Politico: “The ousted leader refused to relent to reality. Set against a backdrop of avarice and inequality and persistent sickness, distrust and misrule, the leader exploited and exacerbated societal unrest to seize and flaunt vast power – doing anything and everything he could to try to keep it in his grip. He resisted pleas for unity and calm. He tested the loyalty of even his most ardent and important establishment supporters. He was censured and then toppled. Still, though, he declined to consider even the smallest acquiescence. Besieged and increasingly isolated, he faded as he aged – but he never yielded. Some people believed he had no less than the blessing of God. He was Benedict XIII – ‘the pope,’ said Joëlle Rollo-Koster, a noted scholar of the Middle Ages, ‘who never conceded.'”

“Benedict, who died in 1423, was the last of the popes of Avignon, in what’s now the south of France. He was an ‘antipope’ – in opposition, that is, to a sequence of popes presiding from the more customary hub of Rome – and insisted even as he was twice deposed that he remained the rightful pontiff. Weary, irritated leaders, both religious and royal, ‘said, ‘You’re out, you’re out, you’re out,’’ Rollo-Koster told me, ‘and he said, ‘No, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in.’’ Six centuries later, Donald Trump, twice impeached, is finishing his first full week as a dispatched post-president ensconced in his own Florida fortalice of Mar-a-Lago – committed by almost all accounts to do from his Palm Beach perch some modern-day variant of what Benedict pulled off for decades. The calamitous, lies-laced last few months of Trump’s White House term, and in particular the last few weeks, almost certainly will make this harder – the broad corporate blowback, social media silencing and historic congressional condemnation piled atop his already looming legal, financial and reputational peril.”