If Michael Kelly could rise from the dead, this would be the week. The late journalist once skewered Hillary Clinton with surgical precision in a 1993 New York Times Magazine piece titled “Saint Hillary,” portraying her as a self-appointed moral authority who spoke endlessly about rebuilding society without understanding it. His question still echoes: If society must be remade, why should Hillary Rodham Clinton get the job?
That same “Saint Hillary” has now resurfaced with a new essay, “MAGA’s War on Empathy,” in which she delivers another sermon—this time on Christianity and morality. According to her, she now knows what real Christian compassion looks like, and conveniently, it looks nothing like the policies of President Donald Trump. Imagine that.
Her argument stumbles right out of the gate on basic facts. She claims previous administrations deported millions without controversy, while Trump supposedly turned cities into battlegrounds. But the Obama administration built the detention facilities she now condemns, and not all American cities are battlegrounds—only the ones where organized left-wing activism chooses to manufacture conflict. Dallas isn’t a war zone. Miami isn’t either. But Hillary doesn’t notice that inconvenient detail, so it quietly disappears from her essay.
Even more impressive is how she manages to contradict herself in back-to-back paragraphs. First, she assures readers that past deportations were normal and acceptable. Then she describes resistance to deportation as true “neighborly” Christianity. Which is it? Are deportations fine, or are they immoral? Hillary doesn’t say. She doesn’t even seem aware she created the contradiction. Words come out, but meaning never quite arrives.
Michael Kelly once described her as a moralizer who lacked actual moral clarity, a preacher without wisdom. Decades later, nothing has changed. She still speaks as if she alone has the authority to instruct Americans on decency, while misunderstanding nearly every policy and event she references. Her discussions of “toxic empathy” and religious principles show she doesn’t grasp even the basic contours of the arguments she’s invoking.
And yet, the message of the preacher continues. Hillary Clinton lectures Americans on virtue while ignoring her own party’s history on deportations, her own contradictions, and the realities on the ground. It’s the same performance, just with new buzzwords and the same old tone of moral superiority.
But here’s the good news: Americans have seen this act before, and they’re not buying it anymore. While Saint Hillary writes essays about empathy, President Trump focuses on law, order, and national security—policies that protect real people in real communities. And in the end, that grounded approach is what keeps the country moving forward, not recycled sermons from a political past the nation has already outgrown.
