Not long after Renee Nicole Good was shot by ICE, and Trump outright lied about her killer being the actual victim (the killer was, in this alternate reality posted on “Truth” Social, run over, in the hospital, and in very bad shape), I played D'Angelo's “Devil’s Pie.” Produced by DJ Premier and released in 1998, the dusty, bass-dragged, soul-simmering track concerns desperate people who are reduced to crime or selling their bodies for a few bucks—a slice, and a very slimy one, of the “devil's pie.” But the track is deeply sympathetic. D'Angelo is not condemning but describing the raw realities of hood capitalism. These people might be fallen, but they are not irredeemable. They might be living in hell, but they haven’t sold their souls.

Now let's turn to the matter of a devil's bargain. We could get all fancy and talk about Goethe's Faust, which presents the devil’s bargain in a Cartesian and Laplacian universe of intellectual mastery—no, that won't do. Let’s instead keep it real simple and locate its meaning in a 1987 film that mixed horror and noir, Alan Parker's Angel Heart. What happens in this movie: A private detective, Harry Angel (played by Mickey Rourke—an ’80s actor who is going through something right now), is hired by a rich man, Louis Cyphre (played by the only Hollywood actor to inspire an ’80s pop hit, Bananarama’s “Robert De Niro’s Waiting”), to investigate a mystery that needs, for contractual purposes, to be cleared.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Harry doesn’t know he is actually possessed by a swing-era crooner, Johnny Favorite, who sold his soul to the devil to become famous and, when the time came to pay off his stardom, tried to get out of the deal by raw-eating the heart of a fresh World War II soldier, Harry Angel. Along the way, Johnny Favorite murders people in a desperate effort to break the bargain. In the end, Louis Cyphre—yes, as in Lucifer, aka Satan, aka the Dark Prince—reclaims what he owns, what was sold in the bargain, Favorite’s soul.

Now, this movie is about a man who cannot be redeemed. Even God can't help Harry. Those who went for a slice of the devil's pie, however, are not totally lost. God is still there for them: on the street, in the jacked car, in the prison cell. D’Angelo knows you still got soul; knows that God will not throw stones but instead wash your feet. Even the tax collector is not in the abyss, not like Johnny Favorite, someone who, by their own choice, is forever out of the reach of God's love and forgiveness.

If Minneapolis shows us one thing, it is the irretrievability of those who support a president who is bombing people on boats, who is kidnapping people from city streets, and who is now killing people for practicing their rights as American citizens. ICE agents are bats right out of hell. Their contribution to society as a whole is next to zero. They are even attacking and traumatizing children.

And it doesn’t get better: The suppressed materials of the Epstein Files make it clear that MAGA has sold its soul to the horrors upon horrors they describe. You are in there now and forever. You will never escape this bargain.