HOW IT STARTED: What’s really behind Trump’s clash with the Pope?
Donald Trump’s latest clash with the Catholic Church stunned even the most hardened veterans of culture-war X. According to the President of the United States, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, the conspicuously holy spiritual leader of 1.3 billion people, is “WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy.” He also claimed that, “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”
For commentators accustomed to the fog of modern diplomatic platitudes, such trash talk was the equivalent of a Holy Roman Emperor hurling insults at a medieval pontiff. In the year 963, for example, the Emperor Otto I accused Pope John XII of fornicating with his own niece, “making the sacred palace a whorehouse” while he drunkenly murdered his enemies and consecrated a ten-year-old bishop.
Trump’s rhetoric may have been mild in comparison, but the fact remains that not once in the 250-year history of the United States has a Commander-in-Chief launched a personal attack on the Supreme Pontiff.
—The Spectator, April 27th.
How it’s going:
It took the pope all of what? Two weeks? To completely and totally vindicate Trump’s criticisms of him with this boneheaded move https://t.co/cdx48ITo8A
— Matthew Boyle (@mboyle1) May 3, 2026
This was not a dreamer. Evelio originally came here from El Salvador illegally as a grown man in 1990. He had already been deported at least once before. Soon after his arrival, he was granted TPS because of the civil war back home. Eventually learned English and became a US… https://t.co/K8WurJijH9
— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) May 4, 2026
Deace’s tweet concludes, “Barely 2% of West Virginia is Hispanic. Barely 1% of the state speaks Spanish. This is a purely political appointment by a woke pope trying to shoehorn his open borders agenda into a state Trump has won by 40 points three times. There’s nothing prophetic here, but it’s all shamefully political. An open borders agenda the pope himself isn’t forced to abide by, because Vatican City has strict enforcement policies and walls. This is like if MSNBC picked offices in the church, all the while never allowing the illegals in Martha’s Vineyard where their primetime hosts spend their summers.”