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The regime's attacks on Pope Leo backfire spectacularly
They're expose the broken, cult-like nature of Trumpism.
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President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have picked a fight with the pope, and things are getting really weird.
It isn’t just the spectacle of Vance lecturing Pope Leo XIV about theology, though that is indeed a car crash you can’t look away from. It’s also that the man who declared he is “the most pro-faith and pro-religious liberty president in American history” is furious to find out that Catholics, a group he counted on as being not only reliable conservative voters but one that was completely aligned with his worldview, do not agree with his every move.
Now, both men are caught in a trap of their own making.
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They’ve spent years attempting to shove religion into the public sphere, but only their violent, Christian nationalist version. Thus far, that’s been a relatively successful project, even as it openly excludes any religion outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. Dismissing the views of Muslims or Sikhs or Buddhists is easy for Trump and Vance and their followers. But insisting that the pope is out of line is different, and requires Trump and Vance to twist themselves into knots.
While Trump has chosen to attack the pope in his traditional manner — all bluster on Truth Social, vague accusations of being a communist, antifa, whatever — Vance has taken another approach: the pope should shut up, because he knows theology better.
Better than the pope, that is.
Christ-splaining to the [checks notes] pope
Perhaps because he’s made his conversion to Catholicism such a central part of his public persona, Vance seems genuinely confused to learn that Pope Leo XIV’s understanding of Catholic theology does not align with his own. He’s tried so hard to get the pope to just hang with him, so certain that his status as a co-religionist would woo the literal head of a church with roughly 1.4 billion members worldwide.
What Vance and Trump don’t seem to grasp is that the pope’s statements are, to be frank, relatively bog-standard expressions of Catholic theology regarding immigrants and war. It just doesn’t happen to be the Catholic teaching that Vance likes.
An important caveat here: you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to the Catholic Church writ large, which has a lengthy history of harm, from covering up the rampant sexual abuse of minors by priests to the horrifying treatment of indigenous children in Catholic residential schools to spending vast sums to make abortion illegal to its continuing opposition to same-sex marriage. And there’s no question that the Catholic Church has been responsible for its