While the name Gladden Pappin sounds like a character from some lazy ripoff of Dickens, he is in fact a real person and really does serve as a top outside advisor to neckbearded Vice President JD Vance. According to the Atlantic, the Harvard-educated Catholic extremist Pappin believes some not very realistic shit, specifically that convicted felon President Trump will dissolve Congress and then the Pope will coronate Third Lady Melania Trump as queen of the United States of America.
It makes sense in the historical context of Pope Leo III coronating Charlemagne as Carolingian/Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD and then subsequent pontiffs conferred upon later monarchs and other medieval rulers in that kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. And also as the kind of logic underpinning the liquor-fueled ravings of a fascist nerd during what a source described as a 2018 meeting of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute at which Pappin expressed as a certainty – that then-Pope Francis would elevate the Catholic-raised former illegal immigrant “artistic” porn performer as the divinely righteous absolute sovereign of the United States – rather than an aspirational hope kind of thing.
“This is what will happen,” said Pappin, according to Jeff Polet, the director of the Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R Ford Presidential Foundation, confirming independently what the Atlantic’s Isaac Stanley-Becker had previously heard from others about Pappin’s gushy daydreams of Melania Regina I, Dei Gratia Regnorum Americae et Terrarum Ceterarum Regina, Fidei Defensor.
Pappin himself was a bit shy about his fan fiction tale in an email exchange with Stanley-Becker, writing “Satire is dead and Trump Derangement Syndrome killed it,” because you libtards take everything seriously instead of literally or whatever the fuck kind of gaslighting this smug incel thought he was pwning the woke cosmopolitan journalist with. Stanley-Becker contrasts this with a 2018 email from Pappin to another person in which the future vice presidential adviser wrote he was indeed “guilty as charged” of sharing his “quixotic monarchism” with fellow conservatives present.
Now Pappin claims he was merely “poking fun” at “stereotypes of conservative Catholics.” Would love to hear what he’d think if Ilhan Omar joked about declaring Zohran Mamdani as supreme sultan of an American caliphate under strict, Taliban-level Sharia law and that all infidels face beheading.
Asked straight up whether he believes in democracy, Pappin said “Western democracies need to return to their roots in Christian civilization in order to pull back from hyperliberal progressivism.”
He could’ve just said “no.” Sadly Stanley-Becker did not ask Pappin for his take on the legitimacy of her majesty Queen Romana‘s claim to the Canadian throne. That’d at least be a chance to feel out his intellectual consistency in real-time as, although Francis never endorsed the QAnon cult figure and it’s not looking good with Leo XVI either, she is a Catholic and asserts absolute rule.
Nor is there anything about whether Pappin bought a ticket to the Melania “documentary” or if he waited for it to premiere for streaming on Amazon Prime. That’d be another window into his level of commitment to living as subject to the glamorous mastermind of the “Be Best” initiative.
Anyway, the rest of the article is more about Pappin pushing Jaydee hard to help Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban’s survive Sunday’s big election day, with Stanley-Becker at first having set out “trying to understand why President Trump and the people around him are backing Orban’s reelection this month as if he were a swing-state Senate candidate” and ending up with this profile of Pappin.
CORRECTION 4/6/2026 6:41 PM EDT: An earlier version of this article stupidly misstated Pappin’s occupation and referred to him as on the federal payroll on Jaydee vice presidential staff. The evil dork was however present at a tightly-knit October 2025 meeting between Jaydee and Orban.