Pope Francis Dies, Conclave Elects First American Pope; Trump Picks a Fight Within Weeks

A Death and a First

Pope Francis died on April 21, 2025 — Easter Monday — at age 88, of a stroke followed by cardiac arrest. His funeral on April 26 in St. Peter’s Square drew more than 250,000 mourners and over 100 official delegations, including reigning monarchs and heads of state. The conclave to choose his successor opened May 7. On the fourth ballot, on May 8, white smoke rose from the Sistine Chapel chimney. Cardinal Dominique Mamberti stepped onto the central loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica and announced, for the first time in the 2,000-year history of the Roman Catholic Church, an American pope.

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost — Chicago-born, Augustinian, an Illinois-trained mathematician turned missionary who had spent decades in Peru and most recently led the Vatican’s powerful Dicastery for Bishops under Francis — took the name Leo XIV. His first words to the world, from the loggia, were “Peace be with all of you!” He was inaugurated on May 18, 2025.

For American Catholics, the moment was historic. For the Trump administration, it was a problem.

Trump Loses an Ally Before He Has One

There was a brief window in which Pope Leo’s election might have been claimed by the political right as a moment of American religious triumph. Republican leaders did, initially, congratulate the new pope; Vice President JD Vance, himself a Catholic convert, attended the inauguration. Trump issued a perfunctory statement.

Then Leo started talking. From the earliest weeks of his pontificate, the new pope used his platform to address what he called the “wounds of our time” — war, the treatment of migrants, the dignity of the poor, the abuse of executive power against vulnerable people. None of those positions were new for the Catholic Church. All of them were, by the design of the speaker, in direct tension with the policies of the U.S. administration that had taken office four months earlier and was at that moment in the middle of mass deportation operations, federal-worker purges, and the Liberation Day tariff regime.

By summer, Pope Leo was openly criticizing the U.S. expansion of the war in the Middle East. By fall, he had spoken out against the boat-strike killings in the Caribbean. By the time the U.S. joined Israel’s air campaign against Iran in early 2026, the pope had become — in a way no previous pontiff had been within an American president’s first year — one of the highest-profile global moral critics of the United States government.

A Year of Attacks From a President Who Will Not Be Outlasted

Trump’s response to all of this has been the response he gives to every prominent critic: personal attacks, baseless accusations, and the conversion of an institutional disagreement into a one-man feud. Within months of Leo’s election, Trump was attacking the pope in interviews. He shared an AI-generated image of himself dressed as Jesus Christ. He has accused Leo of “endangering Catholics” and falsely claimed the pope wants Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. As of May 2026 — one full year after Leo’s election — Trump has still not spoken to the pope by phone.

The fact that the target is the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics has not given the president pause; it has, if anything, intensified his attacks. He cannot fire a pope, cannot indict a pope, cannot strip a pope’s security clearance. So he reaches for the only tool he has against any institution that refuses to defer to him: the lie, repeated daily, until his own supporters absorb it as fact.

Why This Entry Matters

The election of Pope Leo XIV is, on its own, a historic event in American religious life — a Chicago-born missionary becoming the first U.S. pope after 2,000 years of Italian, French, German, and Polish predecessors. The fact that this event happened in May 2025, three months into Trump’s second term, is what makes it directly relevant to the political record of this presidency.

It set up the year-long collision course between the White House and the Vatican that has shaped subsequent foreign policy moments — from Iran to immigration to the boat strikes — and that has placed the world’s most prominent religious leader in sustained public conflict with an American president. It is also a quiet reminder of what the Catholic hierarchy decided to elevate at the moment Trump was consolidating power: an Augustinian missionary who has spent his adult life with the poor in Latin America, not a culture-war prelate aligned with American conservatism.

The pope was, in other words, a deliberate institutional answer to the moment. Trump understood that immediately. He has been attacking ever since.