The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 14 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
When 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 and author of several books about religion and the American right, to make sense of all this for us. Robert, good to have you on.
Robert Jones: Thanks. Glad to be here.
Sargent: 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 “weak on crime,” adding this: “I don’t want a pope who thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump also said, “I don’t want a pope who criticizes the president of the United States” because I’m doing what I was elected for. Robert, I wanted to get your general thoughts on that first.
Jones: Well, I’ll start with the last one. “I was doing what I was elected for”—Trump, of course, thinks that now that he’s been elected, he can be constrained by nothing but his own whims. That’s really what he’s reacting to here.
But in this case, he’s got the leader of a worldwide church who is also operating out of a 2,000-year-old theological tradition. Leo is not firing from the hip here. He really is digging pretty deep. And this criticism is not just about the war. It is weighing these decisions about state violence against Catholic moral teaching. Trump thinks that there should be no criticism of him whatsoever. This is the authoritarian playbook. That you should have no dissenters, and certainly no dissenters with influence or power.
Sargent: Exactly. And it doesn’t matter whether they speak for a 2,000-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, “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an anti-Christ spirit.” A Daily Wire reporter called it “outrageous blasphemy,” adding “he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness.” Christian MAGA activist Sean Fucht said: “This should be deleted immediately.” And former Republican spinner Ari Fleischer 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 is seen as blasphemous?
Jones: Well, Trump is clearly displaying himself as Jesus. In the image he’s got on a white robe with a kind of red robe over it. You could find hundreds of images like that of Jesus dressed this way—this white robe, this red sash over the top. He’s got this glowing hand as he’s leaning over this person in their sickbed.
So this is also this depiction of supernatural divine healing power that he’s claiming for himself. One other thing is that this is not the first time Trump has done this. It was actually just after Easter last year that Trump actually posted an image of himself as the pope, dressed up in papal vestments. 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.
Sargent: 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.
Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?
Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, it wasn’t a depict—it was me. I did post it and I thought it was me as the doctor and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. So 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.”
Sargent: 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?
Jones: He’s reaching deep for this one. The problem is that the image really didn’t allow much wiggle room. So the best he could say is, I’m a doctor, I’m at a bedside.
But there are angels in the air behind him. And as we said, these glowing palms. So he’s just trying to obfuscate and back away from it. 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 you really believe in it.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. 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?
Jones: That’s a really good insight. Things that are sacred, things that are holy, things that deserve awe and respect and deference. These are all religious emotions that actual people who have some sense of piety take very seriously. That’s why we’re seeing some of this kind of reaction, even from some of his strongest supporters, is because they also have a religious sensibility.
Whenever Trump engages religion, it comes off very tin ear, because he just has no sense of piety. It becomes very clear, whether it’s his misnaming a book of the Bible, walking across the street, clearing it with some violence and then holding up a Bible awkwardly in front of a church. These are all things that actual religious people wouldn’t do that way. But he just has no innate sense of that.
Sargent: So Robert, I wonder if part of what we’re seeing here is that in Trump’s genuine understanding of the situation, evangelicals really do matter a lot more within his base than Catholics do. What does the data show on that? It confirms that, right? How would these different groups perceive this controversy generally?
Jones: That’s right. His strongest supporters have always been white evangelical Protestants. They have voted more than eight in 10 for him every time he has been on the ballot. Catholics are a much more complex story. His support among Catholics has actually been split pretty starkly along racial and ethnic lines.
He’s always had white non-Hispanic Catholics with him, but they vote about six in 10 for him, not 85 percent for him. The real difference is that inside the Catholic Church, Hispanic Catholics have actually voted Democratic, typically. In the last election, it was only about 43 percent of Hispanic Catholics that supported him, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics. There’s this racial tension inside the Catholic Church, and it’s just not a monolith in the way that it is among white evangelicals.
His statement that he could walk down the middle of the street and shoot somebody in the middle of the day and people would still vote for him—I think that’s 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.
Sargent: 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 a flawed vessel sent to them by God to carry out his and their plans in the world. Whereas Catholics aren’t really at that place. Is that distinction correct?
Jones: That’s fair. Catholics have much more complex reasons for supporting Trump than white evangelicals do. His messianic appearances actually resonate much stronger with evangelicals than they do among Catholics. You can see that in the favorability numbers, too—Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals, even today, is 70 percent. It hardly ever wavers, no matter what happens.
But his favorability among even white Catholics who voted for him is only about 53 percent. It’s just barely in majority territory today.
Sargent: What is his favorability rating with Catholics overall right now?
Jones: With Catholics overall, it’s actually a little bit underwater—just below majority. But that’s because his favorability rating among Hispanic Catholics is 25 percent. It’s half as high as among white Catholics.
Sargent: So let’s listen to some more of Trump here. He’s asked if he’ll apologize to Pope Leo. Then he says this.
Reporter (voiceover): You don’t apologize?
Donald Trump (voiceover): No, I don’t, because Pope Leo said things that are wrong. He was very much against what I’m doing with regard to Iran. And you cannot have a nuclear Iran. Pope Leo would not be happy with the end result. You’d 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 MAGA person, and he’s a great guy, Louis. And I said, I like Louis better than I like the pope.
Sargent: So, Robert, what do you make of that? All this makes it a lot worse, doesn’t it?
Jones: Well, the never-apologize mantra, right? Straight from Roger Stone all the way through. This is his MO. Just while we’re talking about religion, it was striking to me when he was running for president the first time around, where he just outright admitted he’s never even asked God for forgiveness. He outright said, “I’ve never asked forgiveness for my sins,” which for most Christians is a pretty threshold moment to joining the religion or becoming part of the religion.
This is really part of his MO. Don’t ask forgiveness, even of God. Certainly don’t apologize to any human being. Just stand by it. But you’re right that in this case, it is so far over the line—it may actually do some damage.
Sargent: 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 Roy Cohn.
Jones: Yeah, that’s right.
Sargent: He’s basically applying his longtime policy of never backing down—which was taught to him by Roy Cohn—to his relations with the pope, a spiritual leader of many, many millions who is operating from a 2,000-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 are 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. I wonder whether that makes things worse in the minds of at least some religious people. Can you talk about that?
Jones: Well, 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. Trump is so out of his depth here that he doesn’t really even realize what he’s walked into. Catholic just war tradition goes back to Saint Augustine. It is more than 1,500 years old, serious Catholic theology. It’s very developed, and it’s over the very serious question of: If there’s a state that has a monopoly on violence and can wield it at such high levels, what are the moral restraints that should be placed on a state—even on a king, in its original formulations? It turns out there are moral constraints according to Catholic moral tradition.
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 have failed, and there has to be an imminent threat before. You could imagine a different world in which Trump knew this tradition and tried to frame a justification for going to war with Iran that might meet some of those criteria, even if it were kind of spun very heavily. But he hasn’t even attempted to do this. He just doesn’t really realize the kind of bandsaw he’s run into here with Catholic moral theology.
Sargent: 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 nourished by Catholic theology going back to Saint Augustine.
Jones: It’s really telling in that clip you’ve played about Trump that he’s simply appealing to ends. If you think about ends and means in your philosophy classes, he’s just appealing to an end and saying, We should want this kind of end with Iran. And if we want that end, then we could just go to war.
But that’s not the way moral philosophy works. There are principles that one must meet. You can’t just declare an end and then willy-nilly deploy any means to getting there. That’s the whole point of moral theology; to limit what can be done, particularly when we’re talking about wielding violence. The thing that is so revealing is that Trump can’t even recognize the functioning of a principle that might limit power. That’s just not even in his lexicon.
Sargent: 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 really a radical theology. Hegseth has also, not coincidentally, been essentially saying that maximal force and violence and brutality is a good thing. He’s been saturated with bloodlust and sadism as he’s talked about how our precision weaponry will kill people on a mass scale. He even recited one prayer which essentially said, in some form or other, 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 to Pete Hegseth, but not to the enemy. That itself is something that, if I understand correctly, Pope Leo is rebutting. Is he not? Can you explain that?
Jones: Pope Leo rebutted 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. We do have these diametrically opposed 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.
What Pope Leo is saying is something quite different. He’s saying, 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.
Sargent: Do you think a lot of religious Catholics out there will understand this dimension of the debate? Will they see Trump not just blaspheming himself, but also being so diametrically opposed to Catholic doctrine on principle? Will that trouble them?
Jones: I think it will. It may be a cumulative thing. They’ll see the tension between Pope Leo and Trump. They’ll definitely see it, because he’s an American pope. That’ll make it much more resonant than perhaps other popes. But I think what will happen is because of the way that Pope Leo is carving out this very careful moral theological stance—that trickles down to the bishops and to parish priests. It creates a space for very different conversations to happen.
Because the most powerful thing is what happens at the local community level. Not what happens on high. Pope Leo’s leadership here is creating more space for bishops and parish priests to have a different conversation—one where maybe they just have a whole Bible study or a whole theology study on the Catholic just war tradition. And if you do that you’re very quickly going to discover there’s no way to shoehorn this Iran war into anything to be approved by that tradition.
Sargent: 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?
Jones: I think so. That’s the church’s job, to provide moral teaching, and that’s part of what the hierarchy does. It organizes the worldwide church and can influence certain kinds of conversations and bring them to the fore. By spotlighting this as something very important, addressing it on Easter—these are very strong signals to local parishes that this is actually something important to talk about.
Sargent: What that would ultimately mean is that Pope Leo is, in some sense, subtly undermining Trump with a constituency among whom he’s already vulnerable.
Jones: I don’t think Pope Leo would think about it directly like that, but that may be the end result. I did take a little bit of a look, and what’s important to remember is that Trump’s super-support among evangelicals largely occurs among states that are very safe Republican states. So even if he dropped 10 points among evangelicals, he’d probably still be OK.
But his support among Catholics, particularly white Catholics, is very heavily concentrated in places that are all swing states, like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—these are places where elections are won or lost. If you’re thinking about very close elections in those states—again, 60 percent of white Catholics voted for him, his favorability is now 53 percent among white Catholics, only 46 percent of white Catholics support the war in Iran—if he loses 10 points among white Catholics, it’s game over in those swing states.
Sargent: Just to wrap this up, can you explain how that plays out for JD Vance in 2028? He’s someone who converted to Catholicism, and he’s making that a major part of his political identity.
Jones: He did, very early on. And he’s also earned his own direct rebuke from the Vatican when he tried to bastardize a Catholic teaching about immigrants—he was trying to invoke the Ordo Amoris, the Order of Loves. He was trying to say, First we love our family, then we love our friends, then we love our community, and then we love the rest of the world. He got a straight rebuke from the Vatican saying, No, actually, that’s not the way this theology works. So he may run into the same problems, even though he himself is Catholic. And because he’s Catholic, that may actually create more problems for him than it does for Trump.
Sargent: Because he’ll have to explain himself in more detail?
Jones: I think so. And if you consider yourself to be a Catholic in good standing, how then can you be being rebuked by the head of the Catholic Church at the same time?
Sargent: Well, best of luck to JD Vance 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.
Jones: Thanks so much.