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Louis Prevost sat down with Piers Morgan for seventeen minutes on the eve of the Fourth of July, and almost nobody noticed.
I missed it, but I promise that I have an excuse.
I was on Lampedusa that weekend, covering Pope Leo XIV’s Mass among the migrants at Europe’s southern door on America’s 250th birthday. The national press missed it too, and so did the Catholic press.
Their excuse was (fairly) the Fourth of July.
A holiday weekend swallowed the interview whole, and when I went looking for coverage of it this week, I came up empty.
That is a shame, because Louis talks about his brother the way no one else alive can, as an older sibling who calls his brother quickly.
He has been on this beat since shortly after his election. Trump said “I really like his brother” in July 2025.
We’ve learned more about him through the profile of the three Prevost brothers, through his previous sit-down with Morgan, and into April, when Trump called Leo “weak on crime” and praised Louis as “all MAGA.”
The segment ran inside a 250th-anniversary debate episode that Morgan taped on Thursday, July 2, and posted the next day, which is part of why it sank. Here are eight things we learned from it.
Two of them sit in front of the paywall. Paid subscribers get the rest.
1. Pope Leo will talk to Trump. Trump has to dial.
The president and the pope have never spoken, a point Morgan made near the end of the interview. Louis said he has already put the question to his brother directly: what if I get the president on the phone? “Sure, if you want, but he has to call me,” Leo told him. Louis described it as a Vatican rule. “You have to request from the pope. The pope doesn’t go.”
A message has already traveled the other way.
A day or two before UFC Freedom 250 on the White House lawn on June 14, which was Trump’s 80th birthday, Louis asked his brother whether he had anything for the president. The pope told him to wish Trump a happy birthday.
Louis delivered it ringside. “Oh, that’s very nice,” Trump answered, by Louis’s account, and promised to pass along his thanks. The president has yet to pick up the phone to thank the pope himself.
2. “He’s always been Catholic first.”
Morgan asked whether a man goes from American first to Catholic first when he becomes pope. Louis answered before the question was finished. “He’s always been Catholic first. Whether when he was a priest, a bishop, a cardinal, that’s him. He’s the Church.”
Then he made the point the administration refuses to hear. On the border, Louis said, his brother has also said “a country has a right to its borders and to control its immigration,” so “there’s really no argument there. It’s just the way it gets presented.”
This came from a Navy veteran who told Morgan he would “go back and die for this country again, if necessary.” The order he put them in, faith above flag, is the story of this papacy.
The remaining six takeaways are for paid subscribers, including Louis and Leo’s conversations about immigration, a possible trip to the United States, his takeaway from the Trump-Leo fight, and who the pope will talk to next in American media.
If you have been waiting for a reason to join, this is a good one.
