Vatican Ditches Protocol, Gives Trump Front Row Seat

The Daily Beast reports:

President Donald Trump, wearing a blue suit in a sea of black, was seated in a prized front-row seat for the funeral of Pope Francis. The seating location will likely be a source of great satisfaction for the famously thin-skinned president, who mercilessly mocked Joe Biden after he was seated in the 14th row at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral in 2022. Based on precedent, Trump was expected to have been seated in the third row, behind anointed monarchs.

The concession on Trump’s seating arrangement represents a significant break from the precedent last employed at Pope John Paul II’s 2005 funeral. On that occasion, Catholic royals took the front row, followed by non-Catholic royals. Non-royal heads of state were then seated behind them in alphabetical order based on the spelling of their countries’ names in French, the official language of Vatican diplomacy.

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