Why MAGA feels so threatened by the Pope: conservative

After returning to the White House in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to defend Christianity and appointed evangelical Pastor Paula White to head the new White House Faith Office. Christianity, Trump claimed, was under attack during former President Joe Biden's four years in office. But in fact, Biden is known for being a devout Catholic and isn't shy about discussing his faith.

Trump's message is aimed primarily at a specific area of Christianity: far-right white fundamentalist evangelicals. And he has plenty of critics among Catholics and Mainline Protestants.

Some of the criticism is coming from 70-year-old Robert Francis Prevost, AKA Pope Leon XIV, a vocal opponent of Trump's war against Iran. Trump is angrily lashing out at the Pope, while Vice President JD Vance — a convert to Catholicism who was raised Protestant — is saying that Leo should stick to theology and stay away from politics.

Trump, in an April 12 post on his Truth Social platform, wrote, "Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy…. Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician. It's hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it's hurting the Catholic Church!"

In an article published by The Bulwark on April 16, Never Trump conservative Bill Kristol lays out some reasons why MAGA Republicans are so resentful of Pope Leo.

"According to (White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen) Miller, in the real world, it's power — not justice — that matters," Kristol explains. "The 'iron laws of the world since the beginning of time' rule, and the essence of those iron laws is that might makes right…. That Trumpist view — that power is to be worshiped, that might makes right —can be dressed up in religious garb, whether through the unctuous sophistry of JD Vance or the grotesque weaponization of faith by Pete Hegseth. But the costume clearly doesn't fit. The claim that we have no choice but to follow 'the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,' indeed that we should exult in doing so, is fundamentally at odds with a Judeo-Christian world view…. Of course, if the Trumpist claim is right, if those iron laws since the beginning of time are all-powerful, then the Declaration of Independence doesn't matter either."

Kristol adds, "Whatever human rights we may think we should respect don't matter. The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must."

The "might is right" mindset, according to Kristol, explains "why the Trump Administration and its surrogates have chosen to pick a fight with Pope Leo XIV."

"They're attacking Pope Leo not simply because he's the Pope, but because he's the first American pope," Kristol argues. "He's a threat to their ambition to change the meaning of America. And he's popular here in America. A poll last month found that 42 percent of Americans had a positive feeling about the Pope, while only 8 percent had a negative view. Half said they were neutral or not sure."

Kristol continues, "If you're Trump, and you see a critic with those numbers, a critic who can command attention and who shows no signs of being afraid of you or of shrinking from a fight, you want to weaken him. You want to try to drive up his negatives and to drag him down into the polarized political mud in which all other American public figures exist. So you try to reduce him to just another political actor — to a radical leftist who's 'WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy'…. The Trumpists fear Pope Leo not simply because he's defending the views, and speaking to the communicants, of his church. They fear him because he's defending the principles, and speaking to the citizens, of his country. Of our country."