It’s rare for Trump to tell a lie so blatant that even he doesn’t seem to believe it. The man is such an excellent fabulist because he is viscerally convinced that his own tales are canonical. But when recently met with outrage from his more pious followers after he posted a picture of himself as Jesus Christ, the president’s wavering explanation was that he had thought the image showed him as a doctor. “There’s a Red Cross worker [in the picture],” he clarified, as he collected a McDonald’s delivery outside the Oval Office.
Such is the tone and context of Trump’s latest war of words with the Vatican, a fight which is turning the sacral into the bizarre, and the profound into the petty. Leo XIV, the first pope to preach in an American accent, said last month that “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” In February, he was invited to America’s semiquincentennial celebrations in July – but declined. The net result is that two of the world’s most powerful Americans, a Chicagoan and a New Yorker, have got into an ungodly spat.
East-west schisms are a seasonal leitmotif of Church history – including across the Atlantic. In his 1898 letter Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae, Pope Leo XIII attacked those Americans who were “fond of novelty” for their disloyal belief in liberalism, free speech and the separation between church and state. Today, the roles are reversed. In Trump’s rote formula, he has called the Pope “WEAK on crime”, “terrible for Foreign Policy” and a “very liberal person”. A Trump official has reportedly threatened Vatican diplomats over their stance on the Iran war by mentioning the 14th-century Avignon Papacy, a rupture that had its origins in a rivalry between Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII. The French king, who had wanted money from the Church to wage war, decreed that “in temporal things we are subject to no man”.
The mutual dislike runs deep. The Pope has quipped of Trump’s Truth Social website that “it’s ironic – the name of the site itself. Say no more.” Archbishop Paul S Coakley, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, has said that “Pope Leo is not his rival; nor is the pope a politician.” Well, that is not how Trump sees it. The occupant of the papal throne is a perfect rival for Trump: you can imagine the president ogling the Pope’s genuinely palatial residences, comparing them to his kitsch skyscrapers. The pageantry, the adulating followers, the global fame, the promise of the divine: all these things matter to him. Trump probably views the Catholic Church – whose name comes from the Latin for “universal” – as some sort of proto-United Nations, a meddling globalist institution with a very fine wardrobe.
Beneath the AI-rendered memes, Big Macs and blasphemous barbs, this episode shows that Trumpland is built upon paradoxes. One of the most curious is that a White House packed with Catholics is so often sparring with the very people they consider God’s representatives on Earth. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Robert F Kennedy Jr and Karoline Leavitt are all Catholic. As are Trump’s cabinet secretaries for transportation, labour and education.
Elite Maga has long been a partly Catholic enterprise, populated with converts. Ross Douthat, the Catholic New York Times columnist, once explained to me that Catholicism is the only religion with the “intellectual heft and firepower that people educated at places like Harvard and Yale or Oxford and Cambridge want. If you’re going to be a Christian in the intelligentsia, it feels like Catholicism or nothing.” And it was not Pope Francis’s flirtation with liberal reforms that drew Maga Catholics, but the Papacy’s historical offerings, the cerebral, ritualistic and traditionalist side to Catholicism.
This ascendance of Catholic converts has not led to smooth relations with the Holy See. “The Catholic Church is wrong,” Tom Homan, Trump’s deportation chief, said last year after US bishops took issue with mass deportations. “I’m saying it not only as a border czar, but I’m also saying this as a Catholic.” Or look at the vice-president’s recent riposte that in things temporal the president is subject to no man in Rome. Steve Bannon, a blithe Catholic, once joked to Jeffrey Epstein about “tak[ing] down” Pope Francis.
The divide is more cosmic than political. In an age where AI might bring about the inorganic evolution of an intelligence higher than humankind, the tech right has split with the Vatican over what this means theologically. The technologist and Vance mentor Peter Thiel recently gave a rendition of his lecture on the antichrist in Rome, only to be pilloried in the Catholic press. Pope Leo has pointedly written about artificial intelligence that “technologies must serve, not replace”.
Trump sits petulantly at the centre of this latest schism. But I suspect it is his Catholic lieutenants who will have to resolve it. For all his contortions at court, Vance clearly cares about ideas and religion. But the president looks unlikely ever to join the Pope’s flock. In the Eighties, at the very university where Thiel was rumoured to have planned to speak, the man who would become Pope Leo XIV wrote in his doctoral dissertation on Augustine of Hippo that there “is no room in Augustine’s concept of authority for one who is self-seeking and in search of power over others”.
[Further reading: After Iran, America may turn against Israel]
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This article appears in the 15 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Angry Young Women
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