Trump inauguration: Bishop seeks mercy on vulnerable immigrants, trans children
Her prayers were greeted with mockery and sour-faced silence by the new POTUS, his family, friends and colleagues

During President Donald Trump's inaugural prayer service, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde took the bull rather pointedly by the horns, calling on the 47th US president to have mercy on gay, lesbian and transgender children and on the hardworking, tax-paying immigrants.
"In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” the Bishop prayed.
The Bishop’s plea seemed a direct response to Trump’s Day 1 executive orders — trying to end birthright citizenship and recognising only two genders in the US.
“For we were all once strangers in this land,” she reminded the president and his entourage, noting that the Bible exhorts Christians to be merciful to strangers.
Even as she made the point that the vast majority of immigrants without the “right papers” were not ‘criminals’ but “good neighbours” and that some of the children fearful of separation from their parents are born into republican families as well as democratic and independent ones, Trump, J.D. Vance and their families, colleagues and supporters sat sour-faced — except the bit where ‘praying for the vulnerable’ had Melania Trump and Vance smirking and outright laughing.
They footnoted her prayer with a resounding silence rather than an “Amen!”
Trump would later tell a reporter: "Not too exciting, was it. I didn't think it was a good service. No...They can do much better."
He would go on, on 22 January, to state on his own platform Truth Social, ”The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater," Trump wrote. "She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.... She and her church owe the public an apology!"
His colleague Mike Collins would call for putting Bishop Budde on the deportation list.
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