The nation's newest campaign finance regulator is inserting himself into the never-ending debate about separating church and state, and causing a stir by accusing Roman Catholic bishops of hiding behind their church's nonprofit status to avoid endorsing candidates.
Trey Trainor, a Catholic who was confirmed for a long-vacant seat on the Federal Election Commission in May, also said in an interview with the conservative website Church Militant released on Wednesday (and a followup interview with the Religion News Service) that separation of church and state is a "fallacy" and that this year's election amounts to a "spiritual war."
None of these comments would appear to have any bearing on Trainor's role overseeing the federal rules that govern the flow of money into politics, but they quickly attracted criticism.
All nonprofits are prohibited by federal law from taking part in political campaigns, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops states in its "Political Activity Guidelines" that this precludes supporting or opposing specific candidates.
Trainor said he believes church officials are motivated by a fear of losing their tax status and the tax dollars that go to Catholic social service agencies.
"The bishops are using their nonprofit status as a shield to hide behind from having to make a decision about who to support," said Trainor, a longtime Republican campaign lawyer in Texas who is the only person President Trump has put on the FEC.
He said the bishops have nothing to fear about their tax status because Trump issued an executive order in 2017 directing the Treasury not to pursue legal action against religious organizations that speak out about politics. The actual impact of that order has been heavily debated but even Trainor agreed that it does not change the law on the books.
Fellow FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub is among those who disputed Trainor's views about limits on religious groups' political activity.
"My colleague is not correct," Weintraub, a Democrat who recently turned over the rotating job of FEC chairman to Trainor, said in a statement to RNS. She said the "statute remains the law of the land and cannot be undone with an executive order."
John Gehring, Catholic program director with the progressive group Faith in Public Life, tweeted that Trainor's comments were a "brazen use of federal power to encourage Catholic leaders to endorse Trump."
While their clergy have avoided endorsing candidates, some Catholics argue that followers of the faith should not vote for Democrats because of their support for abortion rights — most prominently Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who is Catholic.
A Lacrosse, Wis., priest sparked controversy when he posted a video last month saying: "You cannot be a Catholic and a Democrat. Period." His bishop promised last week to "correct" the priest but a bishop in Texas stated his support for what the Wisconsin priest said.
Trainor's comment about the separation of church and state was based on the conservative legal view that the prohibition against government-sponsored religion in the Constitution is not meant to preclude people from expressing and acting on their faith in the public square.
And in his interview with RNS, he expanded on his comment that the election is a spiritual war.
"What we see going on around the country is complete anarchy in places where the rule of law has been completely abrogated," Trainor said. "So it is a spiritual war in that it is striking at the underlying foundations of our constitutional republic. It's getting rid of the Christian moral principles that are the basis of the foundation of the country."
The dustup comes at a time when Trainor is somewhat underemployed. Just a month after he joined the FEC one of his new colleagues resigned, leaving just three commissioners on the job — one short of a quorum, meaning the regulators have not been able to take any enforcement actions during the height of campaign season.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.