The Real Reason Trump Hates Pope Leo: He Wants to Take His Place

Donald Trump’s harshest critics accuse him of being a would-be king, but recent religious controversies make it clear that the president may have even higher ambitions: to become a spiritual monarch and perhaps even the king of kings.

In early March, Trump said he should have a say in choosing the replacement for Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated by the United States as part of Trump’s war of regime change. Trump’s desire to appoint a new ayatollah may seem absurd, but it is part of a broader pattern of using American military power to subjugate rival regimes and religions.

In January, the Pentagon requested a meeting with Cardinal Christophe Pierre, then the Vatican ambassador to the United States. The free press reports that Pierre had to endure “a bitter lesson warning that the United States has the military might to do whatever it wants – and that the [Catholic] The Church had better take his side. According to The free pressa Pentagon official even mentioned the historical example of the Avignon Papacy, a 14th-century crisis during which for nearly seven decades successive popes were forced to live in France under the thumb of the French crown.

Other reports of the meeting cast doubt on the mention of the Avignon papacy, but not definitively. Regardless, the January meeting was clearly an attempt to intimidate the Catholic Church, and specifically Pope Leo XIV. This is part of a long pattern of Trump and his allies trying to intimidate the Vatican. Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, was intensely hated by the MAGA right, who often called him a “woke pope” for his criticism of environmental degradation and economic inequality. In 2019, Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, allied himself with the late Jeffrey Epstein, a power broker and notorious pedophile, in his efforts to undermine Pope Francis and strengthen traditionalist opposition factions within the Church.

Leo disappointed the right, which was hoping for a return to the hardline conservatism of Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI. Born in the United States, Leo lived for many years in Peru, where he served as bishop from 2015 to 2023. This gave him an empathy for the South that shines through in his frequent critiques of militarism. In a speech in Cameroon on Thursday, the pope condemned the “handful of tyrants” ravaging the world and rebuked those “who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic or political gain, dragging what is sacred into darkness and filth.” Furthermore, Leo called on governments to treat migrants and refugees humanely.

Although the pope did not name Trump directly in these messages, the president clearly felt the sting. This explains Trump’s Truth Social Post last Sunday which claimed that “Pope Leo is WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy.” Trump returned to the subject Thursday, telling reporters that the pope “says Iran can have nuclear weapons. I say Iran cannot have nuclear weapons.” Trump, as he so often does, lies. As CNN reports, “Pope Leo has made no statement asserting that Iran may possess nuclear weapons. In fact, the pope has repeatedly denounced nuclear weapons and made unequivocal calls for countries around the world to abandon them.”

Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 at the age of 35, has found a place as the White House’s official attack dog against the Vatican (although Trump now appears to be competing for that title). For some reason, Vance chose to do this by presenting himself as a greater expert on Catholicism than the Pope. Like Tom Nichols from The Atlantic notes, Vance

might have taken inspiration from John F. Kennedy or Mario Cuomo, Catholic politicians who were careful to note that their faith was personal and important to them, but that in their public lives they must govern as Americans under the Constitution. Vance took a different approach: the pope, he implied, was not a very good or very intelligent Catholic.

Lecture theology to the pope may sound like hubris, but it is the result of an even more arrogant idea: that Trump himself is a sacred figure. In a now-deleted Truth Social Post, Trump shared an AI image of himself as Jesus healing the sick. In response to backlash that the image was blasphemous, Trump deleted the post and offered a dubious defense that he believed the image simply showed him as a doctor healing the sick (despite the fact that it was filled with religious iconography).

What destroys the credibility of Trump’s defense is that the idea that he is almost Christ-like is not uncommon in MAGA circles. When Trump first entered politics in 2015, evangelical Christians who admired him often compared him to King David, a man who was certainly imperfect and given to sexual excess, but who was nonetheless an instrument of God’s will. But as these Christians have grown accustomed to Trump, the King David analogy has given way to comparisons to Christ. In other words, Trump is no longer seen as a necessary evil but as a positive embodiment of good.

At a White House Easter event, Paul Caine-White, the president’s spiritual adviser, said: “And Mr. President, no one paid the price like you paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed, arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior has shown us.” On Thursday, Congressman Troy Nehls said Trump was “almost the second coming.” That same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth compared the “legacy of the Trump-hating press” to the biblical Pharisees who “scrutinized every good deed for violation, looking only for the negative.” Implicit in this analogy is that Trump is like Jesus, the good man the Pharisees persecuted.

The idea of ​​Trump as Jesus is of course something only bigots can believe in. MAGA in its most intense form is like a cult. Trump-as-Jesus is also a theology of authoritarianism. This implies that Trump cannot be criticized. This explains the frenzied MAGA attacks on Pope Leo. Even those of us who are neither Catholic nor Christian can recognize the Church as an autonomous institution with the right to defend its own values ​​and worldview. But Trump cannot tolerate any powerful institution beyond his control. MAGA’s authoritarian tendencies make it plausible that the Avignon papacy was invoked at the January meeting. Perhaps the next logical step would be, as some have suggested, an American papacy in Avignon, with Mar-A-Lago as the new Vatican. When Pope Francis died in 2025, Trump was quick to release an artificial image of himself seated on the throne of Peter, dressed in full papal regalia. He was of course a troll, but like many of Trump’s trolls, he was responding to a hidden desire.