It’s been a strange year for presidential-papal relations as the Trump administration has spent the past several months antagonizing the Pope. Now in the latest installment of this unholy saga, a prominent MAGA pastor has declared that Trump has a “better understanding” of the Bible than the head of the Catholic Church.
Appearing on Fox News on Saturday, firebrand Pastor Robert Jeffress took issue with the Pontiff. While he did call the Pope a “good man” who is “sincere in his faith,” he went on to say that he is “sincerely wrong when it comes to Iran.”
“God created the church and government for two distinct purposes,” asserted Jeffress, saying it was the job of the former to bring people to Jesus and of the latter to protect citizens. “The great irony is it looks like President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches about the rule of the government than the Pope has.”
While he claims to be a Christian, Trump is famously ignorant of the Bible, having made repeated gaffes when asked about his scriptural views. Even so, his political movement has been largely driven by the support of Christians, particularly evangelicals.
But in recent months, many of Trump’s religious followers have had a crisis of faith due to his attacks on the Pope.
The conflict took root in January, when, during a closed-door meeting at the Pentagon, Trump officials told a representative of the Vatican that “America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.” A Trump official then “reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.”
Not long after news of that confrontation emerged, as the war with Iran spiraled out and Defense Secretary began delivering violent prayers in which he asked God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” the Pope responded by saying that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.'" This kicked off a proper beef between the president and the Pope, with the former railing that the latter is “weak on crime” and “catering to the radical left,” who, for his part, continued to make veiled references to the importance of peace.
This culminated with a post from Trump bearing an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, a move that was so broadly disliked that even some of his own followers began calling him the Antichrist. A whopping 87 percent of Americans say they disapprove of Trump’s Jesus post, including 80 percent of his own 2024 voters.
But Jeffress has stuck with Trump through it all, rejecting the Pope’s position and accepting whatever the president suggests.
“He told us that Iran was within weeks of getting a powerful weapon that would destroy Israel, much of the Middle East, and could bring great harm to America, and he had no choice but to act,” said Jeffress.
According to U.S. Intelligence, however, Iran was nowhere near developing nuclear weapons before the war began.