Trump’s attack on a pope he cannot control is really a ‘declaration of impotence’
After white smoke in the rafters of the Sistine Chapel signaled the rise of a new pope last May, President Donald Trump heralded the first U.S.-born leader of the Catholic Church by declaring the choice “a Great Honor for our Country.”
But now the two most influential Americans on the world stage — Trump, the leader of 340 million Americans, and Pope Leo XIV, with a global flock of 1.4 billion Catholics — are locked in a struggle for hearts and minds that harbors risks for both men.
After a pair of Trump posts Sunday on Truth Social — one, a rambling attack against Leo, and the other, a Christ-like depiction of the president — Leo responded Monday onboard a papal flight to Algeria, telling journalists he had “no fear of the Trump administration.”
“I don’t want to get into a debate with him” the pope said before appearing to do just that by adding: “I don’t think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing.” Later, reflecting on one of Trump’s missives on Truth Social, he said: “It’s ironic — the name of the site itself. Say no more.”
Veteran observers of the Catholic Church say an open war of words between a pope and a U.S. president is unprecedented.
“You have to jump back to the Middle Ages when kings and emperors were shouting against the pope in Rome and calling him false,” said Marco Politi, a longtime Vatican watcher and author. “There is just no other recent example like this.”The risk of a direct confrontation with a sitting pope, observers say, is perhaps greater for Trump — who is taking on not only the first pope born in the United States, but a spiritual touchstone for an important, core group of Republican voters: conservative White Catholics. And he is doing so in a midterm congressional election year.
Trump is also no longer facing Pope Francis, the Argentine-born pontiff whom many conservatives viewed as having the instinctive anti-American bias of the Global South. Rather, Trump is taking aim at a White Sox-loving, South-Side-of-Chicago boy made good who is delivering his critiques with the quiet and unassuming presence of a small-town parish priest, and who now speaks with the moral authority of a pope.
“When political power turns against a moral voice, it is often because it cannot contain it,” the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, undersecretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, wrote on X. He added, “In this sense, [Trump’s] attack is a declaration of impotence.” [Continue reading…]