The traditional inaugural prayer service was held on Tuesday at National Cathedral and it featured this incredible moment:

The woman preaching is The Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC.

Look at President Grievance’s face. Look at how disgusted he is.

Look at Melania’s angry face. Look how she is silently seething after being called out by a fellow citizen. Look at Laura Trump’s smirk.

Look at JD Vance, trying so hard to get his wife to mock Budde with him from the front row. Look at Tiffany Trump trying to do the same with her husband.

And look at Usha Vance, whose eyes never stop watching Budde, and who quite obviously rebuffs her husband’s rudeness.

These people came back to Washington expecting fealty and submissiveness. And who could fault them? The entire Republican Party has bent the knee, and the richest assholes in the world came with their bended-knee gifts, too.

And what they received today at National Cathedral was an act of public defiance. They came to be fawned over and to preen and instead an unassuming woman in clerical robes, without fancy jewelry, or designer clothes, or an international media company, listed the things President Grievance planned to do, and asked him, in the name of the Christianity he claimed they share, to consider showing mercy to some of the “least of us”, as Jesus said.

The scene immediately reminded me of when the then Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, was invited to give the sermon at Prince Harry’s and Meghan Markle’s wedding. Bishop Curry gave a moving sermon where he called out the British royal family’s role in slavery, a heritage he and Markle share, and their response was to openly snicker at his ebullient and enthusiastic delivery:

Both of them had intimate access to powerful leaders, and each of them defiantly preached the word to them, and those powerful leaders had to sit there and take it in silence.

At the end of her sermon Budde invoked this passage from the prophet Micah:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

It’s one of my favorite Bible passages, and here’s a beautiful musical setting of it to close this post: