Americans Are Choosing Pope Leo XIV Over Donald Trump — and It Isn’t Close
A new ABC–Washington Post–Ipsos poll catches Pope Leo XIV at +25 favorability while Donald Trump craters to 37 percent — his lowest second-term reading. Two-thirds back the pope on peace. Trump still hasn’t called him.
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The verdict came in this past week, and it wasn’t close.
A new ABC News–Washington Post–Ipsos poll, fielded April 24 to 28 and released May 6, found Pope Leo XIV with a 41 percent favorable rating among American adults and only 16 percent unfavorable.
Two-thirds of the country — 66 percent — said they reacted positively to Leo’s appeal that Americans contact Congress to work for peace and reject war.
The same poll caught Donald Trump in freefall.
His job-approval number cratered to 37 percent, with 62 percent disapproving — the lowest reading of his second term. The strikes on Iran were called a mistake by 61 percent of Americans. Nearly nine in ten reacted negatively to his recent post depicting himself as Jesus Christ. A clear 57 percent majority opposed his social-media swipe at the pope.
To this day, Trump has not picked up the phone to call Leo.
The numbers tell a story the White House would prefer to bury: across both faith and partisan divides, the American people have looked at the one-sided ‘fight’ between the pope and the president and chosen the pope.
It has been an extraordinary year for an American who once expected to live and die as a missionary in Peru.
When Robert Francis Prevost was elected pope on May 8, 2025, more than a few pundits predicted his American passport would prove a political liability. The first U.S.-born pontiff in history, ascending the throne of Peter under the shadow of MAGA — some assumed his standing in America would rise and fall with every Trumpian provocation.
It hasn’t.
Across the polling year — Pew measurements, Ipsos check-ins, and my own reporting just two weeks ago on his head-to-head numbers against Trump — Leo has held firm.
Through every assault on him from the right, from JD Vance’s attacks, Mike Johnson’s retorts, to the Iran war crisis, the pope has stood at roughly the same elevation in the American imagination.
Among Catholics, his numbers are more lopsided still: 61 percent favorable, just 14 percent unfavorable. Strongly favorable views outpace strongly unfavorable views among American Catholics by more than 12 to 1.
That stability is the headline that gets missed in Washington. In a town where political fortunes swing weekly with the news cycle, Leo’s standing has been remarkably resistant to every attempt to drag him into the mud.
The president has smeared him on Truth Social, propped up MAGA pastors who told Fox News the president knows the Bible better than the pope, and most recently dispatched Marco Rubio rather than face the Holy Father himself.
None of it has moved the dial.
What makes the gap with Trump more striking still is that Leo refuses to play the game. Here’s what I mean.
