The pope vs Potus: war of words between Pope Leo XIV and Trump has a clear victor

Diarmaid MacCulloch knows a thing or two about a schism, so who better to ask about the barney between the 47th president of the United States and the pope? A brief refresher, beginning with Donald Trump posting on his Truth Social platform an AI-generated image of himself in the light-haloed persona of what, to the untrained eye, sure looks like a Lord and Saviour. (The image has since been removed, but there’s no retracting blasphemy, right?)

Leo XIV, the 267th occupant of the throne of St Peter and the first American pope, has been – some would say unsurprisingly – promoting a message of peace that is generally understood to align with the teachings of Jesus Christ. “God does not bless any conflict,” Leo posted on X on Friday (his handle is the classy @Pontifex). “Military action will not create space for freedom or times of #Peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.”

In response Donald Trump let fly on his own personal social media site: “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy… He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” The rambling post is much, much longer, but you get the idea. And let’s not forget Trump’s beneficent Easter Day message, which closed: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!”

Leo has already taken aim at the “secretary of war”, Pete Hegseth, after the latter prayed publicly for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. The pope issued a blunt rebuke: God ignores the prayers of leaders who wage war, he said, and have “hands full of blood”. Catholic convert JD Vance – who, what with the abandonment of talks with Iran and the crushing defeat of Victor Orbán in Hungary, has had a really spectacularly bad week – has now weighed in. “Stick to matters of, you know, what’s going on in the Catholic Church,” Vance said on Fox News.

MacCulloch is emeritus professor of the history of the church at Oxford University; the author of books including a magisterial history of the Reformation and a gripping biography of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s enforcer, who languished in some obscurity before MacCulloch’s late friend Hilary Mantel took up his cause. Lest you be in any doubt as to Professor MacCulloch’s opinion of the current inhabitant of the White House, he starts off robustly. “He’s always been a moron, but now he’s a moron with Alzheimer’s,” he says.

Trump’s flailing vacuity removes any weight from his words, MacCulloch says, despite his position as the so-called leader of the so-called free world: “Anything he does is simply related to his own ego. It has no external reference, and he just rages – rather like a four-year-old child might against anything which he regards as offensive to the ego.”

How to compare Donald Trump to that other egotistical pope-baiter, Henry VIII? “Henry VIII, although a narcissist like Trump, was not a moron: he was an intelligent man, and around him, he allowed clever people to act,” MacCulloch says. “Thomas Cromwell was able to run with what he’d done and turn it into something rational and useful, which I would regard the Church of England as being, for instance.” Though he does note of Henry’s clever crew: “Often they got their heads cut off in the process” – Cromwell’s fate in the end. Pam Bondi doesn’t face the literal axe, at least.

As to the Vatican “sticking to matters of, you know, what’s going on the Catholic Church”, in Vance’s deathless words, in fact the Catholic Church has learnt its lesson, MacCulloch says. The excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570 was “disastrous” for Rome “because the pope had automatically turned English Catholics into traitors”. A decade later, in 1580, Gregory XIII suspended the earlier bull because of representations by English Catholics about the impossible situation it left them in.

That 16th-century sequence of events had a long tail, MacCulloch says: “One of the reasons that, in the 20th century, Pope Pius XI did not condemn Hitler openly was that a Vatican bureaucrat said, ‘Look what happened with Elizabeth I’.”

It’s always salutary to have a chat with someone who’s got the perspective of centuries. Henry VIII’s wily actions strengthened his nation; Trump’s behaviour is having just the opposite effect, “basically bringing the American dominance of the world to an end”, MacCulloch notes coolly. “It lasted from 1945 to the present day, and now it’s in tatters. The prestige of the USA has been exploded. It’s still got its wealth, but as we have just seen in Hungary, wealth is not always the key to political power when you’ve got elections and angry people to vote.”

Now that anger is turning against him – even the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, normally a staunch ally, has had a pop at Trump. “Now everything he does turns to dust,” MacCulloch says. “For the first time, he’s beginning to see that.”

Photograph by Observer Composite via AP/Getty Images, Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images