Toward the end of Monday’s briefing, a reporter reminded White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt that Pope Leo XIVin remarks delivered on Palm Sunday, said God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.” Citing a Bible passage, the pontiff added, “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood.”

Asked for her reaction, Leavitt replied“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with our military leaders or with the president calling on the American people to pray for our service members and those who are serving our country overseas.”

Part of the problem, of course, is that no prominent political figures have argued there is something wrong with praying for service members. But the other element to this is some are going far further than simply calling on the public to pray for U.S. troops.

Take Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, for example. The Washington Post reported earlier this week:

[L]ongtime norms are being upended by the proselytizing Christian campaign of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, say multiple former high-ranking military officials and experts on religion and law. Rather than boosting cohesion through a more universal spiritual uplift, they say, the new approach violates the Constitution and undermines the bonds of mutual respect between troops that are essential, especially in wartime.

The scope of the beleaguered Pentagon chief’s embrace of Christian nationalism is quite broad. In recent months, Hegseth has:

• led Christian prayer services in the Pentagon’s auditorium;
• invited radical Christian nationalist figures to speak at official prayer services;
• used social media to promote messages that suggest his faith should dominate over other religious traditions; and
• argued during an official press briefing that Americans should take a knee and pray “in the name of Jesus Christ,” at the same briefing in which he quoted Scripture.

At an event last week, Hegseth took matters to a new level when he prayed for U.S. troops to inflict “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. … We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

In case this isn’t obvious, Hegseth is as free as every other American to worship, or not, as he pleases. His religiosity is his own business.

But as has become clear in recent weeks, the defense secretary isn’t just exercising his faith in line with his conscience, he’s also erasing the First Amendment’s church-state line and incorporating Christian nationalism into his wartime message in ways without precedent in the American tradition.

Retired Army Col. Larry Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Colin Powell during Powell’s tenures as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, told the Post, “The American military has had a remarkable ride of equanimity and fairness and justice and all manner of good adjectives with regard to religion. It’s done this in a way that’s really remarkable — until now.”

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent had a related report this week:

If Hegseth truly believes his war on Iran is unfolding in accordance with his conception of biblical law — the highest authority of all — then that explains why he treats all those niggling secular constraints as unbinding on him. Maximum violence and killing of the enemy — who cry out to God but, unlike Hegseth, don’t get an answer back from Him — are affirmatively good.

‘It’s not the way somebody who claims to be a person of God — a religious person — should think,’ [Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona]who has flown many combat missions himself, told me. War, he added, ‘is a morally and ethically complicated thing for any person. Any serious warfighter struggles with it.’ If we don’t wrestle with this, Kelly said, we’ll ‘start to lose ourselves.’

Looking ahead, there are limited options to curtail the defense secretary’s public advocacy of Christian nationalism — Donald Trump could intervene, though that seems exceedingly unlikely — but Hegseth’s critics are not powerless. On the contrary, some of the Pentagon chief’s policies related to religious promotion have already sparked litigationwhich opens the door to possible court-imposed limits. Watch this space.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

This is an adapted excerpt from the March 30 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

On Monday morning, a 10-foot-tall golden toilet appeared at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., along with a plaque that reads “A throne fit for a king.”

“In a time of unprecedented division, escalating conflict and economic turmoil, President Trump focused on what really mattered: Remodeling the Lincoln Bathroom in the White House,” the plaque continued, adding that the giant toilet “stands as a tribute to an unwavering visionary who looked down, saw a problem, and painted it gold.”

This weekend, that gold-toilet president was also the target of one of the largest single-day nationwide demonstrations in American history. Organizers estimate that more than 8 million Americans joined the third day of No Kings protests against Donald Trump in 10 months.

One of the places where the local press reported a steep increase in participation compared with previous anti-Trump and No Kings protests was in Hagerstown, Marylandwhere an estimated 3,000 people took part in a demonstration at the public square.

In Hagerstown, the banner for the protest wasn’t just “No Kings,” it was “No Kings, No Camps.” Just outside that city, the administration has been trying to build one of its Trump prison campswhich would hold thousands of people without trial.

The grassroots group Maryland Coalition to Stop the Camps asked people to come from all over the state to Hagerstown to show opposition to the prison camp that Trump is trying to put there.

This piece of this story is worth watching right now, especially after Kristi Noem was ousted as homeland security secretary and a new guy, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullinis taking over.

One of the things that has emerged about the warehouse purchases the administration has been making for its prison camps is that for some reason the government appears to have been eager to wildly overpay.

In Salt Lake City, the administration paid almost 50% more than the property appeared to be worth. It was assessed at $97 million, and the government paid more than $145 million. In Roxbury, New Jersey, one warehouse was assessed at $62 million, but the Trump administration came in and offered $129 million for it — more than double the cost. In Georgia, one of the properties valued last year at $26 million was purchased for $129 million.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported on an internal department memo that circulated last week, the day after Mullin was sworn in as the new head of Homeland Security. The memo reportedly said that the process of turning these warehouses into Trump prison camps was going to be slowed down and that the proposals for these facilities are going to be revised to start incorporating feedback from stakeholders — whatever that means — before they move ahead.

Simultaneously, CNN reported that there is a new inspector general investigation into alleged corruption at the department concerning the soliciting and handling of contracts, including the involvement of Noem and her top adviser, Corey Lewandowski.

There was already an audit that had been sparked in the department; now, on top of that, there’s a new and apparently urgent investigation, which reportedly included investigators searching the offices of one Homeland Security official who had been placed in a job at the agency by Noem and Lewandowski.

That investigation came after NBC News reported on March 19 that Lewandowski reportedly sought multimillion-dollar payments from companies contracting with Homeland Security, including companies that operate immigration prisons.

Lewandowski has denied the allegations. Democratic members of Congress have now opened their own investigation into what has been going on there.

Earlier this month in Social Circle, Georgia, town officials put a lock on the water meter at a warehouse that the Trump administration is trying to turn into a prison there. In Salt Lake City, officials voted to cap the amount of water that the federal government would be allowed to use at a warehouse it wants to convert to a prison, one that it appears the administration overpaid $48 million for.

Why’d they do that? Who made off with that money? Whose pockets just got stuffed with tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money?

That stink is what you think it is: It smells like corruption. It’s the kind of behavior for which kings and dictators are famous.

But on Wednesday, the Trump administration will try to make its most radical move yet against immigrants. It will argue before the Supreme Court that when the Constitution says that anyone born in this country is an American, the Constitution didn’t really mean that.

Everyone calls this the birthright citizenship case, but no one who’s not a lawyer instinctively knows what that means. What it means is that anyone born in this country is an American by virtue of the fact that they were born here.

But now, the Trump administration is trying to change that. It wants to assess the allegiance and the loyalty of a person’s parents before it decides if that person — born here, in this country  — can be considered American.

The last time we had massive domestic prison camps in this country, to hold people indefinitely and without trial, was in World War II, when the U.S. government locked up Japanese Americans for yearsregardless of their citizenship, on the theory that their race alone made them dangerous.

Japanese American groups and experts on their wartime incarceration have filed friend-of-the-court briefs in that case ahead of the oral arguments this week.

Law professor Eric Muller of the University of North Carolina is a nationally recognized expert on what happened to Japanese Americans during the war. He’s written four books on the topic.

In his friend-of-the-court briefhe explained, sort of patiently, that even in World War II — when we were so panicked about the loyalties and the allegiances of whole huge swaths of people, so much so that we created effectively a concentration camp system to lock up an entire ethnic group for years on the basis of how scared we were about their supposed loyalties and allegiances —  if the citizens of Japan who we had locked up had babies inside the camps, there was no controversy at all about the fact that those babies were definitely American.

Beyond that, when people had renounced their American citizenship, and we had them locked up in prison camps, if they had babies here, there was no question that their babies were Americans.

Even beyond that, the United States in World War II went so far as to grab a bunch of people who had no ties to America whatsoever, including people of Japanese descent from Peruand force them to come to this country to be put in prison so they could be used in prisoner swaps with Japan.

These were Peruvians of Japanese descent who were only in this country because they were forced against their will to be here, but still, when they had babies in American prison camps during the war, those babies were uncontroversially considered to be American citizens.

But under Trump, who has entrusted the wise and prudent stewardship of immigration matters to people like Noem, Lewandowski and now Mullin, the federal government is now going to tell the Supreme Court that the Constitution has been wrong all this time and that it is he, Trump, who, neutrally and with an even hand, will assess a person’s loyalties and allegiances before it’s decided if they are really an American.

The administration is dragging that stinking heap up to the door of the Supreme Court this very week, the same week that more than 8 million Americans from every single corner of the country came out full tilt and full blast to say No Kings.

No thrones. No golden toilets. No crowns. No camps.

That’s where we are. That’s where we stand. Game on.

Allison Detzel contributed.

Donald Trump has made no secret of his concerns that a judge might stand in the way of one of the president’s top priorities: the White House ballroom construction project.

With this in mind, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon on Tuesday afternoon told Trump what he didn’t want to hear: As MS NOW confirmed, Leon has granted a preliminary injunction to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, temporarily blocking the administration from “taking any action in furtherance of the physical development of the proposed ballroom at the former site of the East Wing of the White House.”

Leon wrote in his order that the president of the United States is the “steward of the White House for future generations of First Families,” adding, “He is not, however, the owner!”

The nonprofit organization that brought the lawsuit insisted that the president exceeded his authority when he destroyed the East Wing and unilaterally launched the ballroom construction project without lawmakers’ approval.

There were earlier indications that Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, appeared sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ complaint, fueling anxiety in the Oval Office. Those hints proved true.

“[N]o statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have,” the court order added.

The jurist concluded that no work can continue until the project receives “express authorization” from Congress. The order takes effect in 14 days, allowing time for an appeal.

Predictably, the president did not respond well to the developments. In fact, Trump published a lengthy tirade to his social media platform that complained, oddly enough, about all of the other hypothetical cases the National Trust for Historic Preservation could’ve filed, but didn’t. From the online rant:

… The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Radical Left Group of Lunatics whose funding was stopped by Congress in 2005, is not suing the Federal Reserve for a Building which has been decimated and destroyed, inside and out, by an incompetent and possibly corrupt Fed Chairman. The once magnificent Building is BILLIONS over budget, may never be completed, and may never open. All of the beautiful walls inside have been ripped down, never to be built again, but the National ‘Trust’ for Historic Preservation never did anything about it! Or, have they sued on Governor Gavin Newscum’s ‘RAILROAD TO NOWHERE’ in California that is BILLIONS over Budget and, probably, will never open or be used.

Trump’s extensive whining aside, it was notable that at no point in the president’s online statement did he respond to the substance of the legal complaint or respond to the court order on the merits.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”