The Fallout From Trump’s Pope Bashing

For anyone old enough to remember the 1980s and Ronald Reagan and Republicans’ success at wooing Catholic voters away from the Democratic Party, which the GOP once lambasted as the home of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,” the contretemps between Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV is particularly stunning. It’s also stunning for Democrats of a certain age who remember being crestfallen that the GOP had wooed so many Catholic voters from the party of Al Smith, John F. Kennedy, and Tip O’Neill. The Reagan Democrats—many of whom were Catholic—were a prize to be treasured, not cast away with a Truth Social post. For his part, Vice President JD Vance, a recent but hardly humble Catholic convert, rendered unto Caesar, saying Leo should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Um, noted.

Michael Novak, the late conservative Catholic scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who devoted much of his career to chronicling and persuading Catholics to move right, is spinning in his grave under Rock Creek Cemetery.

Trump’s irascibility, hot temper, and twitchy thumbs couldn’t keep him from condemningthe pontiff for being “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” after the pope made comments calling for peace in the Mideast—where the United States and Israel launched a war against Iran—and other remarks about political leaders manipulating religion for personal gain. The pope later clarified that the speech containing the last criticism wasn’t directed at Trump.

Not satisfied to frame Pope Leo, a working-class White Sox fan from Chicago, as a liberal elitist, Trump went on to say: “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History. Leo should be thankful because, as everyone knows, he was a shocking surprise.”

Naturally, politicians and pundits hotly debated whether Trump’s dissing of a spiritual leader would alienate Catholics whom Republicans have long courted. The short answer is that no one can be sure, but it could make a difference in close, swing races if there are many, given the potential for a Democratic blowout.

Trump has been quiet lately about the pope, but the pope keeps talking about war and peace, as he did the other day when he met the archbishop of Canterbury.

Still, there are reasons to think the squabble’s effects will be marginal: Persons of all hues have come to discount Trump’s braying, and indeed the 47th president’s popularity is so low because of war, inflation, and general malaise that his digital ripostes directed at Rome probably won’t change things. Besides, after a decades-long fall off in the numbers of Americans identifying as Catholics, it leaves a something of a conservative rump that’s likely to stick by the president. It’s certainly hard to see any scenario in which Trump’s verbal fisticuffs with the Vatican help the unpopular president.

“The limited polling data so far suggest that the president’s support among Catholics had been dropping even before his heated comments about the Pope, while the Pope is very popular with Catholics,” said Mark J. Rozell, the dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released April 21 found that some 60 percent of respondents had a favorable view of Pope Leo, compared with 36 percent who had a favorable view of Trump.

But it’s worth watching some key demographics. After making stunning gains with Hispanic voters in the 2024 presidential election in areas as ethnically and geographically diverse as Cuban-Americans and Puerto Ricans in New Jersey’s Hudson County and Mexican-Americans in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Trump has seen his support crumble with those same voters, something analysts attribute as much to inflation as the administration’s blunderbuss and occasionally deadly deportation roundups of busboys and construction workers. The Catholic swing vote includes 35 million Irish Americans who narrowly voted for Joe Biden in 2020. As Rana Farhoohar noted in the Financial Times,

While Trump pulled many white and Hispanic Catholics to his side in both his presidential victories, the margin of support was only a little over 50 percent—far less than the 80 percent of evangelical voters who favored Trump in 2024. Because Catholics are the largest single religious voting bloc—they represent a fifth of all Americans—even a small swing can make a big difference.

See Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

David E. Campbell of the University of Notre Dame is doubtful about dramatic effects from Trump’s tussle with the Holy See. A professor of American Democracy and director of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative, he said: “There’s no reason to expect that it will have any effect on midterms. Trump is not on the ballot, and it’s a long way from now to November.” Campbell added that things might change if this episode “is part of an ongoing pattern.”

Not only Catholic voters but prominent ecclesiastics seem willing to forgive and forget. Much was made when the extremely online Bishop Robert Barron posted this on X on April 13: “The statements made by President Trump on Truth Social regarding the Pope were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful. They don’t contribute to constructive conversation at all. It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life.”

Barron, viewed warily by progressive Catholics, is on Trump’s religious liberty commission and was at the White House during Holy Week when the president’s spiritual advisor, Paula White-Cain, compared Trump to Jesus. (“You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us.”)

So Barron’s modest criticism was notable, and so was his softening it:

I am very grateful for the many ways that the Trump administration has reached out to Catholics and other people of faith. It has been a high honor to serve on the Religious Liberty Commission. No President in my lifetime has shown a greater dedication to defending our first liberty. All that said, I think the President owes the Pope an apology.

Since then, Barron has engaged in what might be called triangulation. On April 20, he posted this on X: “There is a way past the absurd and deeply divisive ‘war’ between the President and the Pope, which the press has enthusiastically ginned up.” Trump could only be pleased by this passage in that post: “If we understand that the Pope and the President have qualitatively different roles to play in the determination of moral action regarding war, we can, I hope, extricate ourselves from the completely unhelpful narrative of ‘Pope vs. President.’”

One sub-debate during this kerfuffle: Is the president favoring Protestantism over Catholicism and reviving tensions between the two branches of Christianity?

“Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Catholics hate the Protestants,” sang satirist Tom Lehrer in the 1960s in his ditty “National Brotherhood Week.” Since then, partly because of the ecumenism spurred by the Second Vatican Council, American Protestants and American Catholics have increasingly interacted (and intermarried). There has also been convergence in political circles between Catholics and evangelicals over social issues. One of them is 1994’s release of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, a manifesto that opposed abortion and favored “a vibrant market economy.”

Citing American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, a book he co-authored with Robert D. Putnam, Professor Campbell told me, “the old days of tensions we saw in 1960 are a thing of the past.” However, he acknowledged that “embers of anti-Catholicism are still glowing in some evangelical circles.” Douglas Wilson, a pastor whom Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invited to lead a worship service at the Pentagon, has suggested that in a Protestant republic, it would be all right for Catholic churches to ring bells, but “a parade in honor of the Virgin Mary, carrying an image of the Virgin Mary down Main Street, no.” 

In an article in The Catholic Herald, Christopher Hale, an enthusiastic admirer of the pope who worked on Catholic outreach in Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and pens the Letters from Leo newsletter, noted the different ways Trump reacted to complaints about a post with an image showing him as a Christ-like figure and his denunciation of Pope Leo: “Within a day, the Christ image came down. The post mocking our Holy Father stayed up.”

Hale warned: “So let me say to my conservative Catholic friends the thing I have wanted to say for a long time. Your movement has been hijacked by a celebrity populism that puts evangelical grievance ahead of Catholic conscience, and only you can take it back.” Darren Dochuk, a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and co-director of the university’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, told me: “I don’t think Vance will be hurt.” In fact, he added, Vance may have helped himself because “he’s shoring up his credentials with evangelicals.”

Trump’s disparagement of the Pope electrified the punditocracy, and the portrayal of their “feud” (as they were Bette Davis and Joan Crawford) has undeniable entertainment value. This controversy has also engendered a new interest in Catholic “just war” theory.

But it’s also a reminder that Trump sees all politics, all of life, as being about himself. When the cardinals elected Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV in May 2025, Trump saw the puff of white smoke and the election of the first American Pope as a reflection of his eternal glory, not His eternal glory. “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope,” Trump posted about Prevost, “and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

Such vanity is classic Trump and part of the reason why there will surely be fewer Republicans in Congress come November.

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