By Christopher HALE
On Sunday evening, aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump watched 60 Minutes interview three senior American cardinals close to Pope Leo XIV.
The broadcast was the first joint television interview of Cardinals Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, and Joseph Tobin of Newark, and was a methodical Catholic indictment of the administration’s war on Iran and its handling of immigration policies. When the segment ended, the president could no longer contain his anger.
For weeks, reporters had been pressing Trump — in press conferences — about Pope Leo’s opposition to the U.S.-Israeli bombing of Iran, and the president refused to engage. Something broke the dam in the sight of three American cardinals — on the nation’s most-watched news program — crediting the first American pope for encouraging their moral clarity. Since Sunday night, Trump has attacked Leo six times in less than 72 hours.
Pay attention, carefully, to the order of what Trump did next and which posts remained and which were removed.
Late Sunday, minutes after the broadcast ended, Trump posted a tirade on Truth Social calling Pope Leo “WEAK on crime, and terrible on foreign policy,” and accusing the cardinals of electing an American pope just “to deal with” him. Minutes later, he posted an image of himself — generated by artificial intelligence — dressed as Christ healing a sick person. Evangelical leaders blasted the image of Christ. Within hours, it was gone. The attack on Pope Leo — the post that angered American Catholics — remains on the president’s feed.
There is only one honest way to read this editorial choice. MAGA Catholics have zero influence over this president. The evangelical half of the coalition can get [a post] deleted within a single news cycle, while Catholic resentment gains nothing but open mockery of their pope that continues to be live on Truth Social as I write these lines. A coalition that won’t defend a pope when the cost is small will never defend the Church for anything that matters.
The president will never tell the real reason for his behavior. The rest of us can. On CNN this week, data analyst Harry Enten exposed the political reality through numbers so one-sided that they explain everything. Pope Leo enjoys a net approval rating of plus-34 points among the American public. Trump is at minus-12. That’s a nearly 50-point margin in the pope’s favor. Separate NBC News polls tested Leo against every other major public figure in the country, and the pope came out as the most popular man in America. “I believe the president is making a colossal mistake,” Enten concluded, “by attacking the most beloved man in America.”
Then, Enten turned to the number the White House should actually fear. In November 2024, Trump beat Kamala Harris among U.S. Catholics by 20 points. One year into his second term, his net approval rating with Catholics has fallen to minus four. A 24-point drop among voters who returned him to the Oval Office is not a difficult time; it is a political emergency. Attacking Leo will not reverse that decline, and every additional tweet pushes the number even lower. The diagnosis begins with jealousy, but jealousy explains only part of what is happening. The rest comes from a power that Trump has no authority to touch.
Pope Leo leads an institution older than the United States by 1,750 years, with 1.4 billion followers and a sovereign state recognized by almost every government on Earth. He is also American. This asymmetry is one that the Oval Office cannot address. A president has no power to impeach the pope, impeach him, fine him, or expel him from the Vatican. Leo’s pulpit reaches roughly 17,000 Catholic parishes in this country every Sunday, and the White House has no mechanism to stop it. So the president shouts and the vice president provides theological cover. JD Vance has spent the past week on Fox News and at a TPUSA [Turning Point USA] rally in Georgia arguing that Catholic bishops who oppose the administration’s immigration enforcement and bombing of Iran are stepping outside their comfort zone.
At the TPUSA event, Vance went even further, telling Pope Leo XIV himself to be more careful when giving his opinions on theology. The message to the MAGA base is clear: the new conservative orthodoxy allows for open hostility toward Rome whenever Rome challenges the regime. American Catholics need to understand what Vance is doing, because he is running for president in 2028, and the evangelical primary electorate he needs has never been comfortable with Rome. A vice president who claims to be Catholic while publicly undermining the Catholic pope is testing a coalition that treats Catholic identity as a burden to be managed. Conservative Catholics need to hear this directly. The men who were entrusted to protect the Church within this administration have already made a choice, and the choice is not the Church.
Pope Leo sees what Trump cannot undo. He has the moral attention of more Americans than any elected official in the country, and he is using that pulpit to speak the truth about airstrikes, mass deportations, and the dignity of the human person. This is unacceptable for a president whose authority depends on being the loudest voice in every room. American Catholics are the largest religious bloc in this country. They must remember every attack on their pope — at every signing ceremony, at every event in the [White House] Rose Garden, at every rally, and at every ballot box between now and 2028. The White House cannot touch the throne of Peter. What it can lose is the Catholic vote that put it there — and the accountability begins now. (Euronews.eu)