The Swamp That Swallowed Itself by Jeff Callaway

 

THE SWAMP THAT SWALLOWED ITSELF:

How Donald Trump Betrayed Everyone Who Believed in Him, and the Ghouls He Replaced Them With

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the clothing of sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves." — Matthew 7:15, Douay-Rheims Bible

I. A FUNERAL NOBODY WANTED TO ATTEND

I voted for Donald Trump.

I want you to know that before you read another word, because what follows is not the kind of thing you write lightly, and it sure as hell isn't the kind of thing you write without first confessing where you stood. I stood in the booth. I pulled the lever — metaphorically, in this digital age of ours — and I believed. I believed in a man who said he would drain the swamp, expose the shadow government, bring home our sons and daughters from foreign wars fought for foreign interests, and finally, finally, put Americans first. Not Israelis. Not the weapons contractors. Not the globalists pulling strings behind velvet curtains. Americans.

I was wrong. Or more precisely: I was right about the vision and catastrophically wrong about the vessel.

What has happened to Donald Trump in the course of his second term is either one of the great betrayals in American political history, or something far darker — something that demands language most politicians and media figures are too cowardly, too comfortable, or too compromised to use. As a Catholic who spent years on the other side of the spiritual divide before being pulled back by the grace of God, I know what it looks like when a man's soul gets traded away. I've seen the negotiation happen in real time. I've watched the moment when a person stops being themselves and starts being an instrument.

I am not going to be gentle about this.

The man who stands in the White House today — rambling through press briefings, calling his most loyal former allies "nut jobs" and "low IQ losers," letting a conspiracy-pushing Israeli-first internet provocateur fire his national security officials, and sitting in the Oval Office with a prosperity gospel snake-oil saleswoman whispering prayers of manipulation in his ear — that man is not the same man who stood on a debate stage in 2016 and made the establishment shake.

That man is gone. And we need to talk about what replaced him.

II. THE BEAUTIFUL MINDS HE THREW AWAY

Let us begin with what was lost, because you cannot understand the depth of the betrayal without first grieving what was beautiful.

Tucker Carlson built one of the most watched programs in the history of American television by asking the questions no one else in mainstream media had the spine to ask. He challenged the military-industrial complex on air. He questioned American foreign policy with the kind of intellectual honesty that his former colleagues at Fox News never dared. He interviewed foreign leaders the establishment wanted silenced. He told his enormous audience that the wars being fought in their name were not for them, had never been for them, and would never be for them. He was the closest thing American television had produced in decades to a genuine journalist of conscience.

Tucker Carlson, along with Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones, was subsequently called a "loser," a "nut job," and described as "low IQ" by Trump himself in a lengthy Truth Social post NBC News — after each of them did nothing more sinful than oppose a war with Iran that a growing number of Americans, across the political spectrum, believe serves Israeli interests rather than American ones.

Carlson characterized Trump's embrace of war with Iran as a betrayal of MAGA supporters who voted for him specifically based on his stance against U.S. involvement in foreign wars. Deadline That is not a betrayal of Trump. That is holding him to his own words. That is the very definition of loyalty to the principle over loyalty to the man — which is, incidentally, exactly what we should demand of every journalist and commentator alive.

Candace Owens built an audience of millions by being willing to say what polite conservative media would not. She was one of the most effective communicators on the right, capable of reaching young Black Americans, Catholics, Christians of every denomination, and working-class people who had been written off by the Republican establishment for decades. She is a Catholic convert, a mother, a woman of serious moral conviction, and she was among the most articulate voices making the America First case in language ordinary people could grasp and hold.

Owens responded to Trump's tirade by posting a screenshot of his post and writing, "It may be time to put Grandpa up in a home." NBC News That is not the statement of a political opportunist. That is the statement of a woman who has watched something she believed in collapse in front of her eyes and is no longer willing to pretend otherwise.

Megyn Kelly, whatever your history with her, spent the years of Trump's second campaign as one of his most visible and consequential media allies. She drove enormous audiences. She gave credibility to the movement among people who might not have been otherwise reachable. She was, by any reasonable measure, an asset. And she was discarded the moment she exercised independent judgment about a war that has no business being America's war.

These were not small-time bloggers. These were not fringe voices. These were the people — along with Joe Rogan, whose audience may be the largest in American media — who handed Donald Trump a second term on a silver platter. They talked to the unconvinced. They moved the unmoved. They brought millions of people, people like me, to believe that this time was different, that this man was different, that something in American politics had genuinely shifted.

And what did Trump do the moment they dared to disagree with him about a war?

He called them names on social media like a wounded teenager.

III. THE COURT JESTER IN THE OVAL: LAURA LOOMER

Now let us talk about who replaced them.

Since Trump's return to office, Laura Loomer has remained in close contact with him, frequently offering advice on personnel. In April 2025, Trump fired half a dozen National Security Council aides after she attacked them first in a social media post, then during a meeting at the White House.

Let that sink in like a stone thrown into still water. A woman with no security clearance, no government position, no elected office, no military service, and no foreign policy expertise walked into the White House and got half a dozen national security officials fired. Officials whose job it was to protect the United States of America. Officials whose entire professional existence was oriented toward keeping American intelligence intact and American interests defended.

Fired. By a social media influencer.

In early April 2025, reports emerged that Loomer influenced President Trump to dismiss more than half a dozen national security officials due to her suspicions of their disloyalty to him. This is not governance. This is not America First. This is a carnival. This is the kind of thing that happens when a powerful man becomes captured — intellectually, emotionally, and operationally — by someone whose loyalty is not to the country, not to the Constitution, and not to God, but to a very particular ideological agenda dressed up in MAGA clothing.

Who is Laura Loomer? Let us be specific, because specificity is the antidote to propaganda.

Laura Loomer is an American far-right activist and media personality born in 1993. She has been described by various sources as far-right, a white nationalist, as well as alt-right, and alt-lite, and has described herself as a proud Islamophobe.

She is known for anti-Muslim rhetoric, promoting false claims about events like school shootings, and her work with outlets like Project Veritas and InfoWars. A two-time failed congressional candidate in Florida, Loomer hosts "Loomer Unleashed" on Rumble.

Loomer has promoted the Springfield, Ohio cat-eating hoax, falsely claiming the city was populated by "20,000 cannibalistic Haitians." She falsely claimed that USAID funded the salaries of CNN and MSNBC TV show hosts. Following the 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators, Loomer falsely accused Minnesota Governor Tim Walz of being responsible for the shootings.

This is the woman whispering in the ear of the President of the United States. A documented, repeat fabricator of reality. A woman whose public record is a rolling archive of provably false statements, racial provocations, and hysterical conspiratorial accusations against anyone who dares to question the state of Israel or suggest that American foreign policy should prioritize American lives.

Because that is the thread that runs through all of it: anyone who suggests that American soldiers should not die for Israeli geopolitical goals, anyone who questions the nature of U.S.-Israel entanglement, anyone who dares to apply the same critical lens to Netanyahu that they would apply to any other foreign leader — those people are immediately attacked by Loomer as antisemites, traitors, or enemies of Trump.

Loomer publicly called Candace Owens "the #1 Jew hater in America," a grotesque and defamatory accusation leveled at a Catholic woman who simply asked whether America's foreign policy serves American interests. Owens never said anything remotely close to what Loomer accused her of. What Owens said — and what Tucker Carlson said, and what Megyn Kelly said — was that America should think carefully about being drawn into a war in the Middle East that kills Americans for someone else's strategic interests.

For that, Loomer called Owens the number one Jew hater in America. And Trump fired national security officials at Loomer's instigation.

In the context of the Iran war, Loomer celebrated the deaths of American soldiers, according to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who noted that "pro-war Zionist Jews like Laura Loomer celebrated the deaths of American soldiers."

Celebrated. The deaths. Of American soldiers.

And she is Trump's trusted confidante.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraphs 1939 through 1941, speaks of the virtue of solidarity — the recognition that all human beings are bound together in common dignity and that justice cannot be selectively applied based on tribal loyalty. What Loomer represents is the precise theological and moral inverse of solidarity. She represents a tribalism so narrow, so ferocious, so willing to sacrifice the lives of American men and women on foreign soil, that it has corrupted the political movement she claims to serve.

The Church teaches in CCC 1928 that "society ensures social justice when it provides the conditions that allow associations or individuals to obtain what is their due." What is due to the American people — what is owed to them — is a President whose primary loyalty is to them. Not to a foreign prime minister under criminal indictment. Not to a social media activist whose defining characteristic is her willingness to destroy anyone who dissents from her Israel-first worldview.

IV. THE PROSPERITY SNAKE AND HER GOLDEN PULPIT: PAULA WHITE CAINE

And then there is Paula White Caine.

I want to be precise here, because the Catholic Church has very specific things to say about false teaching, and I am a Catholic. I am not attacking Paula White because I dislike her personally. I am identifying her for what she is, theologically and historically, because the truth matters and because a nation whose president takes spiritual counsel from a demonstrably false teacher is a nation in profound spiritual danger.

White is a proponent of prosperity theology, and has been criticized for her religious beliefs by some theologians and conservative evangelists.

Prosperity theology — the teaching that God blesses the faithful with material wealth, that financial success is evidence of divine favor, and that one can essentially purchase God's blessing through donations to a ministry — is not Christianity. It is not even a close relative of Christianity. It is, as numerous serious theologians across denominations have documented, a direct corruption of the Gospel, a twisting of Sacred Scripture for financial gain, and an exploitation of vulnerable people who deserve genuine pastoral care rather than a transactional religious performance.

Most Christian traditions reject and condemn the prosperity gospel on theological, ethical, and biblical grounds; within mainstream evangelicalism, it is often labeled a heresy. The movement White-Cain represents has a reputation for corruption and the exploitation of the vulnerable, who are promised divine rewards in exchange for financial contributions.

This is the woman Trump appointed to lead the White House Faith Office.

The twice-divorced televangelist is a controversial figure who preaches the prosperity gospel — the belief that God will bless believers with material wealth — which is seen as heretical to some Christians. She previously said, "to say no to President Trump would be saying no to God."

Let me translate that last sentence into plain language: Paula White Caine has equated Donald Trump with divine authority. She has told the faithful that rejecting Trump is the same as rejecting God. This is not Christianity. This is political idolatry dressed in a clerical collar, and it is exactly the kind of spiritual manipulation that the Church Fathers warned about in language fierce enough to blister paint.

One day after the 2020 election, when results showed Trump was losing to Joe Biden, White appeared at a live-streamed prayer service in which she spoke in tongues and repeatedly called on "angelic reinforcement" from angels from Africa and South America to secure Trump's reelection.

Angels from Africa. Angels from South America. Called upon by a prosperity gospel televangelist on behalf of a political candidate. This is not intercession. This is a spiritual transaction — the same transactional logic she applies to her fundraising applied now to democratic politics. And the man watching all of this was apparently moved rather than alarmed.

The Senate inquiry found the couple had used tax-exempt ministry money to pay for a private jet, salaries to family members, and nearly $900,000 for a waterfront mansion.

Paula declared on stage, "Wherever I go, God rules. When I walk on White House grounds, God walks on White House grounds... I have every right and authority to declare the White House as holy ground because I was standing there and where I stand is holy."

This statement is not humility. It is not faith. It is the specific theological error known as divine immanence conflated with personal holiness — the heretical belief that one's own presence sanctifies space, that one is so filled with the divine presence that wherever one walks becomes holy ground. The Scriptures are unambiguous: it is God who makes ground holy, not the sinful human beings who walk upon it. Moses was told to remove his sandals because the ground was holy — not because Moses was.

At the White House Easter lunch, Paula White compared Trump to Jesus Christ, remarking: "Jesus taught us so many lessons through his death, burial, and resurrection. He showed us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price."

No one has paid the price like Donald Trump has paid the price.

Let that blasphemy hang in the air for a moment.

The man who died nailed to a cross for the sins of all humanity is being implicitly compared in suffering and sacrifice to a billionaire real estate developer who won a political election. This is not a misstatement. This is not a poor choice of words. This is the natural conclusion of prosperity gospel theology — a theology that has no room for the Cross, no room for suffering as redemptive, no room for the God who identifies with the poor, the prisoner, the suffering, and the outcast. It replaces the crucified Christ with the successful man, the anointed winner, the one God has blessed with power and wealth.

The Catechism in paragraphs 1849 through 1853 speaks of sin as an act that offends God and injures human dignity. False teaching that manipulates the vulnerable in the name of Christ is not a minor theological disagreement. It is a grave moral offense, and it is the spiritual atmosphere surrounding the most powerful man on earth.

V. NETANYAHU'S PUPPET AND THE EPSTEIN SHADOW

Let us now speak of what may be the greatest unsaid truth of Trump's second term.

Although Trump may believe he is pulling the strings, he has clearly and repeatedly allowed himself to be manipulated by Netanyahu. Trump's rejection of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's assessment that Iran was not actively working on developing a nuclear weapon — taking Netanyahu's beliefs over his own intelligence community's findings — is a clear sign of the prime minister's sway over the president.

This is an extraordinary sentence. The President of the United States rejected the findings of his own intelligence community in favor of the preferred narrative of a foreign prime minister who, it must be noted, is the only sitting prime minister in Israeli history to stand trial, having been charged with fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes in three separate cases.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a man under criminal indictment who needs war to survive politically. Every day the bombs fall is another day his trial is delayed, his coalition is intact, and his hold on power endures. He is not fighting for Western civilization. He is fighting for Benjamin Netanyahu. And through channels both formal — his son-in-law Kushner, his special envoy Ron Dermer — and informal, including the megaphone of Laura Loomer and the Israel-first faction within MAGA, he has managed to bend the most powerful office in the world toward his personal legal survival strategy.

Netanyahu himself, in his memoir, described how his close adviser Ron Dermer used specific personal touchpoints to communicate with Trump, finding common ground beyond the reach of professional diplomats. Trump, as experts note, is "hungry for flattery," and this weakness was masterfully exploited.

A hunger for flattery. That is the door through which every manipulation enters.

And then there is Jeffrey Epstein.

Donald Trump stood in front of millions of Americans and promised to release the Epstein files. He said it plainly. He said he would have "no problem" releasing them. His allies in the campaign — Vance, Trump Jr. — hammered the Biden administration for concealing the Epstein client list. It was one of the great rallying cries of the 2024 campaign: the shadow government protects its own, and we are going to blow the lid off.

In May 2025, Attorney General Bondi informed Trump that his name appeared in the Epstein files. She also said that the files contained "unverified hearsay" about Trump and others, child pornography and identifying information on Epstein's victims. As such, officials advised that the files should not be disclosed.

There it is. The moment the great transparency promise met its reflection and flinched.

An NPR investigation found the Justice Department has removed or withheld Epstein files related to President Trump. Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release.

The DOJ under Trump's own Attorney General is actively withholding files that a law Trump himself signed mandates be released. The man who promised to expose the shadow government is now operating the machinery of its concealment. The swamp-drainer is now the swamp.

Elon Musk, the former senior advisor to the President, posted on X that Trump "is in the Epstein files," prompting congressional Democrats to demand answers about whether the files were being withheld specifically to protect the President.

When even Elon Musk, who was perhaps the most consequential private citizen behind Trump's second-term victory, is publicly questioning whether the Epstein suppression is a cover-up for Trump himself — you are no longer in the territory of political spin. You are in the territory of institutional corruption.

VI. BUTLER'S UNANSWERED GHOSTS

Something happened in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, that has never been fully explained, and the silence surrounding it has grown more deafening with every passing month.

The FBI never determined why Thomas Matthew Crooks wanted to kill Trump. The bureau has not publicly shared information on its investigation in more than ten months. Senator Ron Johnson, one of the lawmakers investigating the assassination attempt, stated: "It's a year now, and the American people don't have answers. Who is this Crooks guy?"

A twenty-year-old man with no known political ideology, no manifesto, no online radicalization trail that anyone has been able to produce — managed to climb onto a rooftop 157 yards from a presidential candidate despite local law enforcement having flagged him as suspicious well before he opened fire. He fired eight shots. He killed one man. He wounded two others. And a bullet grazed the ear of the future President of the United States by a margin so thin it constitutes a miracle by any theological standard.

And we still do not know why. We still do not know who he was in any meaningful psychological or ideological sense. We still do not know how the security failures that allowed him access to that rooftop happened in such a systematic, comprehensive fashion.

One former Secret Service agent said it "boggles the mind" how Crooks was able to get on that roof, saying "communication" and "complacency" were the two issues that really went wrong in Butler — adding that he cannot understand how so many errors were made on that site that day.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, once one of Trump's strongest supporters, posted: "I'm not calling the Butler assassination a hoax. But there are a lot of questions that deserve public answers. I'm asking why won't Trump release the information about Matthew Crooks? Did he actually act alone? If not, who is behind him and who helped him? Why the cover up?”

Why won't Trump release the information?

That is the question. That is the question a man whose ear was nearly taken off by a bullet should be burning with fury to answer. That is the question that should have produced congressional investigations, FBI briefings, and complete and total declassification of every document related to the worst security failure in modern Secret Service history.

Instead, there is silence. The same silence that surrounds the Epstein files. The same silence that surrounds the conversations between Netanyahu's intermediaries and Trump's family circle. The same silence that surrounds the question of who, exactly, this president is serving — because it is increasingly, undeniably not the American people who put him in office.

When a man nearly dies and does not furiously demand to know who tried to kill him and why, there are only two explanations: he already knows, or he has been told not to ask.

VII. THE SHELL OF A MAN: WHAT HAPPENED TO TRUMP?

There is a sadness to this story that I did not expect to feel, but I feel it.

A research paper noted that Trump has lately seemed "confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality" but that it does not get covered much because it is so common. It highlighted an average rally length of 82 minutes compared with 45 minutes in 2016, and cited experts who considered the increase in tangential speech and behavioral disinhibition to be the potential result of advancing age and cognitive decline.

Trump used to be quite articulate in earlier years, speaking in polished paragraphs. Now he has difficulty finishing a sentence. His thoughts were logical and related then; now they are tangential.

I am not a physician. I will not make a clinical diagnosis of a man I have never examined. But I am a person with eyes, and I have watched the speeches, the rallies, the press briefings of Trump across a decade. And I will say plainly what many of his own former supporters are whispering: the man who electrified those 2015 campaign rallies, who eviscerated opponents on debate stages with a sharpness that cut through the political theater like a blade, who spoke in rallying sentences that burned themselves into the national consciousness — that man's voice is diminished. That sharpness is blunted. Something is different.

Whether the cause is age, pressure, trauma from the assassination attempts, the psychological weight of the Epstein shadow, or something more sinister operating in his orbit — I do not know. What I know is that a man who seems not fully himself is profoundly vulnerable to the people around him. And the people around him, as we have documented, are not people whose primary loyalty is to America.

On January 21, 2026, while speaking in Davos, Trump at least four times referred to Greenland as "Iceland."

A man who repeatedly confuses two different countries while addressing a global economic summit is a man whose support staff should be protecting him from exactly the kind of influence that Laura Loomer exercises. Instead, they are allowing a conspiracy-promoting internet provocateur to attend Oval Office meetings and shape personnel decisions at the highest levels of the American intelligence apparatus.

Who is running the country?

It is a legitimate question. It is the question the American people — conservative, liberal, Catholic, Protestant, secular — deserve a clear answer to. Because the answer does not appear to be Donald Trump. Not the Donald Trump we elected. Not the man who stood at that podium and promised us that America would come first, last, and always.

The Catechism in paragraphs 1700 through 1706 speaks to the dignity of the human person — the truth that every human being is made in the image of God and deserves to be treated accordingly. The exploitation of a man whose capacity may be diminishing, the surrounding of him with flatterers, provocateurs, and false teachers, the using of his office to advance agendas that serve foreign governments and personal financial interests — this is not merely political corruption. It is a profound violation of human dignity. It is the Proverb made flesh: when a man's guards are bought, the city falls.

VIII. THE SWAMP DRANK ITSELF

I have spent years of my life believing that the American political system could be reformed from within, that the right man with the right message could walk into Washington, look the shadow government in the eye, and blink first. I believed it with something that, if I am being honest with myself, bordered on the kind of hope that should be reserved for God alone.

I was wrong to put that hope in a man.

Not because the diagnosis was wrong — the shadow government is real, the corruption is real, the captured media is real, the bought politicians are real, the war machine that grinds up American sons for the profit of people who will never send their own sons to die is absolutely and devastatingly real. All of that is true. All of it needs to be named and opposed and exposed.

But no man is going to save this country. The Catechism teaches us in paragraph 1427 through 1439 that authentic conversion is always turning away from sin and toward God — not toward a political messiah, not toward a movement, not toward a flag or a party or a man with a red hat and a gift for the dramatic gesture. Toward God. Toward the Cross. Toward the Truth that cannot be bought, manipulated, surrounded by sycophants, captured by foreign influence operations, or silenced by a social media post calling the faithful "nut jobs."

The man who replaced the beautiful minds — Carlson, Owens, Kelly, and the others — with Laura Loomer has revealed something essential about himself. A man who chooses a documented fabricator and Israel-first fanatic over a woman of Candace Owens's intellectual seriousness and moral courage has revealed the nature of his judgment. A man who kept Paula White Caine in his orbit across two administrations, allowing a prosperity gospel con artist to speak blessings over his presidency and compare him to the suffering Christ, has told us everything we need to know about his relationship with authentic faith.

And a man who promised to expose Jeffrey Epstein's network, then quietly suppressed the files the moment his own name appeared in them, has told us everything we need to know about the nature of his commitment to truth.

I am done voting. Not because I am surrendering. Not because I am giving in to despair — despair is a sin, and I will not commit it. But because I have come to understand, in the slow and painful way that serious truths are usually learned, that my citizenship is elsewhere. My citizenship is in the Kingdom that does not hold elections, does not fire its servants based on the recommendation of a social media provocateur, does not suppress its own records to protect its executives, and does not replace its prophets with flatterers.

My politics are Jesus Christ and the Roman Catholic Church. Everything else is smoke and noise and the sound of boots marching toward the next war.

Donald Trump drained the swamp. Then he became it.

And the rest of us are standing at the bank, watching the water rise.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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