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.
