Pope Leo XIV and Stephen Colbert Are the Only Things Americans Actually Like

A new NBC poll finds the pope and the comedian at the top — with ICE, AI, and every major politician underwater.

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A new NBC News poll tested the favorability of fourteen figures and institutions in American life. The results contain a remarkable verdict about what this country actually admires — and what it fears.

Pope Leo XIV finished first. His net favorability rating stands at +34, with 42 percent of registered voters viewing him positively and just 8 percent negatively. Stephen Colbert came in second at +10.

After that, the list collapses into a sea of red. Donald Trump sits at -12. JD Vance registers -11. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are deeply underwater. ICE, the federal agency carrying out mass deportation raids across the country, earned a devastating -18 net rating, with 47 percent of voters holding a very negative view.

And at the very bottom, alongside Iran, sits artificial intelligence at -20.

Read those numbers again. The only two entities in American public life that a majority of voters actually like are a Catholic pope and a late-night comedian.

The pope’s position at the top of this list is striking but not surprising. A Gallup poll from July 2025 found that 57 percent of Americans viewed Pope Leo favorably, with a net favorability of +46 — the highest of fourteen newsmakers tested.

Among Catholics, his approval reached 76 percent. Those numbers mirror almost exactly where Pope Francis stood at the start of his pontificate in 2013, when Gallup measured him at 58 percent favorable.

Francis went on to become one of the most influential global figures of the decade. Leo appears to be on the same trajectory.

What makes this NBC poll different from the Gallup data, though, is the contrast it draws.

Gallup measured Pope Leo against politicians and world leaders. The NBC poll places him alongside the institutions that define daily American anxiety — deportation enforcement, algorithmic disruption, partisan gridlock.

Against that backdrop, the pope’s numbers carry a different weight. Americans are telling pollsters something specific: they trust a man who talks about human dignity more than they trust the government agencies and technologies reshaping their lives.

Colbert’s second-place finish deserves attention, too. His +10 net rating makes him the only other figure on the entire list with a positive score. The Late Show host, whose program CBS is set to end this May after nine consecutive seasons at number one in late night, has built a following that cuts across demographic lines.

His audience skews toward Democrats, certainly, but a 35 percent overall positive rating in a country where both political parties fail to crack 40 percent favorable tells you something about the appetite for moral clarity delivered with humor rather than fury.

Colbert, a practicing Catholic who has quoted scripture on air as comfortably as polling data, has made no secret of his ambition to land the pope as his final guest. On Late Night with Seth Meyers in January, asked to name his dream interview, he answered without hesitation: “The Pope. The American Pope.”

He offered to fly to Rome or meet Leo in Chicago for deep-dish pizza. His last show airs May 21. Whether or not the Vatican obliges, the fact that the most popular television host in America wants to close out his career talking to the pope tells you where the country's moral center of gravity has shifted.

Then consider what Americans reject. ICE’s numbers are a political earthquake that neither party seems prepared to absorb. The agency responsible for immigration enforcement drew a 56 percent negative rating, including that staggering 47 percent who feel very negatively.

The Trump administration has staked its domestic agenda on deportation raids and the public spectacle of enforcement. Voters are watching — and recoiling.

Artificial intelligence landed at -20, with 46 percent of voters viewing it negatively against just 26 percent positive. The promise of technological revolution has not reached most Americans. What they see instead is job displacement, misinformation, and an erosion of their ability to distinguish truth from fabrication.

The broader landscape only deepens the story. Trump himself sits at -12 net favorability among registered voters. Vance is at -11. Kamala Harris registers -17. Gavin Newsom, -18. The Republican Party: -14. The Democratic Party: -22.

Every major political figure and institution in America is underwater. The public has lost confidence in the entire apparatus of partisan governance.

And yet they trust the pope.

That fact should concentrate the minds of anyone who cares about the national conversation on war, migration, poverty, and climate change.

Pope Leo XIV possesses something no American politician currently holds: broad, bipartisan moral authority. His voice on the dignity of migrants carries a credibility that no elected official on either side of the aisle can match. On the ethics of artificial intelligence, on the obligations of wealthy nations toward the global poor, he operates from a position of public trust that Trump, Vance, and both party establishments can only envy.

Francis proved that a pope can move the global conversation. His 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ reshaped the climate debate among world leaders. His interventions on migration policy influenced European and American discourse for years. Leo now inherits that same platform with an even more specific advantage: he is an American pope speaking to an American public that has, according to every available measure, decided it trusts him more than it trusts its own political leaders.

The NBC poll captures something that should unsettle every political strategist and party operative in Washington.

In a country where every major political figure and institution is underwater — where both parties, both presumptive standard-bearers, and even the federal agencies carrying out the administration’s signature domestic policy have earned the public’s contempt — one man commands broad, bipartisan trust.

He is a Catholic pope from Chicago who talks about human dignity, migration, and the obligations of the powerful toward the poor.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the growing community of Catholics and people of goodwill who refuse to accept that cruelty is governance, that deportation raids on churches are law and order, and that a country built on human dignity can survive leaders who treat it as expendable.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda.

They want moral clarity grounded in faith, reported with precision, and delivered without fear. That hunger has never been more urgent than right now, as the most trusted man in American public life wages a quiet revolution from Rome.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the authoritarian drift in American life — I am asking you to join us.

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