The Episcopal bishop who stood at a pulpit during Donald Trump's second inauguration and asked him, out loud, in front of God and everyone, to have mercy on immigrants and LGBTQ+ people is stepping down. Mariann Budde announced she will resign as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington on June 3, 2028, pending the ordination of her successor. Trump, for his part, demanded an apology. He's still waiting.
What She Actually Said
Let's go back to the moment, because it deserves to be remembered clearly. Days after Trump's second inauguration, Budde delivered a sermon in which she asked the new president directly to consider "gay, lesbian and transgender children" from families of all political backgrounds, some of whom, she said, "fear for their lives." She also asked him to show mercy to immigrants living in the country without documentation.
This was not a scream into a megaphone outside a campaign rally. It was a sermon. At a church service. The kind of thing that has happened after inaugurations for generations. Budde did not throw anything, call anyone a name, or make a single factual claim that was wrong. She asked a man with enormous power to be kind to people who are scared of him. That was the whole thing.
Trump Did Not Take It Well
According to The Guardian, Trump fired back on social media, calling Budde "nasty in tone" and accusing her of dragging her church into politics "in a very ungracious way." He declared she was "not very good at her job" and demanded that she and her church apologize to the public.
Take a second with that. The man who has spent a decade turning every institution he touches into a vehicle for his own political brand, who held a Bible in front of a church for a photo after federal officers cleared peaceful protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, accused a bishop of being ungracious. The audacity required to type those words is almost architectural in its scale.
She Had History With Him Before That
The inauguration sermon was not the first time Budde had publicly squared up with Trump. During his first term, she published an opinion piece in the New York Times calling out that infamous Lafayette Square moment, when federal officers forcibly dispersed a crowd of demonstrators so Trump could walk to St John's Episcopal Church and hold a Bible aloft for cameras.
Budde wrote, as The Guardian reports, that Trump had "used sacred symbols to cloak himself in the mantle of spiritual authority, while espousing positions antithetical to the Bible that he held in his hands." Which is, whatever your politics, a pretty precise description of what happened. The man held a book he demonstrably does not read in front of a church he had never attended to suggest a connection to faith he has never credibly demonstrated. She said so. Out loud. With her name on it.
Who She Actually Is
Budde is 66 years old and, per The Guardian, the first woman ever to serve as the spiritual leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. She has held the role since 2011, when the diocese elected her. Before that, she spent 18 years as the rector of St John's Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. That is a long time doing the actual work of running congregations and caring for communities.
Her resignation letter, which The Guardian has reviewed, is generous and measured in a way that must have taken some restraint given the circumstances of the last couple of years. "I have not come to this decision lightly or alone, and it will not be easy to say goodbye to the diocese I love," she wrote. She committed to doing everything in her power to ensure the diocese is healthy for her successor. She asked for prayers for "the one God is preparing to serve as the tenth bishop of the Diocese of Washington." It is, frankly, a gracious letter. Someone should tell Trump what those look like.
The Timeline From Here
According to The Guardian, Budde's standing committee will outline the transition steps next week, including the appointment of two committees to begin the work of finding her replacement. She will leave her post on June 3, 2028, after the new bishop is consecrated and ordained.
That gives the diocese roughly a year and a half to run the process. It is not a hasty exit. Budde has led the diocese for fifteen years by the time she walks out the door, a tenure that happened to include two Trump terms, a global pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the national reckoning that followed, and one extremely viral inauguration sermon. That is a lot of history for one bishop to have shepherded a community through.
The Dingo Take
She did her job. That is the whole verdict, stated plainly. Mariann Budde saw a powerful man doing harm to vulnerable people, said so clearly and publicly using the platform her job gave her, absorbed the fury of the most powerful political figure in the country, and then continued leading her diocese for another two years before deciding, on her own terms and her own timeline, that it was time to hand the work to someone else.
Trump called her nasty and said she owed the public an apology. The public, by and large, disagreed. The clip of her sermon went everywhere. People sent her standing ovations from their couches. Because what she did, stripped of all the noise, was stand in a church and ask a man surrounded by power and money and armed agents of the state to please be a little kinder to the people most afraid of him. The fact that this read as controversial in any corner of American life tells you considerably more about that corner than it does about Budde.
She is not going anywhere immediately. She has a diocese to prepare for transition, a successor to help usher in, and roughly eighteen months of work still to do. But when she goes, she will leave having said the true thing out loud at a moment when a lot of people with platforms found reasons to stay quiet. That is not nothing. That is, depending on your theology, more or less the whole point.
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