“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Henry II was reputed to have muttered. His knights heard his pointed remark as an order. They rode to confront Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke too freely and critically about the king. When they failed to intimidate him into silence, they murdered him. Absolute rule demanded absolute fealty.

The representative of the holy trinity could not be allowed to stand above the unitary executive in 1170.

Donald Trump believed that the conclave of the college of cardinals elected Robert Prevost as Pope Leo XIV on 8 May 2025 for the gratification and exaltation of Donald Trump. “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope,” Trump posted on 12 April this year, “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.”

Leo wears the shoes of the fisherman, not the black Florsheim models that Trump insists his underlings wear. As the Iran war continued, the pope called for peace. Trump felt betrayed, aggrieved and victimized that the pope would not kneel at his throne. To his horror, Trump could not stop the moral censure of his policies from mass deportations to the Iran war. As Trump floundered in the strait of Hormuz, the pope’s condemnation was especially damning and humiliating.

“Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!” said Leo on 11 April. “True strength is shown in serving life.” Leo’s condemnations fell upon Trump harder than courtroom verdicts. There was no higher appeal. Trump could not wield the pardon power on his own behalf. The threatened withdrawal of federal contracts or security clearances could not make Leo cower as if he were a law firm or university. Trump’s cancellation of a grant to a Catholic charity in Miami ministering to immigrant children only highlighted his cruelty. No tariff could leverage Leo. Unlike his predecessor Francis, he could not be dismissed as an out-of-touch alien. Leo, who holds a doctor of canon law degree from the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas in Rome, is also Bob from the south side of Chicago, a White Sox fan.

The most despised American in the world cannot bear the judgments of the most admired American in the world. Trump’s wounded pride has festered from envy into malice. Trump’s expectation of submission dashed, he flew into a fury, but his rage could not overawe Leo. He treated the pope like a politician who would crumble before his bluster. “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” he tweeted. Trump exposed his own irreparable fragility: “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,........

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