It still amazes me how quickly U.S. voters forgot that Donald Trump’s reckless ineptitude plunged the world into death and chaos.

In 2018 he eliminated the White House Pandemic Response Team. In 2019 he gutted a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention office in Beijing that tracked emerging diseases.

Trump was warned about COVID-19 by his own health agencies two months before global lockdowns but ignored those warnings. The U.S. government already had led effective international responses to Ebola, Zika, and SARS. We knew how to do it.

But because Trump did not understand how to govern, more than seven million people died and the world fell into economic and social turmoil.

A pattern of recklessness

That history seems worth recalling in 2026, as the world is again plunged into death and chaos by the same man — not from a virus, but because he began a war with Iran without knowing how to end it.

Military advisors warned Iran would block the Strait of Hormuz. Intelligence officials knew the regime would not collapse and that Iran posed no immediate threat. Yet Trump ignored them all.

His habitual recklessness has returned the world to catastrophe because the act of governing remains a mystery to him. Again, people everywhere suffer and die because Donald Trump cannot govern.

Governing vs. campaigning

I emphasize governing deliberately. Political scientists distinguish between campaigning and governing. Campaigns are partisan and divisive, driven by the logic of winners and losers. Governing is different. It aims at the good of everyone — the common good.

Among Catholics, that idea carries moral weight. The Church teaches that the common good is the purpose of social life, and discerning the common good is the purpose of government. Catholic citizens are meant to bring this moral vision into politics. But that is not quite what U.S. Catholics have done.

Catholic voters and the common good

Fifty-eight percent of U.S. Catholics voted for Donald Trump in 2024 — after his disastrous mismanagement of the pandemic, after his felony convictions, after his promised “mass deportations.”

There was no mystery about what his return would mean. The evidence was plain. Yet too many Catholic voters failed to think seriously about the common good.

In no small way, that failure helped lead to the present war with Iran that consumes the Middle East and imperils the globe.

Often, discerning the common good is complex: the answers are not always clear. But sometimes they are. There has never been much ambiguity about Trump’s disregard for the common good — or anyone else’s good.

A call to soul-searching

While bombs fall in Iran and suffering spreads once more, Catholic voters in the United States have some soul-searching to do. We have played an unsettling role in undermining the very idea of the common good everywhere. We have failed to live out our faith in political life.

Pope Francis called for “a better kind of politics” several times. Now would be a good time for Catholics to commit ourselves to that. It begins with a deeper commitment to the purpose of government and more conscientious fidelity to the common good.

• Steve Millies is the director of The Bernardin Center at CTU. A political theorist who trained at The Catholic University of America, he taught political science for 15 years at the University of South Carolina Aiken before coming to Catholic Theological Union (Chicago, IL) where he teaches courses in history and Catholic social ethics.