Pope Torches Trump After President Calls Him “Weak on Crime” Twice

The Holy See will continue to speak out against war, despite challenges from Donald Trump.

Pope Leo XIV brushed off the U.S. president’s verbal attacks Monday, telling journalists aboard a papal flight to Algiers that he’s not afraid of the Trump administration and uninterested in getting into a “debate” with the U.S. president.

“I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do,” Leo said in English. “We are not politicians. We don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker.”

Separately, the Chicago-born pontiff told Reuters, “I don’t ‌think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in ‌the way that some people are doing.

“I will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, ⁠promoting dialogue and multilateral ​relationships among the states to look ​for just solutions to problems.

“Too many people are suffering in the world today,” Leo continued. “Too many innocent ‌people ⁠are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way.”

Leo’s remarks follow several direct challenges from the president, as well as reports that emerged last week about a meeting between Pentagon officials and a U.S. Vatican ambassador in January that included suggestive threats and a mention of the Avignon papacy.

In a lengthy rant on Truth Social Sunday, Trump claimed that the leader of the Catholic Church was “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”

“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela,” Trump wrote. “And I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do, setting Record Low Numbers in Crime, and creating the Greatest Stock Market in History.”

He added that Leo should be “thankful,” claiming responsibility for the pope’s appointment by suggesting that the religious order only put an American atop the Vatican in order to “deal with” Trump.

“Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician,” the president added. “It’s hurting him very badly and, more importantly, it’s hurting the Catholic Church!”

Trump continued to vent in front of reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews minutes later, repeating that he’s “not a big fan of Pope Leo.”

“I don’t think he’s doing a very good job. He likes crime, I guess,” Trump said.

The president also suggested that Leo was inappropriately “worried about fear,” claiming that the Catholic Church arrested ministers and priests and “all those great people” during the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, Leo was only installed in 2025, and Trump himself was in charge of the U.S. at the height of the pandemic.

The Catholic Church has 1.42 billion baptized members around the world, with more than 70 million in the U.S. Roughly 20 percent of Americans identify as Catholic, making it the second-most-popular religion in the country behind Protestantism.

House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin on Friday demanded that Donald Trump get his brain tested in light of the president’s recent comments on Iran.

The Maryland lawmaker sent a letter to White House physician Sean Barbabella, imploring the doctor to administer a cognitive test to the president. Raskin cited remarks Trump made earlier this week as justification for the exam, including Truth Social statements in which Trump threatened to annihilate Iran’s “whole civilization.”

“Experts have repeatedly warned that the President has been exhibiting signs consistent with dementia and cognitive decline. And, in recent days, the country has watched President Trump’s public statements and outbursts turn increasingly incoherent, volatile, profane, deranged, and threatening,” wrote Raskin.

“His apparently deteriorating condition has caused tremendous alarm across the nation (and political spectrum) about the President’s cognitive function and continuing mental fitness for the office of President, and prompted concerns about the President’s wellbeing,” Raskin noted.

Trump’s escalatory threats haven’t just alarmed his usual critics—they’ve also driven a wedge into the MAGA movement. Some of Trump’s longest and most fervent supporters denounced his warmongering behavior this week, including former Fox News titans Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, as well as far-right influencers such as Alex Jones and Candace Owens.

The president then smeared his conservative acolytes in turn, claiming that they were losers with “low IQs.” That didn’t sit well with his voting base, who turned against the president en masse on his historically sycophantic social media platform Truth Social Friday. Many were shocked and appalled by the president’s brazen display of disloyalty to his own cause, announcing their sudden withdrawal from the MAGA movement.

“At a time when our country is at war—especially when the war was initiated by the President without congressional declaration or consent—the American people must be able to trust that the Commander-in-Chief has the mental capacity to discharge the essential duties of his office,” Raskin wrote.

Nonetheless, Trump’s White House staff brushed off Raskin’s message with an unserious smattering of insults.

“Lightweight Jamie Raskin is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told The Hill in an emailed statement. “President Trump’s sharpness, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in stark contrast to what we saw during the past four years when Democrats like Raskin intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people.”

Raskin had anticipated the Biden remark, claiming in his letter that Republicans’ fervent interest in Biden’s wellness was a good reason for them to take interest in Trump’s mental acuity.

The ranking member also demanded that the test be conducted before April 25, the results be made public, and that Barbabella testify before Congress regarding the findings.

Democratic lawmakers are demanding answers from Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, about a massive donation his organization made that may have lined the pockets of President Donald Trump.

In a letter Friday to Pulte, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden and Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren accused the president’s ally of sending Trump money under the guise of giving to charity.

In 2023, Team Pulte Inc., Pulte’s nonprofit organization, told the IRS that it had donated $65,000 to another One World Love LLC, another nonprofit, for the purposes of “assitance [sic] underserved people.”

Mother Jones first reported in February that One World Love LLC isn’t really a charity at all, but a corporate entity founded by a partner at Binnall Law Group, a firm that helped represent Trump after the deadly riot in the U.S. Capitol and in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.

Pulte’s donation to One Love LLC occurred just as the pressures of Trump’s legal bills started to escalate, the senators’ letter stated, and the so-called charity was dissolved later that same year.

“One World does not appear to be an actual nonprofit devoted to underserved individuals,” the senators wrote. “These facts raise serious concerns that Team Pulte Inc. may have illegally funneled cash out of a charity to support President Trump.”\

The Democrats also questioned Joshua Hinkle, current president and director of Team Pulte Inc. They requested the men turn over all documents from Team Pulte Inc. and its employees related to One World Love LLC or the Binnall Law Group, and their employees, by April 24.

Warren and Wyden also pressed Pulte and Hinkle on a series of discrepancies with their organization’s filings to the IRS. In tax filings, Team Pulte Inc. incorrectly listed One World Love as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, though the IRS has no entity with that name, and provided a fake tax identification number, as well as the address to a seemingly random apartment building.

President Trump has already promised presidential pardons to his staff, just barely over a year into his second term. This is the same move that Trump criticized former President Biden for at the end of his four-year term.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Trump told staff in a private meeting that he’d “pardon everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval.” Another person told the Journal that the president said he’d pardon anyone who came within 10 feet. In fact, White House aides reported that Trump makes the claim quite often in meetings.

The White House claims that he’s obviously joking.

“The Wall Street Journal should learn to take a joke, however, the President’s pardon power is absolute,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

Biden pardoned several family members and top officials targeted by Republicans, like his son Hunter and former NIH head Anthony Fauci, before leaving office. Last year, Trump declared all of Biden’s pardons “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” an accusation that has little effect on the legitimacy of the pardons, which are still valid.

Trump has already pardoned a cadre of questionable characters, including former Honduran President and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, dark web drug dealer Ross Ulbricht, Texas Representative and fraudster Henry Cuellar, and nearly every single convicted January 6 rioter, among others.

Donald Trump’s administration admitted that it spread faulty claims of health care fraud in New York state, raising questions about the federal government’s crusade to cut waste in Democratic states across the country, according to an exclusive report from The Associated Press Friday.

Last month, Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host who Trump tapped to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), claimed that last year, New York’s Medicaid program had provided five million people—nearly three-fourths of the state’s 6.8 million enrollees—with personal care services, meaning housekeeping, grooming, and meal preparation.

Oz announced on March 3 that CMS would launch a federal investigation into the apparent fraud. “Heart surgeons are trained to look at the numbers. When something doesn’t add up, you don’t ignore it, you investigate,” he said. “And right now, the numbers coming out of New York’s Medicaid program don’t add up.”

Apparently, they don’t add up because the ones Oz cited are just plain wrong.

CMS spokesman Chris Krepich told the AP that the number of New Yorkers who used personal care services last year was closer to 450,000, or between 6 and 7 percent of the state’s Medicaid enrollees.

He told the outlet that the agency had misidentified New York’s approach to applying billing codes. “CMS is committed to ensuring its analyses fully reflect state-specific billing practices and will continue to work closely with New York to validate data and strengthen program integrity oversight,” he said in an emailed statement.

Despite this revelation, Krepich said that the federal investigation of New York state’s high health care spending is still ongoing. Health analysts have argued that the state’s spending reflects higher costs for service and policies committed to providing New Yorkers with at-home care.

Not everyone is buying that this was an innocent mistake. Cadence Acquaviva, senior public information officer for the New York Department of Health, told the AP that Oz’s initial false claims about the program were “a targeted attempt to obscure the facts.”

Fiscal Policy Institute senior health policy adviser Michael Kinnucan said the discrepancy “could have been cleared up in a phone call.”

“It’s really slapdash,” he said.

The CMS administrator appeared to make other false and misleading statements in his video on X. He claimed that New York had lowered the bar for receiving personal care services to include providing aid to people who are “easily distracted”—a phrase that does not appear among the program requirements that have only become more rigorous in the past year.

New York is just one target of the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on supposed fraud in slue states. The Trump administration enjoys singling out Minnesota and California when discussing nationwide fraud, frequently equating the alleged fraud with its Democratic leadership, personified by Governors Tim Walz and Gavin Newsom.

Enthusiasm to actually fund the Gaza redevelopment proposal is waning.

The Board of Peace, a pet project cooked up by Donald Trump late last year, has received just a tiny part of the total $17 billion pledged to the charter by various countries, reported Reuters Friday.

Ten countries promised to cumulatively throw billions of dollars at the post-war remodel, which Trump has envisioned as a sprawling seaside playground similar to Dubai. Some of the nations that pledged their funds for the reconstruction effort—and the prerequisite peace plan—include Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey.

But practically none of them have actually put their money where their mouths are.

A person with direct knowledge of the peace board’s operations told Reuters that just three countries have donated to the board’s operations thus far: the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and the U.S. itself. Together, their funds amounted to less than $1 billion.

The person added that the Iran war has “affected everything” and thwarted rehabilitation efforts for the devastated region.

The board was already off to a rocky start in February, when dozens of countries convened for the project’s inaugural meeting. Trump, however, had a difficult time pronouncing his peers’ foreign names. Last month, Semafor reported that $1.2 billion of Trump’s own pledged cash for the board was actually siphoned from State Department funds, effectively forcing the American taxpayers to pay for the enormous Trumpian construction plan. At the time, Trump said he would defer $10 billion to the Gaza scheme.

Countries interested in being permanent members on the board are required to pay $1 billion for their spot.

Trump initially floated his peace board idea back in September as part of a 20-point peace plan to control Gaza, promising to include major heads of state as well as former world leaders, such as former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But the board’s charter makes little mention of Gaza. Instead, its goals appear to be as lofty as they are broad, seeking to “promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.”

The concept came under renewed scrutiny in January as Trump aggressed Greenland and NATO. The U.S. president has also invited leaders of nations with terrible track records on human rights, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, to join the board.

Longtime U.S. allies warned that the Board of Peace could upend the current world order, with several refusing to join the board at all, including France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Slovenia.

The White House revealed the designs for Donald Trump’s planned arch at Memorial Circle in Washington, D.C., Friday, and they heavily feature his preferred gold aesthetic.

The renderings were filed by the Department of the Interior along with the Commission of Fine Arts. The 250-foot arch will dwarf the Washington, D.C., skyline, sitting on a roundabout between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary.

The planned arch would be over twice the size of the Lincoln Memorial, which is about 100 feet tall, and would block views of the cemetery, one of the reasons why a veterans’ group has sued to block its construction. At 250 feet, the arch would even be larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

“I’d like it to be the biggest one of all,” Trump said in January. “We’re the biggest, most powerful nation.”

Harrison Design’s renderings show a white monument with a golden inscription reading “One Nation Under God” and a winged statue of Lady Liberty at the top. The arch’s base, with stairs, will have statues of four golden lions, an odd choice considering that the lion has historically been a symbol of England, not the U.S.

Trump is asking for $15 million in taxpayer funds from the National Endowment for the Arts to pay for the arch, despite previously claiming it would be paid for by leftover donations from his $400 million ballroom project, and spent part of Easter Sunday driving slowly around Memorial Circle observing the site instead of attending services.

Even with the economy struggling thanks to a war he started and is now desperate to end, Trump is prioritizing building monuments to himself without getting legal permission first. His ballroom construction has already been halted, and his arch could be next. But if there’s one lesson from Trump’s second term, it’s that he’s doing what he wants without any regard for the consequences.

The “bimbofication” scandal surrounding Kristi Noem’s husband has somehow gotten even worse.

Just weeks after reporting that Bryon Noem—currently married to proudly anti-LGBTQ former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—liked to dress in drag as a large-breasted woman in his spare time, the Daily Mail has revealed that Noem had a nine-year online relationship with a large-breasted dominatrix, during which he frequently disparaged his wife and discussed transitioning from man to woman.  

“I felt he was very hypocritical for standing ten toes on American family values while he was in my messages about wanting to be a trans bimbo bitch,” said dominatrix Shy Sotomayor, now 30. Bryon first reached out to her in 2016, keeping consistent contact with her until 2020—when his ultraconservative wife became governor of South Dakota. He returned to Sotomayor in 2025. “He just popped back into my life like a little groundhog,” she said. 

“Besides the fact of who your wife is, no one is prettier than me. No one is as powerful,” a text from Sotomayor read, after she discovered his true identity.

“Fucking true. Do you want me to be a woman?” Bryon responded.

“Do you want to be a woman for me?”

“I think I do.”

Other text messages obtained by the Mail reveal Noem wanted to become a woman and change his name to Crystal, writing, “I want to be a Crystal so bad.… I want to be a woman so bad.” He discussed various plastic surgeries to make him look more feminine.

One recording has Bryon telling Sotomayor he loved her, and that he could see them “leaving our spouses for each other.” In another, he professed his need to be Sotomayor’s “trans bimbo slut.” He even alluded to “family stuff” and things being “really bad at home” around January 16, after federal agents shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis—the lowest point of his wife’s tenure at the Department of Homeland Security. 

Mr. Noem’s kink is fairly harmless as far as those things go. But his recklessness, his clear gender identity crisis, and the wanton, Bible-toting conservatism that his wife carried with her while terrorizing hundreds of people at DHS make this story all the more absurd. 

Mr. Noem has yet to comment on recent revelations. 

More than three weeks ago, Virginia legislators passed a bill that would severely restrict ICE operations in the state, preventing local police and sheriff’s departments from signing contracts with the agency unless it followed a strict set of state laws.

For some reason, Virginia’s new Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger hasn’t signed the bill—and the deadline for her to take action is Monday.

The bill attaches a number of conditions to ICE activity, requiring agents to have a judicial warrant to investigate a person’s immigration status and to enter homes, to notify local partners of their enforcement actions with at least one week’s notice, to refrain from being within 500 yards of a polling place, and to clearly identify themselves.

ICE agents would also be subject to Virginian courts if they violate state laws, and state police and prosecutors would have investigation and charging powers over “any shooting involving any agent” working with or for the agency. All of this would prompt heavy pushback from ICE and the Trump administration, who would likely refuse these conditions and end ICE contracts within Virginia.

Is that why Spanberger hasn’t taken action on the bill yet? She pulled state law enforcement out of ICE’s 287(g) cooperation program in February, but she hasn’t said anything about this bill despite it being nearly a month old. If she doesn’t veto or sign it by Monday, though, it will become law per Virginia’s constitution.

On Thursday, Spanberger vetoed a bill that would have brought a casino to Fairfax County, citing local opposition. Like the rest of the country, many Virginians also oppose ICE’s violence and legally questionable actions. Will she listen to them and sign a bill restricting ICE into law?

Kristi Noem might be fired soon from her latest position within the Trump administration.

The former Homeland Security chief has barely put in a lick of work at her new government job, sparking questions about Noem’s ongoing tenure within the Trump administration, State Department officials told the Daily Mail.

Noem was ousted from her position atop Homeland Security last month for playing a starring role in several major scandals, including a sprawling $220 million DHS advertising campaign that prominently featured her on horseback and reportedly funneled money into the pockets of her friends and allies. Her reputation—and consequently, Donald Trump’s immigration agenda—were also marred by the actions of ICE agents in Minnesota, where Noem’s subordinates killed two U.S. citizens in January.

But despite the drama, Trump was not willing to let Noem exit his administration entirely. Instead, the president demoted her to the position of special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a multinational security coalition within the folds of the State Department formed two days after she was fired.

So far, the bloc has not achieved much under Noem’s stewardship.

At least four officials who followed Noem from DHS to the brand-new security coalition have been placed on administrative leave, unnamed sources told the Mail Thursday. The outbound officials include former deputy chief of staff Troup Hemenway, ex-deputy general counsel Giovanna Cinelli, and junior staffers Josh King and Octavian Miller.

Noem, meanwhile, took just one meeting last week via teleconference, senior State Department officials told the British gossip tabloid.

“This post was intended as a soft landing so it didn’t look like Noem was immediately being fired,” one State Department insider told the Mail. “But no one really thinks she should have this job. The State Department was not happy to have her here and the understanding is that she’s not going to be here for much longer.”