Faith leaders pray over President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Image via the White House.
President Donald Trump has raised no shortage of eyebrows amidst his ongoing feud with the Pope, most recently declaring that the Pontiff “thinks it's just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon” and that “he's endangering a lot of Catholics.” For his part, Pope Leo keeps arguing that God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them” while calling on Americans “to work for peace and to reject war always.”
“Trump is flailing around on this,” said Sarah Posner, a scholar of religion who spoke with the New Republic’s Greg Sargent about the president’s latest rhetorical assault against the Vatican. “He’s trying to find a way to contest Pope Leo’s message of peace, so he’s coming back at him with this ridiculous claim… If Trump felt confident that he was winning this war of words with Pope Leo, he would not feel compelled to flail around on a right-wing radio show and claim that Catholics were being endangered by their own pope.”
While politicians are normally careful to avoid alienating religious leaders and their followers, Trump has shown no such restraint. This, according to Posner, is because his MAGA supporters have spent years suggesting his divinity and providing fodder for his narcissism.
“He has been told for well over a decade by his most loyal base that God has anointed him to lead America,” she explained. “The idea that Pope Leo is a moral voice for the world — or for Americans in particular — is anathema to Trump. That’s part of his narcissistic personality: because he’s been anointed by God, in his view, somebody else cannot be speaking on moral or ethical issues to Catholics and to non-Catholics around the world.” And because his supporters quite literally view him as a religious figure, “he felt emboldened to portray himself as Jesus in that post a few weeks ago.”
Posner asserted that Trump has also fallen short of the Pope in practical areas beyond the spiritual.
“He’s out of touch with what’s going on in the temporal realm,” she said. “Pope Leo understands what’s going on in the temporal realm more than Trump does. [Trump] seems to not know what’s going on at all with regard to the war, anything that’s going on domestically, the economy and so forth. He leans on the idea that God has anointed him, that he can magically fix America’s problems and America’s standing in the world. And that has become more important to him as he’s lost more control of the politics of the situation and what’s going on with his own administration.”
Evidence of his political floundering, she said, can be found in his growing disapproval among conservative Catholics. While Catholics made up an important part of his 2024 voting base, he has increasingly alienated them with his recent statements about religion and the war.
“You’ve got to figure that the Pope Leo thing is playing a role here,” noted Posner.
At the same time, the president’s support among evangelical Christians has remained strong at 64 percent (even if that is a 5 percent drop since late January).
“For them,” Posner explained, “Trump is a moral and spiritual savior of the Christian nation. These are ideas that resonate far more with white evangelicals than they do with Catholics. What we’re seeing here is: Where do people stand when you have what you believe to be your spiritual leader? In this case, for evangelicals, it’s Trump. And for Catholics, it’s Pope Leo.”
Despite the religious overtones, Posner argued that this fight largely comes down to MAGA’s long-held animosity toward anything perceived as “woke.”
“They see it as a proxy war against wokeism. If you recall, back last year when Leo first became pope… Laura Loomer tweeted ‘woke Marxist pope.’ For the denizens of Trumpian Twitter, that is how they see Leo: that he represents wokeism. Not that he represents Catholics — that he represents this ideology which to them is anathema to Trump and to a white Christian America and all of that. So they have gone so far around the bend that they don’t even really necessarily see it as a religious spat as much as an ideological one in which their guy has to be the victor.”
“His propagandists and his biggest cheerleaders out there in MAGA world want a battle between Trump and the Pope, and they want Trump to defeat him,” said Sargent. “I think Trump is unable to get that the Pope might be seen as a more honest and more pious figure than him.”