DOGE-DOVE Department of Vatican Efficiency had fired all of the Conclave members charged with electing the next pope. They were unable to access the Vatican parking garage, their security passes had been deactivated and their authorization to use the executive elevators had been revoked. Cardinals pro tempore Bibi Netanyahu, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, Scott Bessent, Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, and Pete Hegseth entered the Basilica through a secret postern gate after which, on the first ballot, the Cardinals pro tempore unanimously elected President Trump as Pope Donald I.
Gold smoke poured forth from the chimney along with thousands of hundred dollar bills that floated down to the crowd.
"Make God Great Again!" Cheered the throng of ecstatic MAGODGA supporters gathered in St. Peter's Square. "Rendere dio di nuovo grande!" chanted the faithful.
"Dov'è il gabinetto?" shouted the multitude.
"Vaffanculo!!" screamed the many.
"I'm not surprised," said President (and now Pope) Donald Trump while holding an impromptu news conference on the first tee of his Florida golf course. "I mean, there really wasn't any other candidate worth voting for, was there? I might not even be a Catholic, but I've talked with God my entire life and He's always asking me for advice about this deal or other. I've even got enhanced communication with God using Elon Musk's low orbit satellite telecom subsidiary, GodLink.
"Plus, I'm very, very humble. There are about 1.4 billion practicing Catholics in the world and I've got ten times that many followers on social media, so it's a perfect fit. I know all about a 'Hail Mary' from watching NFL Football. I know all about bulls, even the papal type of bull, and I really know how to sling it. And, of course, I'm infallible. So, because I'm infallible, I am, literally, the perfect candidate for pope.
"I even speak a little Latin," continued President/Pope Donald Trump as he practiced his golf swing: "... ipso facto, etcetera, O solo mio, tutti frutti, Mama mia, caveat emptor, hasta la vista baby, and e pluribis unum - the great motto on back of the dollar, the greatest currency on Planet Earth!
"Now this Frank guy who came before me, you know, the cross-dresser who used to wear a white dress - he was obviously a nice guy. But he wasn't too very smart.
"So, starting tomorrow," President & Pope Trump concluded, "we're gonna get smarter about how we do the Supreme Being. We're gonna start making some changes. It's gonna be big, it's gonna be really huge."
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The very next morning, Pope Don issued his first papal bull: the Holy See was renamed the American Sea and removed to Mar-a-Lago, Florida. Google Maps and MapQuest duly noted the change.
The brand "Pope" was copyrighted, trademarked and converted into a publicly traded Delaware corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In the words of the new pontiff, "Now everyone can get into the business of buying, selling, trading and saving souls." Pope Global Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE stock ticker symbol POGE) IPO'd at $450/share in early morning trading and shortly thereafter was added to the Dow Jones index of the 30 most profitable companies.
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In a second papal bull, Pope Don issued the following edicts:
1. 2,500 % levies have been immediately imposed on all masses, bishop miters and communion wafers that aren't 100% certifiably Prayed in America.
According to Pope Don, "All this stuff about the 'masses' and 'helping the poor' and 'blessed be the peacemakers' and 'love thy neighbor' and 'feed the poor' and 'communion' and banning merchants and money changers from the Temple... well, all that nonsense is pure socialism right out of the Chinese Communist Party playbook. So, from now on, we want our prayers to be Prayed in America, by Americans and for Americans, because there's only one God, and He's American and a businessman. And like the America First Commandment says, you will have no other Marxist or Socialist gods before Capitalism, and no other currencies before the Almighty Dollar!"
2. All Chinese, all illegal immigrants, all North Koreans, all Iranians, all Palestinians, everyone from Yemen, any woman who wears a head covering and every man who wears a black and white keffiyeh, all foreign born university enrollees, everybody with a student or temporary work visa, and everyone who ever voted for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, all of these people will be immediately deported from Heaven - if they're already dead, that is. And they're banned from ever entering into Heaven, if they're not... yet... dead.
We're also going to privatize Heaven and Hell turn them into commercial enterprises. We're not only gonna save souls, we're gonna make them worth saving!
Heaven - well, that's obviously a Trump International Resort with showgirls and swimming pools and championship golf courses and umbrella drinks and lots of servants and room service and air conditioned rooms, just like the Resort we're gonna build in Gaza.
And Hell? Well, Hell's like where all you Heaven-deportees are going to go, you know, one of those Terrorism Confinement Centers in El Salvador. Or, maybe, San Francisco, if you've been really, really bad!
3. From now on and for all Eternity, there is only one language of God. That language is American English. No more Latin or Greek mumbo-jumbo. If you want to talk to God, and if you want Him to pay the least amount of attention to you, you better learn how to talk to Him in God's own American English with cash in hand. The Gospels were all written in American. Just like the Constitution.
And remember: God's a "HIM!" He's not a "her" or an "it" or any number of gender-bender whatevers. So, if you talk to God and you use one of those "woke" pronouns, you can just fuhgeddaboudit! Probably gonna smite you with some kinda lightning bolt or whatever! Or is that Zeus who does that kind of smiting with lightening bolts?
4. The symbols of the Church are all wrong. We're getting rid of that white dove flying around all over the place. The new way to give people the bird is the Bird of Gold, the American Gold Eagle, the greatest bird on Heaven and Earth, instead of some shit-hole dove pooping all over the place.
And that cross! Gimme a break! It's gotta be a big golden dollar sign, just like the one I'm wearing in the "official" mug shot of me, Pope Don I, shown above. We're going to be a religion of success, a real prosperity theology! Because nothing succeeds like success and everyone loves a winner. Even God! The poor are absolutely NOT blessed! Poor people are LOSERS! You show me a poor person who feels blessed and I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you! Get real all you lambs and sheeple! You can bleat about being shepherded by some crook who says you should give to charity... or you can take words of wisdom from a really good investment advisor and make a lot of beautiful money.
Blessed are the super-wealthy!
5. The name of Vatican City immediately will be changed to America City. St. Peter's Square will be redeveloped as a NASCAR race track. Disney will get a franchise to create a Holy Land Amusement Park with a Gates of Hell House of Horrors, purgatory roller coaster rides and a lot of costumed people walking around as saints, apostles, martyrs, and Walt Disney cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse and Snow White and Daffy Duck before they all got "woke," took vows of abstinence, and transubtantiated themselves into trans-mice, gender-blended princes and princesses and total Loony Tunes.
All of this goofy baroque and rococo decoration is also gonna have to change. All the butt-naked little cherubim are out! What is this, some kind of pedo-land run by Jeffrey Epstein? And the paintings, too, are going to be redone to get with the times, including that artsy-fartsy stuff on the chapel ceiling by that slacker Mike Angelo, or whatever:
6. There will be no more cross-dressing in the naves: men will dress like men wearing pin-stripe suits, button down white collar shirts with blue or red or yellow neckties. Sackcloth and hair shirts are definitely out! Nuns will wear short skirts or two piece swim suits, high heels, carry Louis Vuitton purses and wear smoked lens sunglasses. Skinhead and similar tonsured looks are banned forevermore! Nobody will be ordained as a priest unless they've been bar mitzvahed, and can prove that they've got the right junk.
7. And, while I'm at it, I'm gonna impose another 10,000% tariff on everything made in China because they still haven't kissed my papal ass ring!
* * * * *
One day later, the Vatican at Mar-a-Lago announced that Elon Musk will be the Pope's Papal Nuncio. According to Pope Don: Mr. Musk, having fathered more kids than anyone can count, knows a lot about this Holy Fathering stuff. And he also knows about cost-cutting to make access to God more efficient, less wasteful and more business-friendly.
Accordingly, the DOGE-DOVE Department of Vatican Efficiency has decreed that all of the Church's monasteries and convents will be closed and converted into hotels, casinos, nuclear power reactors, shoe factories, and Bitcoin mines. The practice of simony will be revived in order to generate more apostolic revenue. Seventy-five percent of all parish churches will be sold to developers to be converted into luxury condominiums, manufacturing centers and office buildings.
Fork in the road: all monks and nuns will be asked to submit an email to their abbots and mothers superior detailing at least five secular things that they accomplished in the preceding week, with a cc to The Manager. Those monks and nuns who fail to accomplish this task - even those who have taken vows of eternal silence - will be summarily fired and thrown to the lions.
DOGE-DOVE furthermore announced that the Vatican's Swiss Guard will be completely modernized. Gone are the clunky medieval halberds and steel breastplates. They will be replaced with American made M16s, olive drab battle fatigues and Kevlar body armor.
Indulgences will again be available for sale in the papacy of the new pope. Personally tailored sin-absolution can charged to your digital wallets. From now on, prayers will be by appointment only and subject to prepayment of a small service fee.
* * * * *
On the third day of the reign of Pope Donald I, he issued more Bull, including a vow to stage a military parade at St. Marks every Christmas Day in order to present a more muscular, more authoritative image of God's Vicar on Earth. Pope Don said that "the military parade is meant to demonstrate that when I issue Bull, you better do what I say, OR ELSE!"
Additionally, the name of Saint Peters Basilica will be changed to Adam Smith's Capitalist Cathedral. Instead of leaving crutches and other symbols of miraculous healings, the faithful will be encouraged to buy stock in big pharmaceutical companies, drop off empty vials of medication or just leave money, preferably by debit card charged directly to their spiritual accounts.
The new Pope Don also promised to resume the Inquisition... starting with American universities: any professor, administrator or student who denies the infallibility of Israel, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu or equates the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon with genocide will be excommunicated, tried for heresy, convicted and burned at the stake, just like Giordano Bruno and similar folks who deny that the Sun revolves around the Earth or that the Earth spins around America.
Henceforth, according to the new Pope Donald, the faithful will be required to render up to Caesar what is Caesar's. Full Stop.
Under the new gospel of Don, confessional booths will be converted to business centers that celebrate the art of the deal. The confessional booths will be a place where corporate sins can be reorganized in Chapter 11 moral bankruptcies and discharged in full. Confessionals will allow penitents to download their sinful acts and thoughts and post them to social media for everyone everywhere to rate them thumbs up/thumbs down.
Elon Musk's GodX will send subscribers media alerts that let them know to check their in-boxes for sacred messages.
True believers will be offered a Wi-Fi connection that sends the faithfuls' supplications directly to the prayer fulfillment center in the sky - delivery guaranteed within 3 hours with Halo Prime Membership. The faithful will also be offered one-click acts of penance - just press a button and you're absolved of original ... and not-so-original... sins (by clicking here, you acknowledge having read and agreed to the Terms of Salvation available in tiny Latin at the Cathedral website).
The IOG (Internet of God) will connect you and your transgressions 24/7 to the Supreme Being in the Cloud, collecting all your thoughts and deeds in a single digital file for oversight and review by an artificially intelligent Saint Peter-bot relocated to the NSA who will predict your chances of getting into Paradise or the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp as well as monitoring your heart-beat, fat burn-rate, and the number of Friends you have in Heaven (and Hell).
Instead of holy water, the blessed will henceforth be sprinkled with petroleum: Drill baby drill!
All cathedrals will now include sponsored advertisements in their stained glass windows and will be required to use Coca Cola baptismal water.
Autonomous self-driving robo-priests, made and sold by a Tesla-Vatican joint venture, will roll out to your home delivering sacred wine and ketamine wafers along with homilies and sermon-packages crafted specially for your personal salvation (or damnation, as the case might be).
* * * * *
On the fourth day of the papacy of Pope Don I, a schism arose. The Democratic National Committee declared that the election of Pope Don was flawed. A new conclave of cardinals consisting of Neo-imperialists from the EU, Germany, France and Great Britain, as well as Nancy Pelosi, Kathy Hochul, Cory Booker, Michael Bloomberg, Chuck Schumer and Gavin Newsom, secretly met behind closed doors and elected themselves as a Pope Collective. The Pope Collective denied the legitimacy of the so-called usurper Pope Don I (who, in a fit of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the Pope Collective decried as Satan incarnate). The neoliberal Pope Collective then issued apocalyptic decrees, anathema and edicts denouncing Pope Don's denial of Science, his refutation of Gender Affirming Medical Care, his failure to fully and forever fund environmentally friendly, carbon-free war against Russia, and his lack of support for preferred pronouns.
However, the neoliberal Pope Collective, in most other and significant regards, wholly subscribed to Pope Don's political-economic orthodoxy including: the One True Religion of Capitalism; the anathematization of Palestinians; the primacy of Wall Street; the charade of democracy; and rendering just about everything unto Caesar.
The world congregation consisting of all other plant, animal, viral, microbial and alien life on Earth, felt utterly disgusted and hopelessly confused by the self-serving bickering between the multiple Popes. They completely tuned out, dropped out, and turned on... their cell phones to play games and watch TikTok videos.
God yawned.
Damn, He/She/They/It said (speaking to Him/Her/Their/Itself). I think we're gonna have to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. Maybe with octopuses or intelligent cockroaches? Whatever - right now, I think I’ll have a beer and watch that rerun of "Leave it to Beaver" on TV.
Hmm. Maybe I'll just let the human beans wipe themselves out along with everything else. That will save Myself the bother.
Yeah, that sounds like a plan. Sounds like a plan.
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