Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me.
Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, the Pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And I don’t think that’s very good. I think he’s endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people. But I guess if it’s up to the Pope, he thinks it’s just fine for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
Posner: I think that Trump is flailing around on this. He’s trying to find a way to contest Pope Leo’s message of peace. And so he’s coming back at him with this ridiculous claim that A, he doesn’t care if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, and B, that that lack of caring about that will endanger a lot of Catholics.
Sargent: You’d think. Well, the Washington Post had a really interesting new poll which shows how badly Trump is losing here. It found that 57 percent of Americans have a negative reaction to Trump’s claim that the Pope thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon. And as an aside, 87 percent reject Trump recently posting an image depicting himself as Jesus. Sarah, I find that heartening.
Posner: I think he cannot fathom it because he has been told for well over a decade by his most loyal base that God has anointed him to lead America. And so the idea that Pope Leo is a moral voice for the world—or for Americans in particular—is anathema to Trump.
Sargent: I think really what’s going on here is that Trump doesn’t understand that his powers are limited to the temporal realm, to the secular realm. He really doesn’t get that.
Posner: Yes, and that’s why I think he felt emboldened to portray himself as Jesus in that post a few weeks ago. He’s out of touch with what’s going on in the temporal realm. It’s more like Pope Leo is the one who understands what’s going on in the temporal realm more than Trump does. He seems to not know what’s going on at all with regard to the war, anything that’s going on domestically, the economy and so forth.
Sargent: To your point about the Pope actually getting what’s going on in the temporal realm better than Trump does—the Post poll actually gets at this. It finds that 66 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Pope urging Americans to contact Congress to work for peace and reject war. And by the way, 69 percent reject Pete Hegseth’s recent public prayer in which he asked for God’s assistance in meting out overwhelming violence against the Iranian enemy.
Posner: Yes, I think that the war, as we’ve seen from other polling, is largely unpopular. And I think that this poll leads us to see that these are not just for reasons of bad strategy on Trump’s part, or for reasons that he fucked up the Strait of Hormuz situation. I think that people legitimately see it as an immoral war. And that is evidenced by some of the questions that were asked in this poll.
Posner: Funny that you should talk about a schism. Yes. So obviously, Catholics—I think that when you dig into the cross tabs of this poll, you see that even conservative Catholics, Trump has lost support with Catholics that he won by a pretty sizable margin in 2024. And so I think among Catholics, there are probably a multitude of reasons why he’s lost support because he’s lost support with voters kind of across the spectrum. But you’ve got to figure that the Pope Leo thing is playing a role here.
And I think also, again, I’ll come back to the idea that for them, Trump is a kind of moral and spiritual savior of the Christian nation. These are ideas that resonate far more with white evangelicals than they do with Catholics. And so what we’re seeing here is: where do people stand when you have what you believe to be your spiritual leader? In this case, for evangelicals, it’s Trump. And for Catholics, it’s Pope Leo.
Sargent: Let’s go big picture here. It seems like it’s a really big factor in our politics right now that Donald Trump is speaking directly to white evangelicals in a way that simultaneously alienates other Christians, particularly Catholics. You see this on the war, but also on immigration. Let’s recall the Pope has criticized Trump and JD Vance—who very prominently converted to Catholicism—on immigration as well.
Posner: Well, when you dig into some of these polls that have cross tabs on white evangelicals, you’ll find that they’re starting to lose some confidence in Trump on matters of the economy. But it’s the war and immigration where they’re really sticking with him, especially immigration. And I think that they are his strongest supporters in terms of breaking out religious demographics. They’re his strongest supporters on what he’s doing on immigration. They’re all in on the immigration stuff.
I mean, obviously there are a lot of reasons for that. Like I said, there’s the economy, there’s the war, there’s immigration, there’s the Pope Leo spat. But I think that this endangers the solidity of Trump’s base to not have that majority of white Catholics in his camp because it’s just a numbers game. I don’t think that continuing to attack the Pope is really going to improve things for him with Catholic voters, even Republican Catholic voters.
Posner: So when we’re talking about all Catholics—so that includes white Catholics and Latino Catholics—a sizable majority of them have favorable views of Pope Leo, according to this poll: 61 percent. But only 38 percent of them approve of Trump’s job performance. And that’s interesting because 55 percent of Catholics voted for Trump in 2024. So there’s a real divide between how they’re seeing the president and how they’re seeing the Pope.
Posner: Right. And obviously, you know, there are more Democrats among Catholics than there are among evangelicals. So that accounts for a lot of it. But the fact that he won a majority of Catholics in 2024 and now he’s underwater with them is obviously significant.
But here again, that gets at what you’re talking about, Sarah, because in some sense those propagandists for Trump also see Trump as their spiritual leader. And so they actually want him to defeat the Pope, right? Do you see what I’m saying? His propagandists and his biggest cheerleaders out there in MAGA world want a battle between Trump and the Pope and they want Trump to defeat him.
So for the denizens of Trumpian Twitter, that is how they see Leo: that he represents wokeism, not that he represents Catholics, that he represents this ideology which to them is anathema to Trump and to a white Christian America and all of that. So they have gone so far around the bend that they don’t even really necessarily see it as a religious spat as much as an ideological one in which their guy has to be the victor.
Posner: Well, I actually think that for people like Loomer, who are on Twitter all the time and tweeting things like “woke Marxist Pope,” I think that this is much more of an ideological battle in which they see Trump as needing to vanquish what somebody like Steve Bannon would call globalists or globalism, because Leo represents that. He represents a global church.
So I think when you’re talking about these far-right weirdos on Twitter who spend their day trying to fight these ideological battles on Trump’s behalf, I think we’re more talking about that than we are the spiritual warfare that might be animating some of his evangelical base.
Posner: Yeah.
Posner: Well, one can hope. I think, again, the war is very unpopular. The economic fallout from the war is probably even more unpopular than that. So to the extent that Trump continues to try to find ways to justify it and to justify lashing out at his critics, I don’t think it’s something that’s going to help him rehabilitate his fall in perception among American voters for what he’s doing with this war.
Posner: Thanks for having me again.
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