Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

Trump’s Deranged, One-Way Feud With Pope Leo

He’s finally met someone he can’t bully.

Pope Leo XIV responds to questions regarding President Donald Trump’s recent statements during his flight to Algeria on April 13, 2026.

The Catholic Church’s first American pope, the former Robert Francis Provost of Chicago, now Pope Leo, has emerged as an increasingly vocal and essential voice of global conscience, advocating for peace in the Middle East, attacking the American abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and calling for an end to the mass deportation of immigrants. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invokes God and Jesus in our illegal war with Iran, Leo has retorted that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” He said Trump’s threat against Iran, that a “whole civilization will die tonight” was “truly unacceptable.” He never mentioned Donald Trump by name in his statements, until today, but we all know who the bad guy is, according to Leo’s moral accounting.

Trump has struck back before, but Sunday night he went berserk. “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the president wrote on Truth Social, as though the Pope is a big city mayor or a Senate candidate. He said he doesn’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.” (There was no landslide.) Oh, and he was really bugged by the Pope’s visit with “Obama Sympathizers like David Axelrod” (more on that later). Trump then posted a creepy AI version of himself as Jesus Christ, “healing” a man in........

© The Nation