Pope Leo XIV Is Not Fighting Donald Trump — The President Is Fighting Him
Eight attacks from Trump White House in seven days. One response from the pope, only to say the administration does not intimidate him.
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Pope Leo XIV boarded the papal plane to Angola this morning and told the press pool traveling with him that he has no interest in debating Donald Trump.
“A certain narrative has taken hold — one that is not entirely accurate — due to the political situation that arose when, on the first day of the trip, the president of the United States made certain statements regarding me,” the pope said. “Much of what has been written since has been more commentary on commentary trying to interpret what has been said.”
He offered one example.
The peace speech he delivered in Bamenda on Thursday — which MAGA allies read as a direct rebuke of the White House — had been drafted two weeks before Trump ever commented on him, Leo told reporters. It was written for an interfaith peace gathering in Cameroon’s civil-war-torn northwest, about a conflict that has killed more than 6,000 people and displaced 600,000.
“It was looked at as if I was trying to debate again the president, which was not my intention at all,” Leo said.
In that single exchange, the pope mapped the entire architecture of this week. The public count puts the Trump White House at eight attacks on the Holy Father in seven days.
Leo, by contrast, has addressed the American president exactly once during his African tour — to say, plainly, that the administration does not intimidate him.
Jonathan Liedl of the National Catholic Register captured the dynamic with a single Mad Men meme: Don Draper, in black and white, telling his interlocutor flat, “I don’t think about you at all.”
That is the right frame. Some might wonder why the pope will not directly engage. The answer is in Liedl’s meme and in Leo’s own words. His job this week is running a papal tour of Africa. Washington does not figure into the itinerary.
The Wall Street Journal’s reporting on the rift has been erudite and careful. The artwork running alongside today’s essay, however, tells a different story than the words do.
In the illustration, Leo is pictured with a fist drawn back while Trump braces for the blow — a pope squared up to throw a punch.
The public record holds no evidence of such a move. Leo has launched no counterattack this week; the African tour was never built to deliver one.
That has not stopped the pile-on.
On Thursday night, Sean Hannity called the pope a “run-of-the-mill Trump-hating Democrat that lacks moral clarity about radical Islam” on his Fox News show.
Speaker Mike Johnson lectured the pope on Augustine’s just war doctrine, though Leo ran Augustine’s religious order for twelve years.
Twice in the same week, JD Vance told the Holy Father to stay out of American politics — a performance the U.S. bishops’ doctrine committee was forced to rebuke.
The man in white, meanwhile, flies over the Atlantic with his press pool and his pastoral itinerary, promoting interfaith fraternity and preparing to celebrate Mass in a country still rebuilding from civil war.
There is a tell in what gets taken personally. Leo’s Bamenda speech condemned those who manipulate religion for military, economic, and political gain. He named no American official. The administration assumed he meant them anyway.
Some might see a pope who refuses the bait and read it as weakness, retreat, perhaps naïveté. That interpretation of Christian non-engagement is two generations out of date.
When Jesus told his disciples to turn the other cheek, Walter Wink argued most famously, the command was far more than a call to submission. Wink read it as a third way between violent retaliation and humiliated compliance — a creative maneuver that denies the aggressor both the counterpunch he expected and the broken victim he thought he had produced.
The cheek is turned precisely to refuse submission and retaliation at once, and to leave the aggressor standing alone with his violence. The dignity of the person absorbing the strike is the argument.
That is what the world is watching on the papal plane this week. Pope Leo XIV has not capitulated to Donald Trump, nor has he descended into his register. The Bishop of Rome has continued his actual work — walking with Bamenda’s displaced communities, blessing an icon of St. Augustine at the Catholic University of Algiers, sitting down with a council of imams to promote fraternity, and preparing to land in Luanda later today.
There will probably be another Trump attack before the trip ends, and Fox will almost certainly amplify it.
More Catholic institutions could lose federal funding next — the administration stripped $11 million from Catholic Charities earlier this week. Another bomb threat may reach the pope’s brother’s home in suburban Chicago, as one did earlier this week. Through all of it, Leo will keep going.
Evasion is not what we are watching.
Pope Leo XIV has chosen a different kind of combat on the authority of Christ and the example of twenty centuries of saints — one that many Americans not yet have the vocabulary to describe. Don Draper’s line has been making the rounds among Catholics today because it lands.
Twenty centuries earlier, on a hillside in Galilee and later on a Roman cross, Jesus offered the longer version of the same refusal. Leo XIV is carrying it now, at 30,000 feet, on his way to pray with the poorest people on the continent.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope who has refused to be pulled into a fight he never started — and with the Catholics and people of goodwill across this country who understand what that refusal is costing him.
Pope Leo XIV’s first African tour has come at a public price this week: a bomb threat sent to his brother in suburban Chicago, $11 million in federal funding has recently been stripped from Catholic Charities, and a cable news industry that will not let a day pass without calling him a Democrat in a cassock.
The man in white boarded another plane to another African capital this morning, promoting peace and fraternity with the same patience the first bishops of Rome showed when the empire came after them.
In an era that confuses cruelty with strength and sarcasm with argument, we remain rooted in a faith strong enough to absorb a blow without returning one — a faith that outlasted Nero, Caligula, and every emperor since.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. Readers are looking for a kind of courage that is not performative and a faith that holds its ground without losing its dignity.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing with a pope who refuses to trade his office for a cable news fight — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
I feel like 2 things can be true. The Pope is addressing his speeches to his audience in Africa, but we can take what the Pope is saying and apply it to what's going on in America.
That illustration shows him holding his cross. I don’t know that it’s a fist. That being said, Trump wants everything to be about him. He can’t stand that the Pope isn’t taking the bait. Great article as usual!