The NPR Politics Podcast - The president versus the pope

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

President Trump launched new attacks at Pope Leo XIV over the weekend, calling the religious leader “Weak on Crime, Weak on Nuclear Weapons,” in a social media post. We discuss what’s behind the tensions between the president and the religious leader and whether they could affect Trump’s political support.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, religion correspondent Jason DeRose, and White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House. And we also have NPR's religion correspondent Jason DeRose here with us. Hi, Jason. Hello. Good to be back. Yeah, it's great to have you. And today on the show, President Trump versus the Pope. These two men have not seen eye to eye on many things since Leo the 14th was elected last spring. And that came to a head this weekend. Jason, just get us up to speed on what happened. Many things have happened in the last few days. Well, Sunday evening, Trump published a long post on social media that called the Pope Week, very liberal, saying he was soft on crime and wanted to have nuclear weapons in Iran and really, really quite the tirade. And then after he posted this, he spoke to reporters and here's some of what he said. We don't like it. We don't like a Pope that's going to say that it's okay to have a nuclear weapon. We don't want a Pope that says crime is okay in our cities. I don't like it. I'm not a big fan of Pope Leo. He's a very liberal person, and he's a man that doesn't believe in stopping crime. Now, I will say that the Pope is not a law enforcement official, and the Pope has never said that he wanted Iran to have nuclear weapons.

What he has done, though, is spoken out about peace and about concerns about immigration enforcement policy, which is what I think Trump is saying is about being weak on crime and about why. wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon. I did feel like this whole kerfuffle got a little conflated with another social media post, Danielle, though, right? Where Trump, just describe it for me because I'm not going to do it justice, really. Absolutely. Well, understandably conflated because this happened right after the president posted that tirade against the Pope, he posted an apparently AI-generated image that has since been deleted of himself, looking quite a bit like Jesus. He's wearing these flowing white robes with the red sort of sash or shawl,

things that you often see Jesus depicted wearing. There's glowing light coming from his hands as he heals a man in a bed. There are people sort of looking up at him beatifically, a woman making prayer hands. So a lot of religious imagery here. There was a lot of backlash. I mean, Trump himself has since come out and said, I thought it was depicting me as a doctor. But even, Even many of his supporters got angry about it saying, hey, this sure looks like you're depicting yourself as Jesus or God. And you had prominent supporters like, for example, the commentator Riley Gaines, she's famous for opposing transgender athletes.

She came out and said, God shall not be mocked on social media. So a lot of religious people, even people who like President Trump, really did not like this depiction. This back and forth this weekend did come out of left field. a little bit for people who haven't been following. Can you give me a little bit more context on kind of the different ways that Trump and the Pope have kind of bumped heads? Sure. I would say that this has been brewing or on a simmer for quite a few months now and boiled over on Sunday night. I think that Trump has seen some remarks and actions of the

Pope and Catholic bishops in the United States as opposing him. So for instance, last year, last fall, the U.S. bishops passed a resolution, basically calling into question or calling for greater humanity in the way that the Trump administration has gone about immigration enforcement. So I could see Trump saying that this was Catholics opposing him. Just a few months ago, the U.S. bishops issued a friend of the court brief opposing Trump's birthright citizenship case in the Supreme Court, saying that this is an issue of human dignity. So we have a couple of issues they are related to immigration. And then much more sort of internationally in the last few months with Venezuela and Iran, the Pope has spoken out quite forcefully about peace. The Pope has not said,

I oppose Donald Trump. What he has done is held peace vigils, talked about the importance of peace, talked about the importance of humanity. Last week when Trump was threatening to destroy Iranian civilization, the Pope spoke out very strongly about how this was unacceptable to to talk about the destruction of civilizations and that he, as the Pope, thought it was his message to talk about peace. And if that feels like to the president, he is opposing his policies, that is what is going on. Not that the Pope was saying, I dislike Donald Trump. He's rarely actually spoken his name. That's absolutely right. And what Jason is talking about there, I think, has been one of the most notable features of this back and forth. Because it's, you couldn't characterize this as a feud. Right? Because this is not two men trading blows. This is Donald Trump trying to throw punches. And Pope Leo the 14th operating on an entirely different level. Donald Trump calling the Pope weak on crime and weak on nuclear weapons. It's a language that can sound so funny to your ear because the Pope is not a politician. That is the kind of language you use to strike at a political opponent. But as Jason is saying, here, Pope Leo seems to be really very intentionally making this about Gospels, humanity, peace, about very particular Christian and Catholic values, which is totally a different wavelength than Donald Trump is operating on.

What I hear going on there is this idea that President Trump doesn't quite understand the idea of the election of the Pope. He's not elected for just four years or eight years. Popes often spend decades in office, and they are not interested in popularity polls or any kind of poll for that matter. They're elected once forever, and they don't think of themselves as being weak or strong or having the support of this constituency or that constituency. They never have to stand for re-election. And their timeline is more like eternity than it is the next election cycle, the midterms, or the next presidential election. The idea, I believe, to many of the Cardinals, is this is about God and that there is some sort of holy presence in the election of the Pope. It is very different from how a presidential election works.

That's exactly right. You know, I was in Rome about a year ago covering that election. And one of the things that really struck me was that very idea that this was a religious act, this was a liturgical act, this was a devotional act. Yes, there were conversations about what the church needed. So there were some political considerations, but it is not thought of as a, are we going to do the most popular thing right now? It is, are we going to do the most eternally truthful thing, the most long-lasting, important thing for the Catholic Church. And so the idea that you would conflate the vagaries of American politics with the millennia's old traditions within the Catholic Church of elections, yes, the word election is used in both instances, both politics. and in the church, but they really mean very, very different things. Now, some Americans may

pray about who they're going to vote for, but I don't think they approach it necessarily the same way that the Cardinals were thinking of it as, at least the many Cardinals that I heard talk about it and the several I interviewed when I was in Rome a year ago. I mean, have we seen other members of American politics, Danielle, speak out about this? Or how are other people in American politics talking about this ongoing kind of, I don't want to call it a feud, because as you said, it's kind of a That doesn't seem like exactly the right word for it, but whatever, whatever we want to call it. What's been most notable is especially to watch how Republicans and the conservative commentariat have responded to this. And Donald Trump, as we have said, innumerable times owns this Republican Party.

He has reshaped it the way he has wanted to. And so when there is any sort of vociferous outcry against him that is notable. and there has been that this time. You heard, again, I mentioned Riley Gaines. There's been Megan Kelly, I can think of. There's been any number of people on social media who have, you know, podcasts, who have come out and said very firmly, we don't like that image he posted or we don't like what he is saying about the Pope.

But there was one back and forth that I think is really telling, which is then Donald Trump first deleted, we should say, that Jesus-like figure image that he put up. Then he said in an interview with CBS News, well, maybe I'm not such a fan of Riley Gaines. And she then put up a post on X saying, hey, it's amazing that he deleted that. I thought it missed the mark, but you know, I still support Donald Trump.

I mean, he still owns this party, is what I'm saying. So even if there is this outcry, I'm not sure how long-lasting it's going to be. Right. I mean, I feel like we even saw this. with how the Vice President, J.D. Vance, who is a practicing Catholic, talked about this on Fox News last night. I certainly think that in some cases, it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of, you know, what's going on in the Catholic Church, and let the President of United States stick to dictating American public policy. Yeah, and J.D. Vance also said that he thought that Trump just meant that AI image post as a joke

and that it was just a joke that landed poorly. So J.D. Vance is trying to create some distance between what Trump does and what the Pope does here. But of course, issues of morality, the Pope clearly sees things like war and deportations as moral issues. I mean, he uses the words peace and human dignity in what he talks about. The Pope is speaking to matters of morality. He is not talking about policy. He's talking about morality. But I think that the Trump administration views any critique as talking about politics, whereas, you know, religious leaders, especially the Pope, rarely goes after a person by name. I can rarely think of that happening.

It's much more you would speak to these broad ideas, morality, peace and justice, war, human dignity, things like that. I mean, Jason, how has the Pope responded to these attacks from the President? Well, the Pope said he was not afraid of the president that he is a religious leader, not a political leader, that his focus is on the gospel, on peace and human dignity. Here's some of what the Pope said during his travels in Africa this week. I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the states, to look for just solutions of problems. Too many people are suffering in the world of today. too many innocent people are he filled. Too many innocent people being killed, he says there,

and he is not worried about being viewed as weak or not weak. He views himself as a person who, you know, wants to focus on and draw the world's attention to peace. In fact, just before this happened, Saturday night, the Pope held a global peace vigil. Now, I can see how the Pope could view this as, I am speaking about peace. And in the same week that he held this vigil, he said people should contact their elected leaders and tell them to also focus on peace.

But can you see how President Trump could see a peace vigil as an act against him because of his actions in Iran? All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break more on all of this in just a moment. And we're back. So, Jason, I do feel like this is the first time a U.S. president has called a Pope week on crime, but I'm curious to get deeper than that and just kind of have you. I'm wondering if you could talk me through what a typical relationship between a U.S. President and the Pope has looked like before. Well, you know, I think it's never a perfect fit. And it doesn't really fit into the way that we think of American politics being liberal and conservative left and right. I think of abortion. You could say the Catholic Church is conservative on that issue. But if you think of the death penalty, then you think the Catholic Church is liberal on that issue. poverty, it might be considered liberal on that issue. Peace, it might be considered liberal. So I think that that relationship is never like Democrats always go with the Pope and Republicans always go against the Pope or vice versa. It's been very tense under Trump, given the war in Iran and actions in Venezuela. But it's also, I think, a lot of it has to do with immigration enforcement, which the church for years has been very concerned about.

in part because the Catholic Church in America is a largely immigrant church. You know, huge percentages of the Catholic Church are either themselves immigrants or first generation Americans. You know, I think that over the last, say, 50, 60 years, because of the preeminence of abortion as a political issue, it could seem like the Catholic Church, the Pope and the president, depending on the political party, have either been more or less aligned. But I think it's It's really important to think about this much broader in terms of issues like the death penalty, like poverty, like peace, like health care. So I like to say it's never a perfect fit.

And I would say that the Catholic Church says it shouldn't be because the role of the Pope is to always speak the gospel, which is not going to fit with any one political party. Well, and I feel like this is not the first time that Trump has also butted heads with the Vatican. I remember back in 2016, Pope Francis implied that President Trump or President Trump's policies were not really Christian. Talk a little bit more about the long history just with the Trump administration. Right. Back in 2016, when you recall in the campaign in 2016, Trump spent a lot of his time focusing on building the wall between Mexico and the United States. And at that time, Francis said, a person who thinks only about building. walls wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian.

I think that there's a contrast we can draw here if we want to look at other president's relationships to popes, which is during the George W. Bush presidency, to bring this to another Republican president, a Christian president, and a wartime president, he had an audience with Pope John Paul II during his presidency, and John Paul the second had an anti-war message. And he made some comments that also seemed to be about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. He, you know, disapproving of those abuses. George W. Bush did not react the way that Trump has reacted. He didn't lash out at the Pope.

He actually, after the fact, spoke pretty respectfully of the conversation they had. And I think that that, as Jason is saying, it's true. They don't agree on everything. They have different constituencies that they're thinking. of, so to speak. But there has often been this sort of politeness in the utmost respect that they have from each other. Well, it feels like it also points to just this broader complexity that President Trump has about religion, right?

Yeah. I mean, the Trump relationship with religion is really complicated because, of course, you know, he's talked about attending a church, attending Norman Vincent Peel's church in Manhattan. You know, as president, as a public figure, he has never really even tried to portray himself as a regular churchgoer, as a very observant Christian. I mean, there was even this one time on the campaign trail in 2016, speaking at the Christian Liberty University, when he attempted to refer to Scripture, and instead of calling the book of the Bible 2nd Corinthians, he called it two Corinthians, which seemed to betray a lack of familiarity with the good book. But Trump, his relationship with religion in politics is very much that religion is about politics.

He has said before that I don't know how someone who's Christian can vote Democratic. And he also, when he talks about Christianity, he's talked about defending it from, you know, the politically correct Crowder, from the liberals or from whatever opponent he is setting up. So when he brings up religion, it is not often in the context of belief and follow. following certain values, it is very often about politics and how you're voting. And I would say that what he's used to is hearing only from the people of faith who agree with him, which is very different from what many other religious groups are saying about him. But I'm not sure that that sort of penetrates his worldview quite often. And I think that, you know, it's one thing of, say, the head of the Episcopal Church in the United States speaks out against him,

which he probably doesn't pay great attention to. It's another thing when the Pope, leading a billion and a half Catholics around the world, starts to critique his policies that he might start to pay attention in part because he might view himself on that same global stage where he might not for a sort of smaller church leader. But also, they're both Americans. And I think that he has made a lot of this idea that like, well, I'm the American president and he's the American Pope. But the Pope has really arched his back against his idea. He's not the Pope of the Americans. He's the Pope of the Global Catholic Church who happens to have been born in the Chicago area.

Now, I will say that almost every other time we've heard popes speak, we hear them through a translator. They're speaking Polish or they're speaking Spanish or Italian or sometimes even Latin. But when Pope Leo speaks in English, I think it resonates very differently with an American public to hear this guy

with a Chicago accent talking about peace, talking about human dignity. You have the ear of the American people, quite differently when you're speaking English to them than when you're speaking through a translator. So that is another thing that I think Trump is sort of trying to reconcile with or deal with these days. He himself, Trump, is speaking in English to the American people, but so is the Pope. And to bring this once more to American politics, Catholicism is the largest Christian denomination in the U.S. right now. So that is also a consideration that Trump may have in his head.

Right. It's about 20% of the U.S. is Catholic. U.S. is Catholic. And I mean, the evangelical Christian population polls show constantly that this is one of the more durable demographic groups as part of Trump's base. But I guess I wonder if this conflict could endanger that support that has been pretty enduring from devout Christians. I generally don't think so. When we're talking about white evangelicals, when pollsters ask people, do you identify as evangelical? I would argue that at this point, the word evangelical in a political context has lost a lot of its theological meaning. White evangelicals at this point, it's a phrase

that just carries with it a connotation of political conservatism. And in the Donald Trump era, a connotation of being mega. That Venn diagram, it's not a perfect circle, but it's close to being a circle. But at any rate, in terms of whether this threatens his support, ever since Trump came onto the political scene. There have been questions by pundits, people outside the white evangelical world of. Are any of Trump's actions, whether it's foul language, his treatment of women, alleged or otherwise, deportations? Will any of this turn Christians off? And that just has not happened yet, at least, not among his white evangelical base. They love him. They view him as anointed and even protected by God, and that feeling really intensified after the

assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024. A line you hear often from his supporters is, well, God has always used imperfect people and Trump is imperfect, but that's just what God does. So I would be hard pressed to imagine what blasphemous or sacrilegious thing Trump could do to alienate them because they just really stick with him so closely. The one thing I would add to that, though, is that Trump is weak right now politically. And a lot of the people who voted for him who have approved of him in the past are not diehard mega. So if you see his low approval, the Iran War, which is not popular, the failure of peace talks, high gas prices, tariffs,

any number of things that are not terribly popular, you might also look at his words against the Pope. You might look at this Jesus image. And that might add, if you are a person of Christian faith, that might add in your brain to this drip, drip, drip, of things you do not appreciate about the president. So I can see this being another marginal thing, the drip, drip, drip of do I still like this president? Yes or no?

I would also point out that, you know, while this might not change the needle for white evangelicals, this might change the needle for Catholics who were much more evenly divided during the past election. It wasn't exactly 50-50, but it was pretty evenly divided a little bit more for Trump this time. But often Catholics vote the way the whole country votes by a few percentage points one way or the other. So if you're talking about a president who is down right now in the polls, it could make a difference among the 20% of Americans who are Catholic who do vote and who might be turned off because of this. And even for those Christians who support Trump and might be upset by some of the things he said or done, he has made religious freedom central. to his agenda also, he has made appointing judges that agree with Christians on issues like abortion, for example, also central to his presidency and those constituents like that. All right. Well, we can leave it there for today. Thanks so much for joining us, Jason.

Happy to be here. Tomorrow on the show, we'll talk about California, a governor's race that's shaken up by Congressman Eric Swalwell's resignation. Do not miss it. Hit the follow button to listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.