Marco Rubio Admits He Pressured the Pope on Trump’s Behalf

State Secretary Marco Rubio’s meet and greet with Pope Leo XIV didn’t squash the White House’s beef with the Vatican—instead, it seemed to emphasize it.

Rubio told reporters in Rome Friday that his meeting with the pontiff was “very positive,” but mentioned that they did discuss the Iran war and America’s point of view.

“We had a very good meeting,” Rubio said, according to CNN’s Alejandra Jaramillo. Rubio also said he expressed to Leo “the danger that Iran poses to the world.”

Donald Trump revealed Thursday evening that he had instructed Rubio to bring up the matter, apparently uninterested in settling a boiling feud between his administration and the Catholic Church.

“I just said, tell the pope very nicely, very respectfully, that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. “Also tell the pope that Iran killed 42,000 innocent protesters who didn’t have guns, who didn’t have weapons. Tell that to the pope.”

The Chicago-born pontiff upset the president and a number of Trump’s underlings when he advocated for world peace earlier this year. The Pentagon reportedly threatened a Holy See ambassador in January, days after the pope made antiwar remarks during his State of the World address.

Leo has brushed off Trump’s remarks, claiming that he has “no fear” of the Trump administration or of “speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel,” though the Vatican did reject a White House invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.

Rubio’s meeting with Leo ended in an awkward gift exchange that seemingly left the pope speechless. In a not so subtle gesture, the pope gave the Trump administration representative a pen made of olive wood as a de facto olive branch, dubbing it a “plant of peace.” Rubio, in turn, gave the pope a tiny crystal football while acknowledging that the pope—a well-known Chicago White Sox fan—is more of a “baseball guy.”

The Vatican put out a statement after the meeting, referring to the talks as “cordial” but noting that “there followed an exchange of views regarding the regional and international situation, with particular attention to countries marked by war, political tensions, and difficult humanitarian situations, as well as to the need to work tirelessly in support of peace.”

Virginia’s leadership is preparing to fight its state Supreme Court ruling Friday overturning Democrats’ redistricting referendum.

In a statement, Democratic state Attorney General Jay Jones called out the court’s decision as “putting politics over the rule of law.”

“This decision silences the voices of the millions of Virginians who cast their ballots in every corner of the Commonwealth, and it fuels the growing fears across our nation about the state of our democracy,” Jones said. “My team is carefully reviewing this unprecedented order and we are evaluating every legal pathway forward to defend the will of the people and protect the integrity of Virginia’s elections.”

Senator Tim Kaine criticized the timing of the state’s Supreme Court ruling, saying, “If the Virginia Supreme Court had legitimate concerns about this referendum, the time to stop it would have been before three million Virginians cast their ballots.

“The U.S. Supreme Court eviscerates the Voting Rights Act in a lawsuit brought by a January 6 extremist and Southern states race to craft backroom deals disenfranchising minority voters and candidates. Meanwhile Virginia voters choose to stand up against national disenfranchisement only to see their votes cast into the trash by a 4–3 ruling,” Kaine added.

Meanwhile, Republican-led states across the country continue to gerrymander following President Trump’s demand for mid-decade redistricting and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week. Most of those actions took or are taking place without state referendums, basically forcing through new congressional maps that disenfranchise Democrats and Black Americans.

One polling expert, Zachary Donnini of VoteHub, projects that barring any more court orders, nine Republican-led states will have successfully redrawn their maps this year, as opposed to one Democratic-led state. Thanks to a conservative-controlled Supreme Court, the GOP is stacking the deck and denying Black people representation.

Trump-endorsed GOP Representative Max Miller has been accused of physically abusing his ex-wife Emily Moreno—daughter of GOP Senator Bernie Moreno—for years. Miller has denied the allegations.

Court filings obtained by the Daily Mail revealed that Emily is attempting to change their custody situation due to Miller’s “dangerous physical behavior” while their 2-year-old daughter was present. Moreno stated that Miller hit her during a custody exchange with their daughter in February, bruising Moreno’s arm and torso, as shown in photos obtained by the Mail. Moreno also claims that Miller threw a pot of boiling water on her in 2024 while their daughter was present.

Moreno also told the court that Miller “regularly speaks to me in an inappropriate, aggressive and demeaning manner, which is not in the best interest of our child.”

Miller and Moreno separated in 2024 and divorced in 2025.

Miller has faced similar accusations in the past. His ex-girlfriend, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, 49, alleged that he pushed her against a wall and slapped her after she accused him of cheating in 2020.

Miller blames his congressional colleague and former father-in-law for his current legal issues, and is framing his ex-wife as “malicious” due to her alleged bipolar diagnosis.

“It is unfortunate that @berniemoreno continues to fund and enable his daughter’s malicious campaign to ruin my life despite his knowledge of her mental health issues,” he wrote Friday on X. “Bernie, this must be distracting from your job. These antics harm your own grandchild. Anytime you want to put a stop to this, you can.”

Senator Moreno has yet to publicly respond.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito relied on misleading data to support his ruling decimating the Voting Rights Act, The Guardian reported Friday.

In the court’s majority opinion, Alito claimed that the kind of racial discrimination that had prompted the creation of the Voting Rights Act no longer existed.

“Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana,” Alito wrote.

He was citing a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by the Department of Justice, which relied on a statistical methodology that is not preferred by experts in determining statewide voter turnout. The brief calculated Black and white voter turnout in Louisiana as a proportion of the total population of each racial group over the age of 18. This is generally considered a suboptimal method because it includes people who can’t vote, including noncitizens and people with felony convictions.

Experts typically prefer to consider voter turnout as a proportion of the citizen voting age population, or the eligible population. Using this methodology, The Guardian determined that Black voter turnout in Louisiana only exceeded white voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election.

Using the DOJ’s data, Alito also elided the fact that the racial voter gap is actually widening. In the three most recent presidential elections since Barack Obama was on the ballot, Black voter turnout has trailed white voter turnout, according to The Guardian’s analysis. In Louisiana, the disparity grew wider between 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Kevin Morris, a researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that Alito’s claim is “simply not factual,” and that the turnout gap had “exploded” over the last three years.

Michael McDonald, a leading expert on voter turnout who teaches at the University of Florida, told The Guardian that relying on this “misleading” methodology was purposeful. “If I wanted to manipulate the numbers in a way that was favorable to the government’s interest, I would be using voting age population,” McDonald said.

“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling on Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has opened the door for redistricting efforts across the country, as Republicans rush to redraw Democrat-led districts, many of which have majority-Black populations.

Donald Trump either can’t or won’t face the music.

The president exploded at a Black female reporter Thursday who dared to question why he was so focused on his expensive Washington vanity projects while the rest of the country struggles to fill their gas tanks, deriding the query as “stupid” and the reporter who bothered to ask as a “horror show.”

“Mr. President, you are here against the backdrop of war in Iran. Why focus on all these projects right now when gas prices soar?” asked ABC News’s Rachel Scott.

“You know why? Because I want to keep our country beautiful and safe. Beautiful also,” the 79-year-old said.

Trump then went on to complain about the state of the nation’s capital, claiming that several iconic monuments—such as the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool—are “disgusting” and covered in dirt. Cleaning the landmarks, Trump said, would cost approximately $2 million.

“You probably don’t see dirt, but I do,” Trump told the reporter. “And that’s not what our country is about. Our country is about beauty, cleanliness, safety, great people. Not a filthy capital.

“Such a stupid question, if you ask me,” Trump continued. “We are fixing up the Reflecting Pond at the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, and you say, ‘Why are you fixing it up?’ Because you can understand dirt, baby, better than I can, but I don’t allow it.

“This is one of the worst reporters—she’s with ABC Fake News, and she’s a horror show. She’s saying, ‘Why would you bother fixing this up?’ Why would I bother taking 11 or 12 truckloads of filth out of the water in front of the Lincoln monument?” Trump said, turning to his entourage to mock the reporter while misstating the name of the site. “A question like that is a disgrace to our country.”

Elsewhere in Washington, Trump is building a “Triumphal Arc,” destroying some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security, and constructing a 90,000-square-foot ballroom that is likely going to cost taxpayers $1 billion (against his initial promises that it wouldn’t cost more than $200 million, and that it would be entirely funded by private donations).

Meanwhile, the cost of oil and gas is through the roof due to the ongoing war with Iran, which is costing the U.S. roughly $1 billion per day, according to initial estimates by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The average cost of gas nationwide is $4.54 per gallon, with large swaths of the country pushing $5 a gallon, according to the AAA’s price tracker. That’s about 50 percent higher than prices were before the war started. In some areas of California, such as Mono County, fuel costs are well above $7 per gallon.

Analysts have predicted that the high prices are probably here to stay, at least through the end of 2026, as the war in Iran drags on. Last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posited that costs could climb even steeper before midterms.