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There’s a typical pattern when Donald Trump does something outrageous: His critics get angry, his defenders are belligerently inflexible, and everyone walks away mad—except for Trump, who breezes through to the next news cycle. But this weekend, when Trump went on a posting spree about the pope and Jesus, Trump’s defenders went off script. Instead of taking a stance of trollish defiance, they condemned the president.
The two posts, published Sunday night on TruthSocial, hit different nerves. The first, a wall of text, responded to Pope Leo’s criticism of the war in Iran by blasting Leo as “WEAK on crime.” In the post, Trump told the pope to “get his act together,” and suggested that Leo should be grateful to him because if Trump “wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” The second post, which he published an hour later, was an A.I.-generated illustration of Trump as a Christ figure in robes healing a man on his sickbed while surrounded by troops, medical professionals, fighter jets, bald eagles, and praying Americans in a state of awe.
Almost immediately, a number of conservatives on social media expressed shock. Some, including conservative Catholic bishops, bemoaned the assault against a major religious leader. But it wasn’t just Catholics who were affronted. Sneako, a Muslim and far-right streamer with more than 1 million followers, for example, called for people to “condemn this evil” and expressed solidarity “with the Pope and the beautiful religion of Catholicism.” But most of the outrage from Trump’s most faithful fans was directed at the A.I. Trump-Christ image, which several people described as blasphemy. One prominent Christian nationalist, musing on the illustration, speculated that Trump was “demon-possessed.” Another wondered aloud whether Trump was showing signs of the “Antichrist spirit.” Riley Gaines, the anti-trans activist, expressed bewilderment. “Seriously, I cannot understand why he’d post this,” she wrote. “God shall not be mocked.” (Trump appears largely unchastened by the backlash, as his Tuesday late-night posting spree included yet-another swipe at the pope—albeit a more tepid one than his earlier missives.)
Even a few months ago, Trump’s posts would likely have been defended, at least publicly, by his hardcore supporters. He once before put out an A.I.-generated image of himself as pope, and that incident was largely laughed off. He has also shared photos of Jesus guiding his legal defenses and compared himself to persecuted Christ. If there was any MAGA condemnation that followed, it wasn’t widespread enough to get much attention. But this time has been different. And the intensity of the backlash to Trump’s post shows just how much Trump has failed to keep up with new political realities.
For many years, observers of American evangelical Christianity marveled at white evangelicals’ unflinching devotion to the philandering, vulgar politician. When Trump bragged he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose voters, it seemed he was stating a kind of law of the universe. It didn’t matter that Trump had clearly never cracked open a Bible himself; evangelical leaders described him as God’s weapon, specially chosen to do his will on earth. The failed assassination attempts seemed to wipe away any lingering doubt, and Trump himself embraced the idea that he had been saved by God to enact his agenda. A large portion of white Catholics, immersed in the same political culture as evangelicals, bought into similar arguments, even if they weren’t so taken with the more spectacular language about prophecy and divine purpose.
But recent events have shaken this religious loyalty. Most white evangelicals applauded the aggressive deportations campaign, but some Christians grew uneasy with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s willingness to conduct raids at churches or rough up people in clerical collars. More notably, the Trump administration’s ongoing support of Israel has caused an anti-Zionist faction of the Christian right to peel off from the MAGA movement; when Trump launched his war against Iran, that faction expanded. Some Christian leaders began to resent Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s invocation of religious purpose or divine favor in the assault on Iran, while some Christian entities, such as the Catholic Church, have a more straightforward religious opposition to the war itself. Trump’s own complacency in appeasing his religious allies doesn’t help: On Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the year in Christianity, Trump not only didn’t attend any kind of church service; he also posted a threat against Iran on social media that included an expletive, invoked hell, and concluded with a snarky “Praise be to Allah.”
It’s not just that Trump’s base is wavering. It appears that Trump has also misunderstood just how much the politics of American Catholicism has changed over the years. Essentially, while an attack on the previous pontiff might have gone over just fine with American conservatives, attacking the current one is a bit more fraught, even for Trump. American Catholic politics under Pope Leo look quite different from the politics in the later part of Pope Francis’ papacy, which spanned Trump’s first term.
When Trump was first elected, Francis had been pope a few years, and he had already managed to alienate the traditionalist portion of the American church, which leans much more conservative than the church in Europe. Over the course of Trump’s first term and the Biden presidency, U.S. bishops became increasingly willing to express dissent against the Vatican, as Pope Francis grew less and less tolerant of what he saw as narrow-mindedness among those who only cared about condemning sexual sins. At the lowest point of the U.S.-Vatican relationship, a president’s post blasting Francis would have still frustrated regular Catholics, as Francis always enjoyed public favor, but there would have been a number of Catholic clergy and high-profile traditionalists—people similar to Vice President J.D. Vance—secretly cheering him on.
Pope Leo, on the other hand, hasn’t built up such ill-will among elite Catholics in the U.S. Leo is a new pope, but he’s also a more cautious one. He has repaired some of the rifts from Francis’ conflict with the traditionalists, and many conservative Catholics have taken a wait-and-see view in the new era. Plus, Leo is the American pope—a source of pride and excitement for many American Catholics. If Trump thinks of these men as interchangeable, he’s failing to understand the political risks of fighting the Catholic Church.
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And it’s not just the figure at the top that changes the dynamics: Catholicism is hot right now, at least in media coverage. While many scholars have pointed out that Catholicism is not itself seeing any kind of population-level resurgence, there is definitely a small number of young traditionalists who are converting, drawn to the formality of worship and the ancient traditions. Again, this trend isn’t one that would make any kind of difference for the overall church. But it is worth noting the influencers and pundits driving this trend tend to have a stronger affinity for the institution than the more casual cradle Catholics. And given that the Trump administration has come to rely heavily on “new media” for its campaigns, offending those Catholic influencers seems like an unwise strategy.
Still, the most heated backlash undeniably came in response to the A.I.-generated Trump-as-Jesus illustration. Protestants with little interest in defending Catholics leapt to accuse Trump of insulting his Christian followers.
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And that response, coming from his previously most devoted followers, can only be explained by one harsh reality for Trump: He is no longer invincible. Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran has been so unpopular that even on platforms as sycophantic as Truth Social, die-hard Trump supporters have begun expressing their dismay and disappointment in the president. Prominent conservatives who may have previously bit their tongues for fear of public backlash felt safe to label Trump a blasphemer or an idiot. Trump, in a sign of how taken aback he was by the response, deleted the post. This is rare for him. He hasn’t deleted a post since he shared a racist video depicting the Obamas as apes. This time, he tried to defend himself by arguing he thought his depiction was of a doctor healing someone, not Jesus. Most of his defenders found this argument to be feeble.
It’s possible Trump believed he could say whatever he wanted because he thought he had secured loyalty from all Christians for good. His most ardent fans have often described him as a messiah-like figure, based on his success in building a court that overturned Roe v. Wade and on his explicit favoring of conservative Christian institutions. It’s possible some of the loudest or most well-placed messiah-seers may have given Trump a skewed understanding of Christian attitudes. But not every version of Christianity fuses so easily with Trump fanaticism. And now that he’s no longer politically bulletproof, thanks to the fractures within the MAGA movement and the boiling frustration over the war, Trump may have to finally adjust to this new reality. After a decade of blind white evangelical loyalty, he can’t simply expect universal Christian favor, regardless of how blasphemous he gets.
