This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the ...
I'm your host, Greg Sargent.
“In Donald Trump, viciously attacked the Pope and then posted a picture depicting himself”
as a divine figure, it provoked a massive backlash from many in his own base. That was bad enough, but then Trump offered some rambling spin on it all that was so preposterous in its dishonesty, so insulting that it quickly made things worse. We think this mess hints at deeper truths about how Trump approaches religious voters, particularly
the right wing evangelicals who are critical to his support.
It also helps explain why the Trump coalition and the Trump project are so fragile right now. So we invited on Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute, an author of several books about religion on the American right, to make sense of all this for us. Robert, good to have you on.
Thanks. Glad to be here. So Trump is angry because Pope Leo has repeatedly criticized the Iran War and especially Trump's threat to obliterate Iranian civilization. In response, Trump unleashed this crazed rant describing the Pope as, quote, "weak on crime,"
adding this, quote, "I don't want to poke with things that's okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon." Trump also said, "I don't want to poke who criticizes the president of the United States because I'm doing what I was elected for.
Robert, I just wanted to get your general thoughts on that first."
Well, I guess I'll start with the last one, you know, I was doing what I was elected for. I mean, Trump, of course, thinks that now that he's been elected, he, you know, can be constrained by nothing but his own whim. And so I think that's really what he's reacting to here.
But, you know, in this case, he's got, you know, the leader of a worldwide church who is also operating out of a, you know, 2000-year-old theological tradition. So Leo is not firing from the hip here, you know, he really is digging pretty deep. And this criticism, again, is not just about the war. It really is weighing these decisions about state violence against Catholic moral teaching.
Trump thinks that there should be no criticism of him whatsoever.
“I mean, this is the authoritarian playbook, right, that, you know, you should have no dissenters.”
And certainly no dissenters with influence are power. Exactly. And it doesn't matter whether they speak for a 2000-year-old religion or not. So Trump also posted this deranged image that portrayed him as a divine figure in a white robe, healing a sick man by placing his hand on the man's forehead.
This got MAGA figures angry. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that, quote, "It's more than blasphemy, it's an antichrist spirit." A daily wire reporter called it outrageous blasphemy, adding, "He needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness." Christian MAGA activists Shawn Fooke said, "This should be deleted immediately."
And former Republican spinner Ari Flasher said, "It's inappropriate and embarrassing. It's offensive." There was much more like that, Robert, can you just explain at the core why this image just seen as blasphemy? Well, Trump is clearly displaying himself as Jesus, you know, in the image he's got on
a white robe with a kind of red robe over it, and you could find hundreds of images like that of Jesus. You know, dressed this white robe, this red sash over the top of the hand. He's got this other, you know, he's got a glowing hand, right, as he's kind of leaning over this person and they're sick that.
So this is also this depiction of supernatural divine healing power, you know, that he's claiming for himself.
The one other thing I would say is that this is not the first time Trump has done this.
You know, it was actually just after Easter last year that Trump actually posted an image of himself as the Pope dressed up in papal vests, so, you know, this is not the first time he's posted things like this, assuming either the chair of the Pope himself or the image of Jesus. Well, Trump actually deleted the image of himself as a divine figure.
Now let's listen to how he tried to spin his way out of this.
“Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself to pick to this Jesus Christ?”
Well, I wasn't to pick it. It was me. I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with red crosses, a red cross worker there, which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one.
I had, I just heard about it, and I said, how did they come up with that?
It's supposed to be me as a doctor. So Robert, apparently Trump thinks doctors have celestial light pouring forth from their palms, and can heal people by touching them as the picture showed. What did you make of his excuse?
Well, he's reaching deep for this one, I get to say, I mean, you know, the problem is that
the image really didn't allow him to wait over him, I mean, you know, so the best he could say is, yeah, okay, I'm a doctor, I'm at a bedside, but you know, there's angels in the air behind him, and as we said, these kind of glowing palms. So it's very clearly the super, he's just trying to, you know, clearly just obfuscate and kind of trying to back it way from, and again, if he thought this was just an image
of him as a doctor and did this innocently, why remove it, just leave it up if he really believed it. Yeah, absolutely, and I think it's obvious and very clear that a big motivator here, a big core of this whole thing, is that for Donald Trump, he doesn't really understand why something like this would actually bother a lot of people, don't you think?
I think that's a really good insight, I mean, you know, things that are sacred, things that are holy, things that deserve kind of awe and respect and death threats, right? These are all religious emotions that, you know, actual people who have some sense of
“piety, take very seriously, and so I think that's why we're seeing some of this kind”
of reaction, even from some of his strongest supporters, is because, you know, they also have a religious sensibility, and I think that's the thing that makes so much of what, whenever Trump engages religion, it comes off, you know, very tinier, because he just has no sense of piety, I think, because very clear, whether it says, you know, misnaming a book of the Bible, you know, walking across the street, clearing it with, you know, kind of
some violence and then holding up a Bible awkwardly in front of a church, I mean, these are all things that actual religious people wouldn't do that way, but I think he just has no any sense of that. So Robert, I wonder if part of what we're seeing here is that in Trump's genuine understanding of the situation, even jellacles really do matter a lot more within his base than Catholics
do. What is the data show on that? It confirms that, right?
“And how would these different groups perceive this controversy, generally?”
You know, that's right.
His strongest supporters have always been white, evangelical, Protestant, you know, they
have voted more than eight and ten for him every time he has been on the ballot, and Catholics are a much more complex story. So, you know, his support about Catholic is actually been split pretty starkly along racial and ethnic lines, so he's always had white non-Hispanic Catholics with him, but they vote about six and ten for him, not 85 percent for him, and the real difference is that inside
the Catholic Church, Hispanic Catholics have actually voted Democrat, typically. So in the last election, it was only about 43 percent of Hispanic Catholics have supported him in the last election, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics. So there's this kind of racial tension inside the Catholic Church, and it's just not a monolith in the way that it is among white evangelicals.
So he, that's his statement, you know, that he could walk down the middle of the street and shoot somebody in the middle of the day, and people was still vote for him. I think is actually largely true among white evangelicals today.
In fact, he made that comment at an evangelical college in the first place.
It's not so true among Catholics.
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That's code in DSR 26 at the DSR network.com/buy. Thank you, and enjoy the show. Yeah, I want to ask you about that, because it seems like there may be a fundamental difference between how devout evangelicals and how devout Catholics perceive Trump. Evangelicals are much more prone to understand Trump as kind of a flawed vessel sent to them
by God to carry out his and their plans in the world, whereas Catholics, I think, aren't really at that place. Is that distinction correct? I think that's fair. I think that Catholics have a much more complex reasons for supporting Trump than white
Evangelicals do.
His messianic appearance is actually resonated, I think much stronger with evangelicals than they do among Catholics. You can see that in the favorability numbers too, that Trump's favorability among white evangelicals even today is a 70% just hardly ever waivers, no matter what happens. His favorability among even white Catholics who voted for him is only about 53%.
I said, just barely in majority territory today, and what is his favorability rating with Catholics overall right now? Yeah, with Catholics overall, it's actually a little bit underwater, it's just below majority,
“but that's because his favorability rating among Hispanic Catholics is 25% right?”
Half as high among white Catholics. So let's listen to some more of Trump here. He's asked if he'll apologize to Pope Leo then he says this. No, I don't, because Pope Leo said things that are wrong. He was very much against what I'm doing with we got to Iran, and you cannot have a nuclear
Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result. You have hundreds of millions of people dead, and it's not going to happen, so I can't. I think he's very weak on crime and other things, so I'm not. I mean, he went public, I'm just responding to Pope Leo, and you know, his brother
is a big mega person, and he's a great guy Lewis, and I said, I like Lewis better than I could Pope. So Robert, what do you make of that?
“I think all this makes it a lot worse, doesn't it?”
Well, look, I mean, the never-apologized mantra, right, straight from Roger Stone, all the
way through, I mean, this is his MO. It's also just by while we're talking about religion, you know, it was striking to me when he was right for President the first time around where he just outright admitted, he's he's never even asked God for forgiveness, like he outright said that I've never asked forgiveness for my sins, you know, which for most Christians is a pretty threshold moment, right,
to kind of joining the religion or becoming part of the religion. So I think this is really part of the MO, don't ask forgiveness, even of God, certainly don't apologize to any human being, it is just kind of stand by it, but I think you're right, that in this case, again, so far over the line, I hear that, you know, I think he's going to, it may actually do some damage.
Well, I think another way to put this is that he thinks of himself as answering to a higher authority than the Pope and that higher authority is Freud Cone. Yeah, that's right.
He's basically applying his long-time policy of never backing down, which was taught
to him by Roy Cone, to his relations with the Pope, a spiritual leader of many, many millions who is operating from a 2000 year old theology. If you think about it, the Pope is saying some fairly unsurprising things, he's saying that violent conquest and domination are contrary to the spirit of the Lord, that we have to take care to welcome the stranger, these were things that he probably shouldn't be
surprised by coming from the Pope, but Trump is only capable of understanding this as an affront to him personally, and I really wonder whether that makes things worse in the minds of at least some religious people. Can you talk about that? Well, you know, being surprised by something depends on having some knowledge of where
“the benchmark is in order to even know whether you should be surprised by something.”
I think Trump is so out of his depth here, that he doesn't really even realize what he's walked into here. So, you know, Catholic works, just work, tradition goes back to St. Augusta, right? It is more than 1,500 years old of serious Catholic theology, and so it's very developed. And it's over the very serious question of, you know, if there's a state that has a monopoly
on violence and can wield at such high levels, what are the moral restraints that should be placed even on a state or even on a king in the original formulations? And it turns out there are moral constraints, according to Catholic, moral tradition. And one of the key ones is that there's no such thing as a preemptive just war.
In other words, preemption is never a moral reason to go to war.
War always has to be a last resort after all modes of diplomacy failed, and there has to be an imminent threat before, and none of those things has, you know, you could imagine a different world in which Trump, like, knew this tradition and tried to frame a justification for going to war with Iran that might meet some of those criteria. And if it were, you know, kind of spun very heavily, but he just hasn't even attempted
To do this.
I think he just doesn't really realize the kind of bandsaw he's run into here with Catholic
moral theology. I want to clarify for listeners what you're saying here, which is that the just war doctrine and the laws of armed conflict are in a sense nourished by Catholic theology going back to Saint Augustine.
“I think it's really telling in that clip, you played about Trump, that he simply appealing”
to ends. So, if you kind of think about ends and means that you're kind of philosophy classes, he's just appealing to an end and saying, well, we should want this kind of end with Iran. And if we want that kind of end, then we could just go to war. But that's not the way moral philosophy works, right?
That there are principles that one must meet.
You can't just declare an end, and then will he nearly deploy any means to getting there. That's entirely the whole point of moral theology, is to limit what can be done. Particularly, we're talking about wielding violence. And I think the thing that it's so revealing here is that Trump can't even recognize the functioning of a principle that might limit power, right?
That's just not even in his lexicon.
“Right, and I think it's probably worth bringing in here defense secretary Pete Hegseth,”
who's been holding these monthly sermons at the Pentagon, which is itself probably a violation of the church state separation. Pete Hegseth is a Christian reconstructionist, and that's a really radical theology. And Pete Hegseth has also not coincidentally been essentially saying that maximal force and violence and brutality is a good thing.
He's been kind of saturated with bloodlust and sadism, as he's talked about how our precision weaponry will kill people on a mass scale, and he even recited one prayer, which essentially said in some form or other, it essentially said that the Iranian enemy doesn't hear God when he cries to God by contrast, Pete Hegseth believes he does hear God when he speaks to God.
God speaks back to Pete Hegseth, but not to the enemy. And it seems like that itself is something that, if I understand it correctly, Pete Pope Leo is rebunding that, is he not, can you explain that? Well, Pope Leo reverted it directly by saying that God does not hear the prayers of those who pray for violence, so he came straight at those in response to that.
And so I think we did, these diametrically oppose things where one is saying, we are declaring ourselves the instruments of God's violent justice in the world, and God is on our side. And what Pope Leo is saying is actually something quite different, and he's saying that, no, no, we actually have to go through this process to figure out whether what we're doing can actually put us on God's side, which is a very different way of thinking about it.
So do you think that a lot of religious Catholics out there will understand this kind of dimension of the debate, and will they see Trump essentially, not just blaspheming himself, but also being so diametrically opposed to Catholic doctrine on principle, will that trouble them? You know, I think it will, I think it may be a cumulative thing.
I think what will happen is they'll see the tension between Pope Leo and Trump. They'll definitely see it, because again, he's an American Pope, so that'll make it much more resonant than perhaps other Pope's. So they'll see that, but I think what will happen is, because of the way that Pope Leo's carving out this very careful moral theological stance, that then trickles down to the
bishops and to parish priests, and it creates a kind of space for very different conversations to happen.
Because what, the most powerful thing is what happens at the local community level, right?
Not what happens on high, but I think Pope Leo's leadership here is creating more space for bishops and parish priests to have a different kind of conversation. One where, you know, maybe they just have a whole Bible study, or a whole kind of theology study on the Catholic just word tradition. And if you do that, I mean, you're very quickly going to discover there's no way to
shoehorn this Iran war into anything that could be approved by that tradition. Can I ask, do you think that Pope Leo, by saying this stuff is actually in some subtle way trying to invite these conversations on the local level? Well, I think so. I mean, I think that the church's job, right, is to kind of provide moral teaching, you know, and that's kind of part of what the hierarchy does.
It organizes the world by church, right, and can influence certain kinds of conversations and bring them to the fore.
“I think by spotlighting this is something very important, addressing it on Easter.”
These are very, you know, strong signals, I think, to local parishes that, you know, this is actually something important to talk about.
I guess what that would ultimately mean is that Pope Leo is, in some sense, s...
undermining Trump with a constituency among whom he's already vulnerable.
“Yeah, I don't think Pope Leo would think about it directly like that, but I think that”
maybe the end result. And what, you know, I did take a little bit of a look in what's important to remember is that, you know, Trump's super support among evangelicals largely occurs among states that are very safe Republican states, right? So even if he dropped 10 points among evangelicals, it probably still be okay, right?
But his support among Catholics, particularly white Catholics, is very heavily concentrated
in places that are all swing states, Michigan was constant Pennsylvania, right? These are places where elections are one are lost. And so, you know, if you're thinking about very close elections, you know, in those states, if he loses, you know, again, 60% of white Catholics voted for him, his favorabilities now 53 among white Catholics, only 46% of white Catholics support the war in Iran.
If he loses 10 points among white Catholics, it's game over, right, in those swing states.
“Just to wrap this up, can you explain how that plays out for J.D. events in 2028?”
He's, after all, he's someone who just, who converted to Catholicism and he's making that a major part of his political identity. So he did, you know, and very early on, you know, he's also earned his own direct review from the, from the Vatican when he tried to kind of really bastardize a Catholic teaching about immigrants and was trying to, it called the Ordo Amora's, right?
The Order of Loves.
And was trying to say, you know, first we love our family, then we love our friends,
then we love our community. And then we love the rest of the world, and he got a straight review from from the Vatican as saying, no, actually, that's not the way this, this, the allergy works. So he may run in the same kind of problems, even though he himself is, is Catholic and because he's Catholic, then they actually create more problems for him that it does for
Trump. Why? Because he'll have to explain himself in a, in a more detailed, I think so.
“And, you know, you have to explain, like, if you consider yourself to be a Catholic and”
good standing, how then, you know, can you be being rebuked by the head of the Catholic Church at the same time? Well, best of luck to Jadey Van sorting that one out. Folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Robert Jones's new book, which will be out soon.
It's called Backslide. It's about Christian nationalism and democracy. Robert, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thanks so much.
