Trump Accuses Pope Leo of 'Endangering Catholics' as Rubio Heads to the Vatican

A President Picking a Fight With the Pope

On Tuesday, May 5, 2026, hours before Secretary of State Marco Rubio departed for the Vatican, President Trump went on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” and attacked Pope Leo XIV — the first American-born pope in history — as a man who is “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people.” The trigger, as in nearly every previous attack Trump has launched on Leo, was the war with Iran. Trump told Hewitt that the pope wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon, a claim Leo has never made and that misrepresents the pope’s actual position, which has consistently been that diplomatic solutions must precede bombing.

The attack was the latest in a year-long pattern. Since Pope Leo’s election on May 8, 2025 — almost exactly one year before this latest broadside — Trump has not once spoken with the pontiff by phone. He has instead repeatedly attacked Leo in interviews, on Truth Social, and in remarks to reporters, often in response to the pope’s public criticism of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran. In one widely shared post earlier this year, Trump shared an AI-generated image of himself dressed as Jesus Christ; the pope, days later, told an audience that “warmakers have hands full of blood.”

Rubio Walks Into the Room

Rubio’s arrival at the Vatican on May 7 marks the first known meeting between the pope and a senior Trump administration official since Leo’s election. Rubio, a Catholic who has at times tried to position himself as a bridge between the administration and the Church, is now in the awkward position of trying to repair a relationship his own boss has spent the past year actively wrecking. The State Department has insisted the meeting will focus on “areas of common concern” — humanitarian crises, the situation in Lebanon, the future of Catholic communities in the Middle East. The Vatican has made clear that Iran, and Trump’s conduct of the war, will be on the agenda.

The choreography of the visit is its own admission of weakness. The president of the United States is so personally hostile to the pope that the State Department had to send the secretary of state to do diplomacy a normal president would do himself. The pope, for his part, will receive a senior administration emissary while the head of that administration is, in real time, accusing him from cable interviews of getting Catholics killed.

The Pattern of Attacking Critics

This episode is not really about theology or about Iran nuclear policy. It is about how Trump treats institutions that refuse to defer to him. The pope joins a long list of figures and bodies — judges, generals, intelligence officials, civil servants, foreign leaders, journalists, former allies — who have publicly disagreed with the president and been answered with personal attacks designed to delegitimize them. The novelty is the target: a pope whose moral authority cannot be diminished by the usual tools of executive retaliation. Trump cannot fire him, cannot indict him, cannot prosecute him, cannot strip his security clearance. So Trump does the only thing left, which is to lie about him on talk radio.

It is also notable, given this administration’s loud appeals to Christian voters, that the president is in a sustained public feud with the head of the largest Christian denomination on earth. Catholic conservatives who once celebrated Leo as a fellow American are now in the position of choosing whether to defend their pope from attacks by a president of their own party — a position the administration has, throughout the past year, made progressively harder to occupy.

What Pope Leo Actually Said

For the record: Pope Leo has never endorsed an Iranian nuclear weapon. He has called for an immediate ceasefire in the Iran war, condemned the bombing of civilians in Tehran and elsewhere, and warned that “warmakers” — a category in which he has explicitly placed both U.S. and Iranian leadership at various points — would be judged by history. He has met with refugee families displaced by the war, called for humanitarian corridors, and supported diplomatic mediation by Pakistan and Qatar.

That is the full corpus of statements Trump is treating as proof that the pope wants Iran to nuke American cities. Trump is, characteristically, claiming the opposite of the truth and counting on his audience not to check.

A One-Sided Feud

The pope, in keeping with the Vatican’s diplomatic tradition, has not personally responded to Trump’s attacks. He has continued to do what popes do — issue statements on the war, meet with religious and civic leaders, write encyclicals. Trump’s attacks have therefore mostly served to amplify Leo’s public profile, give cable news anchors a new daily topic, and remind American Catholics that the man currently at war with their pope is the same man currently at war with Iran, the courts, the press, and the federal civil service.

That the president is willing to extend his enemies list to the leadership of the Catholic Church is, by this point, unsurprising. That he believes attacking the pope from a Hugh Hewitt interview is good politics is more revealing. It assumes — correctly, on current evidence — that there is no institution in American life, and now no institution outside it, that he will not turn on the moment it tells him no.