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He refuses to forgive. Offered the kingdom of God on a single condition, that he forgive his enemies, President Donald Trump turned it down. In the terms of the question, that meant no heaven for him. He would rather go on hating his enemies than enter paradise.
Trump made the admission to Ross Douthat in the final minutes of his “60 Minutes” interview, the first sit-down he has given since Republicans lost the House and the Senate on Nov. 3. CBS aired a cut of it on Sunday night and posted the 52-minute extended version online, which is worth watching in full.
Douthat, a Catholic and a former New York Times columnist, saved his hardest question for last. “What do you think happens to Donald Trump when you die?” he asked. Trump called himself “a religious person, so in theory I go to heaven,” and when Douthat pressed him, he added, “I hope so. I don’t want to go to hell.”
Douthat then took him back to Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in September 2025. Erika Kirk had spoken there about Christian forgiveness, and Trump followed her to the podium with a line Douthat quoted back to him: “I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.”
So Douthat laid out the hypothetical. To enter paradise, all Trump had to do was feel love and forgiveness for James Comey, Nancy Pelosi, and anyone else he has hated over the years. “The answer is no,” Trump said. “I want to be honest.” Douthat asked whether that held “before the judgment throne of God,” reminding the president that he has lived “the most charmed and remarkable life of any American” in Douthat’s lifetime.
Trump did not move. “I probably cannot do that, no,” he said, “because I do hate some of my enemies, and I always will.”
Douthat built his question out of the Gospel. Right after Jesus teaches his disciples the Our Father, he attaches a condition to it: “If you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions” (Matthew 6:15). One chapter earlier, he commands them to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them.
Pope Leo XIV preached the same truth on the feast of St. Stephen last December, when he told the faithful that Christians have no enemies, only brothers and sisters. On Sunday, Trump rejected that teaching on national television.
It is a remarkable rebuke of Christian doctrine from a man who claims the faith. Coming from Donald Trump, it is also entirely unsurprising.
At the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, in July 2015, the pollster Frank Luntz asked Trump whether he had ever asked God for forgiveness. “I am not sure I have,” Trump answered. “I just go on and try to do a better job from there.” A month later, he could not name a favorite Bible verse, and at Liberty University in January 2016 he cited a passage from “Two Corinthians” (most Christians call the book Second Corinthians).
Douthat closed the interview by granting Trump something the president never asked for, the hope of salvation. “A hundred years from now, while you’re working out your situation in purgatory,” he asked, “what is the line that your presidency is remembered with?” The Church teaches that purgatory is the final purification of those who die in God’s grace and friendship. Offered that mercy, Trump reached for a campaign slogan: “That I made America great again.”
The same refusal of mercy runs through his war. Asked whether he would launch the Iran war again, Trump told Douthat his answer was “an emphatic yes,” even as he conceded that voters “didn’t like the war” or the gas prices that came with it. Pope Leo has spent eight months telling him otherwise, declaring on a flight to Madrid that the notion of a just war “no longer applies” and, two weeks ago, that there is no such thing as a holy war.
Faithful Catholics have been watching. Trump spent the spring attacking the pope, at one point claiming that “if I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” Last Tuesday, according to NBC’s exit poll, Democrats carried Catholic voters 50 to 49, two years after losing them by 20 points.
White evangelicals moved far less. They still backed Republicans 82 to 16, according to the AP Voter Poll, though they shrank to 17 percent of the electorate. Pastors like Robert Jeffress, who told Fox News this spring that Trump knows the Bible better than Pope Leo, have spent ten years vouching for his faith.
Catholics have reached a different verdict, and communities like ours helped them reach it. They have watched this president attack the Vicar of Christ and shrug that he has never asked God’s forgiveness. Sunday’s interview showed them a man who would trade heaven for a grudge. A man like that is no model of Christian leadership, and he should not lead our country. Neither should anyone who aids and abets him.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics (and countless others of goodwill) who believe that mercy is the beating heart of the Gospel. We believe a Christian who refuses to forgive has walked away from the prayer Jesus taught us to say every day.
In an age that rewards grudges and cruelty, we hold fast to a faith that asks more of us. This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for leaders who forgive their enemies and remember that they will one day stand before God.
If you believe this movement matters, with Catholics and people of goodwill standing for mercy against a politics of hatred, I am asking you to join us.
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Jeffress is either a fool or a liar if not both. It is a shame that people who are capable of reading the Bible in any of the many translations accept any sort of spiritual guidance from someone who could spout such nonsense about Trump and the Pope.
This entire substack is a butchering of Catholic doctrine purely for political purposes.