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.
Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support the mission, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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.
Time and again — in press scrums on his return flights and in audiences in Rome — the pope has insisted he does not see himself as a politician and does not want to debate the president of the United States.
“I am not afraid,” he told reporters at the Vatican after the first Trump tirade against the Church in April. He added that he had no interest in trading insults with anyone.
He appears to mean it. Leo has declined to name Trump in nearly every one of his major addresses, even when his rebukes have been unmistakable.
Just this week, addressing European leaders in Rome, he warned against “elites that care nothing for the common good” funneling Europe into an arms race — an unmistakable response to Washington’s military pressure on Brussels.
And still — without ever stepping into the campaign arena — Leo is winning the argument among the American public by better than two to one.
None of this is new.
The American people have a long tradition of siding with popes over presidents in moments of public conflict.
Across the twenty-six years of John Paul II’s papacy, Gallup repeatedly found his favorability among American adults running ahead of whichever president happened to be in the Oval Office.
Through the Reagan years, the Polish pope openly differed with the White House on the nuclear arms buildup and the wars in Central America.
The two men had a real working relationship — they shared a deep anti-Soviet vision — but when they disagreed, the public tended to follow Karol Wojtyła, not the Gipper.
Pope Francis arrived in the United States in September 2015 with a 70 percent favorability rating among American adults and 86 percent among Catholics, eclipsing every politician of his moment. His alliance with Barack Obama on Cuba normalization, climate change, and the Iran nuclear deal moved the country with him, not with his critics.
When Francis broke publicly with Donald Trump in 2016 — saying anyone who builds walls “is not Christian” — the pope’s American favorability held firm.
Francis also forged a quiet partnership with Joe Biden, the second Catholic president in American history.
The two men met at the Vatican in October 2021 and again at the G7 in Italy in 2024. Biden has spoken publicly about how Francis prayed with him over the loss of his son Beau, and the pope defended Biden’s Catholic identity when American bishops, captured by their right flank, threatened to make communion a political instrument.
Francis publicly called Biden a “good Catholic” — a line that infuriated the right and reassured a country exhausted by holy-war politics.
Even Benedict XVI, a German theologian with little of his successors’ political charisma, found common ground with Barack Obama.
The president’s July 2009 visit to the Vatican drew warm coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, and Benedict handed Obama a signed copy of his encyclical on economic justice. Americans, even those who disagreed with the Holy See, respected the dignity of the office.
The pattern holds. When the pope and the president of the United States have clashed, the American people have generally chosen Rome.
There is something the polling cannot quite capture but the country plainly senses.
Donald Trump has spent the past several weeks trying to drag Leo onto his turf — the turf of insult and provocation.
But to this day, he has not phoned the Holy Father once since Leo was elected last May.
Leo has refused to take the bait.
Day after day, he speaks about the dignity of migrants, the cost of war, the lure of nationalism, and the call of the Gospel.
This week he named Father Emilio Biosca — a Latino parish priest whose heavily Salvadoran D.C. congregation, miles from the White House, has lost more than forty members to ICE since August — bishop of a Florida diocese in the heart of Trump-DeSantis country.
In Trump’s West Virginia, the new bishop of coal country is a formerly undocumented Salvadoran migrant whom Leo had publicly backed three weeks before the conclave.
The Ipsos numbers function as more than a snapshot of mood — they register a referendum on what kind of moral authority Americans still recognize. By a margin of better than two to one, they recognize the man in white.
Leo did not ask for this fight. He has said, over and over, that he is not a politician and will not debate the president of the United States.
But the American people are putting him there anyway. Trust in the country’s direction has collapsed to 31 percent. The Jesus image was rejected by nearly nine in ten adults.
Six in ten say the Iran strikes were a mistake. In that wreckage, Americans are searching for someone who will say the thing out loud.
Leo says it quietly, without naming names, refusing to take the bait. And the country, finally, is listening.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the millions of Americans — Catholics and people of goodwill alike — who refuse to confuse a posturing president with a pope speaking the language of the Gospel.
We stand with Pope Leo XIV in his patient, persistent refusal to let the cruelty of this moment have the last word, and with a country that, despite everything, is still capable of recognizing moral authority when it sees it.
In an era poisoned by spectacle and contempt, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of nationalism and authoritarianism.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They want courage, truth, and love made visible in action. They want a Church and a country that look more like the Gospel — and right now, as the president’s shenanigans hurt the world, while the pope holds the line on peace, that hunger is louder than ever.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the cruelty of MAGA authoritarianism — I am asking you to join us.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help this Easter season:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Paid subscribers also get full access to our ongoing biographical series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation, our exclusive reporting in The Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and our weekly Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.
Whether you give $5, $10, $50, $100, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
It is good news that Americans are choosing Leo because that means they prefer a moral, civil man over that of a mafia don. Still, that 37 per cent are still in support of the don is shocking to me and is either a statement about the moral health of the population or something else........?
Bullies move on when you plant your feet and speak up. This bully has little support from the audience and he knows it. Bullies only do what bystanders allow.
Pope Leo is giving a high-level workshop on how to handle bullies.