The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 7 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump has been raging at Pope Leo for weeks over the Pope’s criticism of the Iran War. And this week Trump attacked Pope Leo again in truly bizarre terms, declaring that he’s “endangering Catholics” by advocating for peace and not supporting Trump’s war. This was strikingly personal and extremely ill-advised because new polling shows that Trump is losing his battle with the Pope very, very badly. Importantly, not only do large majorities reject Trump’s attacks, big majorities also side with the Pope on their underlying dispute. We think that’s encouraging in hidden ways. So we’re talking about all this with one of our go-to guests on these matters, Sarah Posner, a scholar of religion who writes for Talking Points Memo and hosts the Reign of Error podcast. Good to have you back on, Sarah.
Sarah Posner: Thanks for having me.
Sargent: So let’s start with Donald Trump’s latest attack on the Pope. Here’s Trump on a right-wing podcast when asked about their ongoing battle.
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.
Sargent: So there Trump repeats one of his favorite lines—that the Pope wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. That’s a vile way to characterize the Pope’s criticism of the war. But that aside, note the added line here about the Pope endangering a lot of Catholics. Sarah, what do you make of that and how will Catholics receive it?
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.
I think if Trump felt confident that he was winning this war of words with Pope Leo, he would not feel compelled to flail around on a right-wing radio show and claim that Catholics were being endangered by their own pope.
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.
It suggests that the public really gets how dishonest Trump is being in attacking the Pope. It’s almost as if Trump is unable to grasp that the Pope might be broadly seen as a more honest interlocutor than Trump is. I mean that sincerely. I think Trump is unable to get that the Pope might be seen as a more honest and more pious figure than him.
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.
I mean, that’s part of his narcissistic personality: because he’s been anointed by God in his view, somebody else cannot be speaking on moral or ethical issues to Catholics and to non-Catholics around the world. And I think that this is further evidenced by the comment that JD Vance made when this whole thing started, when he said that the Pope has to be very careful when discussing matters of morality.
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.
And I want to talk a little more about what you just pinpointed there, which is that large swaths of his base have told him that he’s not just a secular leader—they have told him that he’s a spiritual leader to them too, right?
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.
And so I think he leans on the idea that God has anointed him, that he can magically fix America’s problems and America’s standing in the world. And I think that has become more important to him, to his psyche—if I can psychoanalyze him—as he’s lost more control of the politics of the situation and what’s going on with his own administration.
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.
Sarah, very large majorities here support the morality of a message of peace, even though we’re at war with Iran and Trump keeps commanding Americans to hate Iranians, right?
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.
Sargent: Let’s talk a little more about the Post poll. The cross tabs are really something. A majority—52 percent of Protestants in particular—reacts well to Trump’s claim about the Pope wanting Iran to have a nuke. That’s an even bigger majority with white evangelicals: 68 percent of them view Trump’s claim about the Pope positively. Yet 61 percent of Catholics react badly to Trump’s claim about the Pope. Can you talk about that schism?
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.
Non-Catholics can still recognize the role of the Pope in the world, even if they are not Catholics themselves. But I think for evangelicals—I mean, there’s still some anti-Catholicism baked in to evangelicalism, even though they’ve had this 50-year alliance in the religious right to fight abortion rights and LGBTQ rights.
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.
Now, obviously there are Catholics who are MAGA. So this is not across the board a view among Catholics. But I think the erosion of support for Trump among Catholic voters who had previously voted for him is significant because he relies on that alliance with white evangelicals for his base of support.
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.
The Pope has criticized them both on immigration. And I suspect a lot of Catholics agree with the Pope on that, but white evangelicals very much side with Trump on immigration because their theological view seems oriented towards a much more vicious and hard-edged Christian nationalism that’s a lot quicker to see enemies within, around every corner. Can you talk about that?
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.
And so I think that for Catholics—obviously, they’re not as monolithic as white evangelicals are. You don’t have the 80 percent who are supporting Republicans and supporting Trump. So it’s more split, but now the split is starting to go in the opposite direction. The split for Trump was that he won a majority of white Catholics in 2024, but now it’s splitting back to a majority of them disapproving of his performance.
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.
Sargent: Just to your point about the views among Catholics of both Donald Trump and the Pope—this Post poll really shows clearly that they are overwhelmingly approving of the Pope but really moving away from Trump very dramatically. Can you talk about those numbers?
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.
Sargent: Whereas with white evangelicals, they still overwhelmingly approve of Trump and they’re not splitting in anything like that same way.
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.
Sargent: It really is. Okay. Just to tie this up, I noticed a kind of interesting irony to all this, which is that when Trump attacks the Pope, you see his propagandists on Twitter cheering for Trump. Like they’re actually out there saying, with big sirens on—that type of little meme that they do when they think Trump has scored a direct hit, he’s really taking on someone. They’re like really excited about Donald Trump taking on the Pope and they just seem absolutely unable to grasp how tiny a minority of voters that’s going to appeal to.
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.
Posner: Well, I think they see it as a proxy war against wokeism. If you recall, back last year when Leo first became Pope—and I don’t remember what specifically prompted this—but Laura Loomer tweeted “woke Marxist Pope.” Okay.
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.
Sargent: Well, not only that—Pope Leo is the symbol of global wokeism and of immigration, right? So in essence, they want Donald Trump to defeat the Pope in this kind of, I guess, massive spiritual war that’s going on in their heads.
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.
There are Catholics all over the world. He traveled to Africa to preach to Catholics in Africa. He’s a global person. He spent missionary years in Peru. And this is what they hate. They want America to be insular and not learn anything about other people around the world and not have any migrants or immigrants. And Leo is the opposite of that to them.
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.
Sargent: I mean, ironically, right? They see Donald Trump as a spiritual leader. So to them, this is a spiritual battle between Donald Trump and the Pope in a funny way.
Posner: Yeah.
Sargent: Well, so just to finally close this out, it actually seems politically very terrible for Donald Trump, this whole situation, because he’s so steeped and marinated in those far-right Twitter voices that all he hears is that he’s winning the battle against the Pope. Meanwhile, huge swaths of the American electorate are getting alienated, and that can only be a good thing politically.
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.
Sargent: So not only that, but his Republican supporters aren’t allowed to say that he’s fallible and he’s always winning in every conceivable way. So they can’t even go to him and say, Mr. President, maybe it’s time to stop this war with the Pope already. It’s not doing us any favors in the midterms. Sarah Posner, always great to talk to you about this stuff. Thanks so much for coming on.
Posner: Thanks for having me again.
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