Hello and welcome to Jesuitical, a podcast from America Media for saints and sinners.

You can join us each week for honest conversations about the Catholic Church and our world today, sometimes over drinks.

I'm Ashley McKinless, and I'm joined by Zach Davis.

It's good to be with you, Ashley.

Yeah, so we are talking around 2 p.m. on Wednesday, November 6th.

Last night, former president, Donald Trump, won the 2024 presidential election with a pretty

decisive electoral win and what looks like will be the popular vote. So we are

here to unpack what this means for our country and for Catholics in particular. And to do that,

we are joined by Father Sam Sawyer, the editor and chief of America. Welcome to Jesuitical Sam.

Great to be here. Thank you. So you filed your of many things column this morning. The issue went to press at noon. So. Yeah. So you were kind of responding to this and reacting to it in real time, but also in a venue that was more than a tweet. So you were giving some sustained attention to this. What initial reactions to Trump winning? One initial reaction, and I recognize this is not where everybody is going to land immediately,

but I do actually think that it's there's some mercy in the fact that we at least know how the election turned out,

and that we're not spending weeks or months arguing over, you know, a sliver of

mail and ballots in a few states that we're going to turn the election one way or the other.

There is a clear answer, even if for many people, it's, you know, it's not the answer that

they might have hoped for. You know, I think we've been clear in the voice of the magazine about our

concern about President Trump's rejection of limits on his own authority and the danger he poses

to constitutional norms. We said that back in 2020 before the last election. We've repeated it again

many times since. So I have those concerns.

Certainly I think those concerns are one of the things that's strongest for me right now,

as well as concerns about what the proposed mass deportations will turn into that Trump promised

during his campaign. At the level of what does this election mean, what is it telling us,

I think there's a sense in which opposition to Trump had a relatively unified story, right? And it started with the threat he poses to constitutional norms and to democratic norms and then extended into other perceived threats that he posed, you know, to immigrants,

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