A sign of how petrified the White House is as Trump flails
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U.S. President Donald Trump with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 16, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
In the middle of the most unpopular war in over 75 years—one that has created a political disaster for the Trump administration—the White House had to use the precious time of its Secretary of State to send him to the Vatican yesterday to do damage control.
Think about that. The Vatican isn’t a country with a military, nor is it some massive trading partner with the U.S. It’s a tiny nation-state.
But its leader nonetheless has influence on people around the world and on millions of Americans, and is currently very popular. He’s not someone you want to mess with, even if he criticizes your policies—you just politely, very respectfully ignore him as presidents have done for generations—because he’s a global spiritual leader and you’re out of your league.
But Donald Trump created a massive self-inflicted wound by attacking Pope Leo to the point where Marco Rubio begged for an audience with the pope to try to smooth it over while at the same time trying not to anger Trump by caving to Leo’s message of peace. As I’ve written, the rift goes back a long time, and included Trump first using the Pentagon to threaten the Vatican, before he ultimately began attacking Leo outright on Truth Social.
Rubio had a lot of mending to do. And didn’t work. By seeking to meet the pope, the administration was already admitting defeat. Trump’s polling is tanking, including among evangelical Christians, and the GOP, already weighed down by all of Trump’s other reckless and unpopular actions, cannot afford even minor slippage among the radical Christian base. But they are beginning to hemorrhage.
We’ve believed for a long time that Trump and the Christian nationalist base—which includes evangelicals and conservative MAGA Catholics—had an impenetrable bond. The evangelical leaders are a band of Christian hypocrites who’d made a deal with the devil in their obsessive quest to stop abortion and strip the rights of LGBTQ people. The religious extremists had no problem with the adulterer-in-chief saying he grabs women “by the pussy,” nor being accused of sexual assault and found liable for rape. They stayed loyal as he assaulted the poor and pushed vicious racism.
No, none of that mattered. But it took an image of Trump as Jesus—which he posted after attacking Pope Leo, the Vicar of Christ—to jolt them suddenly.
Trump’s approval has dropped 15% among evangelical Christians and equally significantly among Catholics. And an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll this week landed like a bomb, as Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump holding himself up as Jesus and Pete Hegseth using Christianity to promote the war in Iran:
Eighty-sevenpercent of Americans have a negative view of Trump’s social media post appearing to depict himself as Jesus, according to the poll. Sixty-nine percent dislikeHegseth praying at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Both expressions drew criticism even from Republicans and Trump voters, unusual at a time of deep political tribalism. Eighty percent of 2024 Trump voters had a negative reaction to Trump’s Jesus post, as did 79 percent of Republicans. On Hegseth’s prayer, more than 40 percent of both groups reacted negatively.
And Leo is very popular, unlike Trump, with a 25-point net favorable margin among Americans overall, which grows to 47 points among Catholics.
So the White House has a big problem, and they thought sending Rubio, who was raised a Catholic until age eight, then baptized a Mormon, only to return to the Catholic church at 12 or 13, but who also attends a Baptist church, to the Vatican. Not exactly a stellar example of a consistent and loyal Catholic, but the Catholic convert JD Vance is now damaged goods, because he’d joined in on Trump’s attacks on the pope while Rubio remained relatively silent. And Rubio had visited Leo twice before, so maybe they thought he had the magic.
But the pope was not about to be smoothed over—or silenced. As Christopher Hale at Letters for Leo writes: “The Vatican’s 120-word readout described what passed between Leo and Rubio as an exchange of views — the formula Rome reaches for when a meeting failed to find common ground.” Leo apparently repeated his stance on the war in Iran, immigration, Gaza, and other issues on which he’s criticized the U.S. government.
Rubio’s gift to the pope also backfired, a crystal football paperweight with the state department’s insignia which Rubio apparently gives everyone on trips—cold and impersonal. (The pope literally give a Rubio an olive branch—encased in wood, with an inscription describing it as “the plant of peace.”)
Again, Rubio’s task was to repair a rift while not bowing in any way and sticking with Trump’s message. That is impossible, and Rubio and the administration likely know that. The best they could get was a good photo-op that gave the appearance of having patched things up.
Fox dutifully covered the meeting and then had the MAGA right-wing Cardinal Dolan—pushed out by Leo as New York’s archbishop and now co-chief chaplain of the New York City Police Department—on to talk about what a great job Rubio did.
But as far as the non-MAGA media, the coverage just brought more attention to Trump’s attacks on the pope, which had continued just hours before Rubio got to Rome, when he told radio host Hugh Hewitt that the pope was “endangering” Catholics by not supporting his war in Iran.
Trump cannot help himself. And just as on every other issue, he’s tearing down a GOP that is deathly afraid of standing up to him, while helping build the Democrats’ wave for the midterms.