After Two Months of MAGA Attacks, Pope Leo XIV Beats Trump by 54 Points
On net favorability, the American pope runs +32 to the president’s −22 — a 54-point chasm. Even among rank-and-file Republicans, Leo XIV stays above water.
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The numbers landed this morning, and they tell a story Donald Trump did not want told.
In a new Economist/YouGov poll conducted from May 29 to June 1, 55 percent of Americans say they hold a favorable opinion of Pope Leo XIV, against 23 percent who view him unfavorably. That is a net rating of plus thirty-two in a country that agrees on almost nothing, including the color of the sky
Set those figures beside the president’s.
Trump draws a favorable opinion from just 37 percent of the same respondents, while 59 percent view him unfavorably — a net of minus twenty-two.
Put the two side by side and the pope sits fifty-four points ahead of the man in the Oval Office on net favorability, a chasm between a leader Americans trust and one most of them have written off.
This is the pope Trump has spent two months trying to tear down.
I want to walk through the breakdown, because the partisan numbers are where this gets interesting.
Among Democrats, Leo runs 79 percent favorable against 6 percent unfavorable — a net of plus seventy-three. Independents give him 48 percent favorable to 24 unfavorable, a net of plus twenty-four. And among self-identified Republicans, the people who put Trump in office, Leo still comes out ahead: 42 percent favorable to 39 percent unfavorable.
Sit with that for a moment. The president has aimed the full weight of his movement at this pope since the spring — the clash over the Iran war, the “useless” jab after Chicago’s mayor visited the Vatican, the steady drumbeat from MAGA media and the prelates who echo it.
Rank-and-file Republicans heard all of it, and they still tilt toward Leo.
The pope goes underwater in only one corner of the electorate: among Americans who describe themselves specifically as MAGA supporters, where he runs 35 percent favorable to 48 percent unfavorable. Even there, the gap is thirteen points, far short of the collapse Trump’s allies have been working toward.
Now go into the weeds with me, because the trend matters as much as the snapshot.
When Trump and JD Vance first picked their fight with Leo over the Iran war in April, the pope’s national favorability stood at 55 percent. It stands at 55 percent today. Two months of presidential attacks, and the topline has not moved an inch.
Here is the irony Trump’s strategists may be missing: while the campaign failed to move Leo, it appears to have cost the president himself.
Trump’s favorability has slipped from about 40 percent when the fight began in April to 37 percent now, and his job approval sits underwater at 35 percent against 61 percent disapproval. He picked a fight with one of the few public figures Americans across the spectrum still admire, and the country seems to have marked him down for it, rather than the pope.
Leo has given up a little ground within the Republican coalition — that was always going to happen once the party’s leader made a pope his target. The word that matters is “little.”
The softening shows up almost entirely among the hardcore MAGA base, while Republicans as a whole stay net-positive on him. He emerges from the assault more popular than nearly anyone in American public life who carries a partisan brand.
Hold that up to the light. Ron DeSantis — a Republican who chased his party’s presidential nomination without Trump’s blessing — draws just 31 percent favorability nationally and sits underwater at a net of minus thirteen. Vance, the heir apparent who does have Trump’s backing, is viewed unfavorably by 53 percent of the country.
Even Marco Rubio, Trump’s own secretary of state, sits at just 32 percent favorability nationally, a net of minus fourteen, despite a commanding plus-sixty among Republicans. A pope the president has battered since April is better liked, across every slice of the electorate, than the Republicans who have tried to build a national following with Trump’s help and without it.
This pattern is not new, and that is the deeper point.
Americans have handed popes a wide reservoir of goodwill for as long as Gallup has asked the question.
John Paul II ranged between 61 and 86 percent favorable across his pontificate, cresting in 1998. Francis climbed to 76 percent in his first years.
Even Benedict XVI — the theologian conservatives claimed as their own — reached 63 percent favorable after his 2008 visit to the United States, before the abuse crisis dragged him down to 40 percent by 2010.
These were strikingly different men — a Polish anti-communist, an Argentine reformer, a German traditionalist. Line their numbers up and the differences flatten. The American public has trusted every modern pope, whatever his nationality, his theology, or his politics.
Leo’s 55 percent sits squarely in that tradition. It runs a touch lower than a first-year pope might otherwise command, and we know exactly why. No pope before him spent his opening year absorbing fire from a sitting American president. Strip away the two months of attacks and you are looking at a man the country instinctively respects.
We think that says something — about the office, certainly, but even more about this moment, and about the people who have refused to let Trump set the terms.
At Letters from Leo, we have spent the better part of a year standing with this pope, and with the millions of Catholics and people of goodwill — of every faith and of none — who recognize in his witness a refusal to bow to fear, to cruelty, and to the idols of power.
That number — 55 percent, holding steady through a presidential assault — is a testament to them. It belongs to the readers who forwarded these essays, talked them through at the dinner table and after Mass, and decided that a pope defending migrants and pleading for an end to war was worth standing behind against the most powerful man on earth.
I have a dogmatic belief that you and I are living through a providential moment. Just as God raised up a pope from behind the Iron Curtain to help defeat communism, God has raised up a pope from the Americas to meet the cruelty of MAGA authoritarianism and to call this nation back toward dignity for everyone who lives in it.
We cannot back down now. Trump’s campaign against Leo is not finished, and the pope needs this community more than he did in April. The Gospel he preaches — welcome for the stranger, first care for the poor, no nation made great through cruelty — is precisely what MAGA authoritarianism was built to drown out.
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I'm sorry everything is being degraded by a point system.
Leo leads us as Catholics, not as political agents. Please refrain from pitting Leo against this man who has no regard for human life.