Trump Spirals as Surprise Poll Shows Attacks on Pope Backfiring Badly

Donald Trump has been raging at Pope Leo’s criticism of the Iran war for weeks, and he just unleashed his most vile attack yet. Trump accused the pope of “endangering a lot of Catholics” by advocating for peace. Yet a new Washington Post poll finds that Trump is losing this battle very badly. Large majorities react negatively to Trump’s claims about the pope, and even more strikingly, big majorities approve of the pope’s message of peace, even though Trump is bombarding America with relentless lies and propaganda about both the pope and the war. We talked to scholar-of-religion Sarah Posner, who writes for Talking Points Memo and hosts the Reign of Error podcast. We discuss why this polling is encouraging in nonobvious ways, why there’s a schism between white evangelicals and Catholics over Trump, how MAGA encourages Trump to imagine himself fighting a spiritual war against the pope, and why that’s a political disaster for him. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.