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The Real Reason Trump Hates Pope Leo: He Wants to Take His Place

Forget being a regular king. Trump is clearly expressing a not-so-secret desire to be a spiritual monarch.

Donald Trump’s harshest critics accuse him of being an aspiring king, but recent religious controversies make clear that the president could have even higher ambitions: to be a spiritual monarch and perhaps even the King of Kings.

In early March, Trump asserted that he should have a say in picking the replacement of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had been assassinated by the US as part of the regime-change war Trump launched. Trump’s desire to name a new ayatollah might seem absurd, but it is part of a larger pattern of using US military might to subdue rival regimes and religions into submission.

In January, the Pentagon requested a meeting with Cardinal Christophe Pierre—the Vatican’s then-ambassador to the US—for a meeting. The Free Press reported that Pierre had to endure “a bitter lecture warning that the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants—and that the [Catholic] Church had better take its side.” According to The Free Press, one Pentagon official even reportedly brought up the historical example of the Avignon Papacy, a 14th-century crisis where for nearly seven decades successive popes were forced to live in France under the thumb of the French crown.

Other reporting on the meeting cast some doubt on whether the Avignon Papacy was mentioned, although not definitively. Whatever the case, the January meeting was clearly an attempt to intimidate the Catholic Church, and specifically Pope Leo XIV. It fits into a long pattern of Trump and his allies trying to cow the Vatican. Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, Francis, was intensely hated by the MAGA right, who often derided him as a “woke pope” for his criticism of environmental degradation and economic inequality. In 2019, Steve Bannon, the former Trump advisor, allied with the late Jeffrey Epstein, a power broker and notorious convicted pedophile, in efforts to undermine Pope Francis and bolster traditionalist opposition factions inside the church.

Leo has disappointed right-wingers who hoped for a return to the hard-line conservatism of Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI. Born in the United States, Leo........

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