The pope & Trump: A match not made in heaven | The Excerpt

On the Tuesday, April 21, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: President Donald Trump has been clashing with Pope Leo XIV for weeks now in a rare and increasingly public dispute between a U.S. president and the head of the Catholic Church. USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard joins The Excerpt to share his insights.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

President Donald Trump has been clashing with Pope Leo XIV for weeks now in a rare and increasingly public dispute between the US president and the head of the Catholic Church. The Pope has warned against the escalating violence around the world and called for peace and diplomacy. But Trump has pushed back hard going as far as calling the Pope "weak on crime" and falsely suggesting that he supports Iran having nuclear weapons. But the Pope says he isn't looking for a fight.

Pope Leo XIV:

The talk that I gave at the prayer meeting for peace a couple days ago was prepared two weeks ago, well before the president ever commented on myself and on the message of peace that I am promoting. And yet as it happens, it was looked at as if I was trying to debate again the president, which is not my interest at all.

Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Tuesday, April 21st, 2026. Here to share his insights on the unprecedented viewed between an American president and the Pope is USA TODAY World Affairs Correspondent Kim Hjelmgaard.

Kim, it's great to have you here.

Kim Hjelmgaard:

Thanks so much for having me.

Dana Taylor:

You frame your reporting on this as a parable, not just a political clash. What does that lens reveal that straight news coverage might miss?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

Yeah, that's a great question. Well, I mean, I should say, of course, it's not a parable in the strict sense of Jesus and the gospels using a short and simple story to kind of illustrate something, a moral or spiritual question or something like that. But I do think there is sort of an illustration here or a parable-like illustration. We have two men, perhaps who have the two largest megaphones in the world. This is the US president and the leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Leo. And in particular, sort of this president and this Pope who are both Americans, they have very different focuses. And when you kind of add those two things together, perhaps it's inevitable that there's going to be a public clash of ideas and rhetoric. There's one person insisting that he's putting America first in terms of wars and different episodes, whether that's in Iran or Venezuela or possibly Cuba, as we may find out in the next few weeks. He's cutting deals with foreign governments. And there's a lot of unanswered kind of questions about his grand strategy.

And then we have another person who's kind of spent a lifetime in the trenches with the poor and the destitute pursuing religious principles and who, by all accounts, does kind of have a grand strategy. So it's a parable in that sense.

Dana Taylor:

I know you were recently in Rome. What was your sense of how this clash is playing out on the ground in the epicenter of Catholic power?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

As many people listening to this, probably be aware, there is a strong tradition for the Pope and the Vatican more widely to act as an intermediary in resolving wars and conflicts helping to release political prisoners, provide humanitarian aid, all that.

I would say generally speaking, when I met with different Vatican officials trying to get to the bottom of this a little bit, they don't view this as a political question the way the Trump administration has framed it. They view this very much as part and parcel of kind of faith questions and how you solve intractable issues around the world. And that's where there's a disconnect. The White House very much feels that the Pope has been speaking politically. The Pope and the Vatican do not have that same frame on it.

Dana Taylor:

And how is this feud playing out back here at home, particularly with Trump's Christian MAGA supporters?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

Well, I mean, the jury's out a little bit in terms of whether this feud will push people ultimately away from Trump or toward Trump in the upcoming midterms or farther out in the next presidential election. But I think it's very clear that there has been a strong backlash. Trump's comments, his use of memes that have kind of portrayed him as like a Jesus-like figure, that's definitely sparked a pushback from religious leaders as well as Trump's conservative and kind of Christian MAGA supporters more generally. So I think we can say with confidence that it potentially worsens an already kind of difficult 2026 election cycle for congressional Republicans in particular. It certainly risks alienating and part of Trump's base.

But so stepping back a bit, I think Catholics, particularly in the United States, they appear torn about this feud. I believe back the napkin kind of numbers here that Trump won about just north of 50% of Catholic vote in 2016, a little more in 2024. And some of the polls that we have are showing that he is losing support from Catholic voters even before he got into this kind of rhetorical back and forth with Pope Leo. It hasn't helped him, I think is what we can say.

Dana Taylor:

Trump keeps coming back to national security, especially Iran and nuclear weapons. The Pope is talking about morality and restraint. Are they fundamentally speaking different languages?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

The short answer is yes. With respect to the war in Iran, whether Trump really means it or not, I don't know. But the fact that he's used a phrase like, "We're going to potentially destroy a whole civilization," that is a different kind of language than the Vatican speaks. The White House has spent heavily on American treasure in this episode, also American blood. He's complained about kind of lack of support from allies. He also didn't consult allies about this. And so it's a different language in the sense that MAGA is an ideology, but it's unclear what it actually stands for.

The Pope, on the other hand, speaks and acts, by all counts, from a place of Christian values. His remarks come from a decade long ... No, five decade long commitment actually to the kind of teachings of a particular order in the Catholic church. This is St. Augustine's ideas. So when he's talking now, it's kind of the culmination of a kind of lifelong intellectual interest in all these different problems that our world faces. So yes, kind of different languages. They're not talking across purposes, but they have very different vocabularies.

Dana Taylor:

Pope Leo is of course the first ever American Pope. What story emerged when you looked into both the selection and timing of this choice?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, I would say one of the big takeaways I had when I was reporting in Rome was that there's definitely a feeling amongst officials there that the current Pope was elected, at least in part, chosen by the conclave, we should say, to act as a kind of counterweight to Trump, American versus American, the world's two most powerful Americans perhaps. There's not a lot of evidence of that. I mean, it's more of like a working theory, even if it's a fairly widely held view. There's definitely more concrete evidence that during the conclave, College of Cardinals that ultimately selected the Pope did it on the basis of the fact that he spent five decades in the trenches on issues that matter to the church many years in Peru. And during that time, he built up a wide network of international connections across the planet. And that's really what you kind of need when you go out looking for so called votes to be chosen as the Pope.

Dana Taylor:

This feud has escalated fast from a sermon to personal attacks. You mentioned that AI-generated image of Trump portraying himself as a Jesus-like figure, though he's denied the comparison. How unusual is this moment in the history of US-Vatican relations? And Kim, what about world history?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

So it's both unusual and not. I mean, it's certainly unusual for the attacks to be so personal. I mean, in recent days, both Trump and the Pope have been walking the apparent animosity back somewhat and saying that they aren't personal attacks. Actually, we should say Trump hasn't said this, but he said that they can agree to disagree. Pope Leo has been more explicit in saying these are not personal attacks. But there's not a lot of precedent for such a kind of one figure head versus another figurehead going at it.

That said, it is worth noting that the Vatican and the US only reestablished diplomatic ties in the mid 1980s. And there was more than a hundred years of a lot of distrust from both sides, various historical reasons that I won't get into here. But other Popes have been extremely voluble in terms of talking out what they believe in. Leo's predecessor, Francis, heavily criticized Trump's policies on immigration and climate. He didn't go after the man. Pope John Paul II lobbied ferociously to try to get George W. Bush to not invade Iraq during that war. So there's some precedent where popes have been aggressively trying to go to presidents to get them to do stuff, but there's not a lot of precedent in modern times, and as far as I know, sort of reaching back into history where characters have kind of gone so at each other in this direct way.

Dana Taylor:

This may feel like a strange question to ask, but where does a Catholic Church stand on war? Has that messaging remained consistent or evolved over time?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

Well, I'm not a theologian so I want to be careful about how much I say about this. But what I can say with confidence is that there is a thing in Christian philosophy called the just war theory. And basically, that theory, without putting a too final point on the matter, tries to reconcile a couple of different things. One of those things is that taking human life is obviously very wrong, that states have a kind of duty to protect their citizens. Another is that protecting innocent life and kind of defending moral values requires, on occasion, to use force and violence. And this is really with the rub of it. So the White House in particular, Vice President J.D. Vance, have kind of used this just war theory to say that the pope should be careful when he's talking about theology, particularly if he's implying that the war in Iran is not a just war.

I think that in modern times, there's not a lot of good examples where you could say that the Vatican has advocated for some kind of war. It's really the opposite. They've long advocated publicly and secretly that it's just better not to start wars.

Dana Taylor:

Stepping back, does this clash have real world consequences? Could a clash like this shape public opinion, diplomacy, or even how wars are justified?

Kim Hjelmgaard:

I think it's raised questions about the limits to which Trump can talk about issues that might impact his base or his vote. And I don't think it's controversial to say that Trump conducts his diplomacy such as it is in an aggressive way. He's nakedly transactional. He admits that.

On the other hand, every Pope has been saying in the modern era has tried to stop wars and to sort of talk and justify why they're not necessary. So jury's out on whether this is going to concretely change how Trump or the White House conducts its diplomacy or shapes public opinion, but I think if anything, it will give Trump administration some pause about whether they want to go pick in a fight with someone who's extremely popular.

Dana Taylor:

Kim Hjelmgaard is a world affairs correspondent with USA TODAY. It's always good to speak with you, Kim.

Kim Hjelmgaard:

Thanks so much for having me. I enjoyed it.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.