Trump picked a fight with the Pope: The one person he can’t fire, can’t outbid, and can’t outlast
Trump’s version of the American Dream says the winners are being stolen from: by immigrants and globalists, and by institutions that no longer serve the people who built them. His opponents mostly argue within the same framework, insisting the system should be fairer but still organized around the same ideals. Pope Leo XIV is the first American pope, and is also the only person in the world with the moral authority, the biography, and the institutional platform to critique the MAGA vision of America on its own terms, using its own words.
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Trump chose to pick a fight with the Pope in a way that his own base argue is against the very things he preaches. His approval rating has fallen to 34% in Pew’s latest survey, the lowest of his second term. The Iran war he launched has closed the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted 20% of global oil supplies, pushed gas prices past $4 a gallon, and driven inflation back to 3.3%, the highest since May 2024, with economists warning it could reach 4.2% by year’s end.
The IMF has flagged global recession risk. A majority of voters, 53%, now call the Iran military action a failure, and Democrats hold a 10-point lead on the generic congressional ballot heading into the midterms. An AP poll puts Trump’s approval on the economy at 30%. And into this steps an American pope with a 42% favorable rating and an 8% unfavorable rating, a net favorability 34 points better than the president’s, making the moral case against the very war that is producing the economic pain. The reason why he remains so untouchable despite Trump’s attacks is that he embodies the same thing Trump is: an American.
Iran challenged Trump’s hold over MAGA like no other conflict, and so Leo has like no other figure. Every other critic Trump has faced, from Democrats to foreign leaders, could be dismissed as partisan, but Leo is from Chicago and leads the faith Trump’s own vice president converted to. Now he runs the oldest institution on earth from a sovereign city-state smaller than most golf courses.
When President Donald Trump built the MAGA political movement, he used a very specific version of the American Dream: nationalist, zero-sum, culturally defensive, built on accumulation and dominance. Leo tends to counter that: same country and same institutions but a completely different approach to what the United States should do.
“He’s a believer in the United States, and what he’s saying is also, indirectly, trying to correct where the United States is going,” Massimo Faggioli, professor of historical and contemporary ecclesiology at Villanova University, told Fortune. “He’s credible when he talks about America in ways that an Italian, a German, or a Pole couldn’t be.”
Two American dreams in conflict
Born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, Pope Leo XIV previously served as a missionary in Peru before becoming the first North American pope. For years, the American Catholic right dismissed Vatican criticism of U.S. politics as the meddling of out-of-touch European clerics or a Latin American pope with an anti-American chip on his shoulder. Now, that argument is no longer available.
Christopher White, associate director at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center and author of Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy, sees Leo as genuinely uninterested in partisan politics, and genuinely committed to using his office as a moral platform. “He’s standing on the shoulders of many popes before him who have seen one of the chief responsibilities of their office as being a peacemaker. He didn’t go looking for a fight with the president. The president is certainly the one who escalated this.”
“He looked at the camera a few weeks ago and said to Catholics in the U.S., ‘Call your lawmakers. Tell them to reject war, reject violence.’ He does want there to be a political outcome,” White told Fortune, “but he doesn’t want to be perceived as partisan.”
The last pope, Francis, could be filed away by American conservatives as an anti-American Latin American leftist, but Leo can’t. “Francis always had a very skeptical, cynical view of the United States, as an Argentinian,” said Faggioli. “Pope Leo doesn’t have that. He comes from Chicago, which for U.S. Catholic history has a very special place. He has purified his vision of the United States while being in Latin America for so long. He’s really a man of many worlds, especially of the Americas.”
“With an American Pope, you cannot say the Vatican is run by corrupt Europeans. There’s one of us. Pope Leo has limited their options.”
Contradictions in MAGA Catholicism
When Donald Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV on social media this spring, calling him “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy,” he handed his critics an obvious line: the President of the United States just picked a fight with the pope. But the more interesting story, according to the scholars who study both Catholicism and American politics, is why this particular pope is s