On Sunday night, aboard Air Force One, President Donald Trump watched 60 Minutes speak with 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 it was a methodical Catholic indictment of the administration’s Iran war and its immigration enforcement. By the time the segment ended, the president could no longer contain his rage.
For weeks, reporters had pressed Trump in press gaggles about Pope Leo’s opposition to the U.S.–Israeli bombing of Iran, and the president refused to engage. Something about watching three American cardinals—on the country’s most-watched news program—credit the first American pope for emboldening their own moral clarity broke the dam. Since Sunday night, Trump has attacked Leo six times in less than 72 hours.
Pay careful attention to the sequence of what Trump did next, and to which posts stayed up and which came down.
Late Sunday, within minutes of the broadcast ending, Trump published a Truth Social tirade calling Pope Leo “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and accusing the cardinals of electing an American pope only “to deal with” him. Minutes after that, he posted an AI-generated image of himself dressed as Christ, healing a sick person.
Evangelical leaders erupted at the Christ image. Within hours, it was gone. The attack on Pope Leo—the post that enraged American Catholics—remains pinned to the president’s feed.
There is only one honest reading of that editorial choice. MAGA Catholics have zero influence over this president. The evangelical half of the coalition can secure a deletion inside a single news cycle, while Catholic grievance earns nothing but the open mockery of their pope, still live on Truth Social as I write this. A coalition that will not defend a pope when the cost is minor was never going to protect the Church on anything that matters.
The president will never say the real reason for his behavior. The rest of us can.
On CNN this week, data analyst Harry Enten laid out the political reality in numbers so lopsided they explain everything. Pope Leo sits at a net plus 34 with the American public. Trump sits at minus 12. That is a gap of nearly 50 points in favor of the pope.
Separate NBC News polling tested Leo against every major public figure in the country, and the pope came out the most popular American alive. “I believe the president is making a humongous mistake,” Enten concluded, “going after the most popular guy 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 with Catholics has cratered to minus 4.
A 24-point collapse among the voters who returned him to the Oval Office is not a rough patch; it is a political emergency. Attacking Leo will not reverse that slide, and every additional post pushes the number down further.
The diagnosis begins with jealousy, but jealousy only explains part of what is happening. The rest comes down to a power Trump has no authority to touch.
Pope Leo leads an institution older than the United States by 1,750 years, with 1.4 billion adherents and a sovereign state recognized by nearly every government on Earth. He is also American. That asymmetry is what the Oval Office cannot answer. A president has no power to fire a pope, indict him, impose a tariff on him, or deport 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 shout it down.
So the president screams and the vice president provides the theological cover. JD Vance has spent the past week on Fox News and at a Turning Point USA rally in Georgia arguing that Catholic bishops who oppose the administration’s immigration enforcement and its bombing of Iran are straying outside their lane.
At the TPUSA event, Vance went further still, telling Pope Leo XIV himself to be more careful when opining on theology. The signal to the MAGA base is clear enough: the new conservative orthodoxy permits open hostility toward Rome whenever Rome inconveniences the regime.
American Catholics should understand what Vance is doing, because he intends to run for president in 2028, and the evangelical primary electorate he needs has never been comfortable with Rome. A vice president who claims the Catholic faith while publicly undermining the Catholic pope is auditioning for a coalition that treats Catholic identity as a liability to be managed.
Conservative Catholics need to hear this directly. The men you trusted to defend the Church inside this administration have already made a choice, and the choice is not the Church.
Pope Leo sees what Trump cannot undo. He holds the moral attention of more Americans than any elected official in the country, and he is using that pulpit to tell the truth about aerial bombardment, mass deportation, and the dignity of the human person. That is intolerable to a president whose authority depends on being the loudest voice in any room.
American Catholics are the largest religious bloc in this country. They should remember every attack on their pope at every signing ceremony, every Rose Garden event, every rally, and every ballot box between now and 2028.
The White House cannot touch the chair of Peter. What it can lose is the Catholic vote that put it there—and the reckoning starts now.
Christopher Hale is the publisher of Letters from Leo, a Substack newsletter covering Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic Church, and American politics. He previously served as a Catholic outreach staffer in the Obama White House. Visit thelettersfromleo.com
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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