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Donald Trump messed with the wrong pope

Trump fought with Pope Francis before. He’s finding Pope Leo XIV to be a tougher foil.

The White House cannot stop fighting with the pope.

On Tuesday night, Vice President JD Vance — who converted to Catholicism in 2019 — accused Pope Leo XIV of not understanding the Church’s stance on war, saying it was “very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Later the evening, President Donald Trump continued to berate the pope for not supporting his strikes on Iran.

The White House has carried on its feuding with Pope Leo XIV into a fourth day.

It’s not the first time Trump or Vance have argued with a pope, but this time feels different?

For at least three reasons, Leo is turning out to be a much tougher foil for Trump to fight or bully: He has strong conservative support, is speaking up over a divisive issue, and is better at speaking about politics than Francis.

In Leo, though, they’ve found a feistier opponent than they might have expected. He calmly held his ground, hit back with some jabs of his own — he called the Trump-owned platform Truth Social’s name “ironic” — and, perhaps most importantly, has brought support to bear from prominent right-leaning Catholics in the US. The top Senate Republican sounds unnerved. Trump, who is used to quickly cowing nonpartisan public figures into a more conciliatory stance, is not winning this time.

This isn’t the White House’s first run-in with a pope. Trump, and sometimes Vance, were in a long-running conflict with Pope Francis going all the way back to the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when Francis indirectly suggested that Trump “was not a Christian,” because of his focus on “building walls…and not bridges.” Back then, even Trump’s fellow GOP primary contenders, including Catholics like then-Sen. Marco Rubio, backed him up.

As a result, Trump might be surprised by how much stronger the backlash is this time. Even before he doubled down on his initial Truth Social attacks and posted a controversial (and sacrilegious) AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, many of his usual allies, including conservative Catholics, were calling him out.

“The statements made by President Trump on Truth Social regarding the Pope were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” the Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission who is popular with conservative Catholics, said on X — a statement emblematic of right-leaning Catholics’ responses.

Why is the current spat so different? A lot of it has to do with Pope Leo, who starts with a much stronger base of support from American Catholics on the right. After years of sparring with Francis, Trump and Vance may find they’ve messed with the wrong pope this time.

Donald Trump’s pivot to blasphemy

Traditionalist and conservative Catholics in the US trust Leo a lot more than Francis

Since assuming the papacy, Leo has shown himself adept at leveraging the optics of his office, winning over critics, and building popular........

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