Well, it was quite a Sunday, what with Péter Magyar beating Viktor Orbán by a landslide in Hungary’s election, Rory McIlroy seeing off Scottie Scheffler to win his second US Masters and Donald Trump announcing that the US Navy will blockade Iran’s own blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in a bold attempt to prolong the energy crisis.
Normally, and not just when there is so much other news to think about, it is best for one’s own mental health to ignore Donald Trump’s nightly outpourings on his Truth Social platform. But, perhaps because Magyar and McIlroy raised my spirits, I cannot resist commenting on Trump’s rant last night against Pope Leo XIV.
Rather as with his naming of his social media platform, so often with Trump the words he chooses indicate the opposite both of the truth and of what he must really be thinking. Here is the post in full, for those fortunate enough to miss it:
Let us analyse his rant:
- He accuses Pope Leo of being “WEAK on crime and terrible for Foreign Policy.” If he really thought the pope was weak and terrible he surely wouldn’t bother to attack him. What he really means here is that Pope Leo’s STRONG words on war crimes and clear statements on the use of military power as the principal tool of foreign policy have made him uncomfortable.
- Pope Leo has, of course, never said that he thinks it would be OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, any more than he or any predecessor pope would have said it was OK for North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel or indeed anyone else to have a nuclear weapon. What Trump means is that he fears that his claim that the point of the war that he began on February 28th was to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is not being believed, either by the Pope or by others. Given that he claimed to have “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities in June last year, and now has admitted that the missing enriched uranium is probably buried under rubble, he has anyway long ago contradicted his own claim that Iran posed “an imminent threat,” because, at least in nuclear terms, it plainly didn’t.
- He says he doesn’t want a pope who criticizes the President of the United States: this is probably the only fully true phrase in the whole post. But saying that this is because he is “doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE” to do is revealingly false. It shows that Trump knows that the American public think he is not doing what he was elected to do: He is starting wars rather then ending them, is creating new crimes rather than setting new lows and has presided over a stockmarket that under-performed its counterparts in Europe and Japan last year by a wide margin, even before he caused the energy crisis. And as for the LANDSLIDE claim, perhaps when he calls Péter Magyar to congratulate him he might compare his 49.8% v 48.3% popular vote victory in 2024 (and 312 v 226 electoral college outcome) with Magyar’s genuine landslide.
- Of course he can’t resist claiming that Pope Leo was only chosen because Trump was in the White House. It is untrue that Robert Prevost wasn’t on any list to be Pope: In fact, he was on most lists. But for a narcissist like Trump everything has to be all about him.
- We can ignore the claim that a pope shouldn’t meet people of all views and indeed faiths, for that would be a true novelty. But the idea that Pope Leo’s statements in favor of peace and against war — shock! A Pope who favors peace! — are “hurting him very badly” and “hurting the Catholic Church” are revealing because they indicate that the opposite is true. And that the President of the United States finds a popular Pope and a strong Catholic Church to be worrying.
Trump and his people would do well to read the excellent advice given by Francesco Sisci, a respected Italian journalist who while not being an observant Catholic runs a think-tank called the Appia Institute that has close ties to the Vatican. In his “A guide to handle the Pope,” Sisci observes that rather than haranguing the pontiff, as Trump has just done, or threatening the Vatican’s representatives, as senior officials in the Pentagon reportedly did in January, it is far wiser to “talk to the Pope as a son to a father, or even as a brother, or as you would to a venerable holy man in a funny dress — but definitely never as a boss to an employee.
The Catholic Church has stood up, respectfully but stubbornly, to every earthly power for millennia. It won’t buckle to a president now.” As Sisci also observes, “the Church has one clear compass: do not use religion to wage war.” That, alas, is just what Trump and his self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth have been doing. Which is no doubt why Trump now is so sensitive about having both failed in the war and failed to gain any moral high ground.
We can let Bob Dylan have the last word, with the final verse of “With God on Our Side”:
So now as I’m leavin’, I’m weary as hell
The confusion I’m feelin’ ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head, and they fall to the floor
That if God’s on our side, he’ll stop the next war
This article first appeared on Bill Emmott’s Global View. It is republished with permission. The featured image is from a Trump social media post later on Sunday that has aroused additional stir.
Bill Emmott, a former editor-in-chief of The Economist, is the author of The Fate of the West.
