Donald Trump Is on a Collision Course With the Catholic Church

Plus: Why is a Democratic leader posting fit pics on the grid?

(Composite / Photos: Getty Images)

About six months into the second Trump presidency, Republicans are charting a collision course with the Catholic Church. Stark and growing differences between their views on migrants, the poor, technology, and other issues could put the spiritual home of tens of millions of American Catholics in direct conflict with the political framework of the party that runs the U.S. government.

As House and Senate Republicans advanced a budget that ripped some cords out from the social safety net while giving ICE, the federal government’s masked police force, the kind of money that could stand up another nation’s military, religious sisters from more than 60 congregations protested inside and outside the Capitol. Bishops, meanwhile, sent letters pleading with lawmakers to reject the budget on the grounds that it harshly punished the poor and undocumented.

In one of the most recent examples, Cardinals Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C. and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey led the list of signatories to an interfaith letter to U.S. senators condemning the budget for how it will “sow chaos in local communities,” “be used to target faith communities,” and “harm the poor and vulnerable in our nation, to the detriment of the common good.”

“Its passage would be a moral failure for American society as a whole,” the letter said.

Such denunciations are atypical. And they provide the latest illustration of the stress Trump has placed on major institutions: media, law, academic, and now ecclesial.

I asked multiple Catholic senators about the letter before they voted on the budget last week. All claimed to have no knowledge of it, including Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), who is both a Knight of Columbus and a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre—memberships that suggest he’s a bit more than a casual Mass-goer.

As Congress delivered the budget to Trump’s desk—after mounting little resistance to it—McElroy tried to speak out more forcefully and urgently. In an interview, he told CNN reporter Christopher Lamb that the administration’s deportation policy “is simply not only incompatible with Catholic teaching, it’s inhumane, and it’s morally repugnant.”

“It is a mass, indiscriminate deportation of men and women and children and families, which literally rips families apart, and is intended to do so,” he added.

As a cardinal, Pope Leo occasionally expressed his disapproval of Vance and Trump on social media, but he has refrained from making similarly direct political statements since his election to the Throne of Saint Peter. But, nevertheless, remarks the pope has made over the past few weeks have often cut against the Trump administration’s priorities. And while we must not interpret this to mean that the Church is explicitly calling out Trump, it’s reasonable to point out that the Church’s priorities appear to be increasingly at odds with the policy orientation of the White House.

The disagreements go beyond immigration. Pope Leo condemned Trump’s decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities within hours of the attack being made public, saying, “Every member of the international community has a moral responsibility: Stop the tragedy of war before it becomes an irreparable abyss.”

Pope Leo has even come down on AI, drawing contrasts between cold, impersonal, and surprisingly limited algorithm-driven systems and the profundities of the human mind.

“Our personal life has greater value than any algorithm, and social relationships require spaces for development that far transcend the limited patterns that any soulless machine can pre-package,” the pope said in June, continuing:

Let us not forget that, while able to store millions of data points and answer many questions in a matter of seconds, artificial intelligence remains equipped with a “static memory” that is in no way comparable to that of human beings. Our memory, on the other hand, is creative, dynamic, generative, capable of uniting past, present and future in a lively and fruitful search for meaning, with all the ethical and existential implications that this entails.

Trump’s not really one to take ethical and existential implications into consideration when crafting policy. That goes for AI, too. He has signed executive orders bolstering the AI industry and made its further development a major priority for America’s tech sector. There was even a draft provision in the Republican budget that would have prohibited states from regulating AI for the next decade. However, a bipartisan duo in the Senate struck the big tech handout from the budget just before the chamber voted to pass it.

There’s one person I’d love to ask about all this: Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019. Official White House statements have noted that Vance is the “first Catholic convert to serve as Vice President.”

Since he became vice president, though, Vance doesn’t appear to have ventured out for regular Mass attendance. The only times he’s been documented going have been during his travels to Italy on official business. He was seen in St. Peter’s Basilica during a Good Friday liturgy, and he was also at Pope Leo’s inaugural Mass in St. Peter’s Square in May. Stateside, Vance has kept his distance, abruptly cancelling plans to attend a Mass in Montana last month. There is little documentation of his Sunday activities to suggest he is living up to his insistence (as offered during the National Prayer Breakfast in February) that “like 95 percent of Sundays” he would “actually go to Mass.” Nevertheless, a spokesperson for Vance told me, “The Vice President is a devout Catholic and attends Mass weekly.”

The church’s opposition to many of the Trump administration’s priorities is becoming more pronounced. Add to that the fact that an American-born pope means Donald Trump is no longer the world’s most influential American, and it may make for some frustrations at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

You know I had to do it to ‘em

When Democrats demanded their party leaders “fight,” posting fit pics to the grid is probably not what they have in mind.

And yet, over the weekend, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries posted a photo on Instagram captioned “Home Sweet Home” followed by an emoji that can mean either high-fives or prayers. He may have wanted the former for his fit, but he’s starting to need the latter in light of the response.

In the photo, Jeffries is wearing white shell toe Adidas sneakers, a long-sleeve Adidas top, and a glittery cross and chain. He’s got the subtle contrapposto of the classic fit pic pose, performing nonchalance while also carefully revealing every element of the fit. Power and influence are often spoken of together. Perhaps that’s why the House minority leader looks like an aspiring influencer.

But the real crime is the obvious manipulation of the photo. If you haven’t seen it already, take a look at the slats of the bench and the sidewalk bricks behind him: They are bowing out. The likeliest explanation is that Jeffries was attempting to make himself look taller (or slimmer) in the photo. It could also have also been an accident. And we can’t discount the possibility that Rep. Jeffries’s hips bring powerful transdimensional forces to bear on the environment around them.

But it’s probably just a bad photoshop. Users were very quick to point out the House Democrat’s heightmaxxing—it seems like the kind of thing that is, well, below the office, if you will.

Maybe this could create some common ground between Democrats and Republicans. Everyone from Newt Gingrich to the Trumps are big fans of Facetune, which can leave you looking oddly smooth in photos. Who wouldn’t want to be both smooth and tall online?

Median Republican member of Congress

Not long after flash flooding devastated Texas and claimed more than 100 lives, Republican lawmakers and candidates began searching for answers to how this tragedy could have happened. Naturally, some of them looked in the most insane places.

The morning after the flood, while officials were still scrambling to understand the scope of the devastation, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) announced that, alongside Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), she would soon be introducing legislation that “prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity. It will be a felony offense.”

“I have been researching weather modification and working with the legislative counsel for months writing this bill,” Greene added. “We must end the dangerous and deadly practice of weather modification and geoengineering.”

Meanwhile, Kandiss Taylor, a Republican candidate running in Georgia for the House of Representatives this cycle, declared the floods to be fake.

“Fake weather. Fake hurricanes. Fake flooding,” Taylor posted on X. “Fake. Fake. Fake.”

She didn’t mean to say the floods didn’t happen—she appears to intend “fake” to mean “artificial” rather than “false,” although frankly it’s hard to be sure. “If fake weather causes real tragedy, that’s murder,” she wrote in another post.

At least one Republican isn’t buying it. In a press conference after the floods, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told reporters, “To the best of my knowledge, there is zero evidence of anything related to anything like weather modification.”

“And look, the internet can be a strange place,” Cruz added. “People can come up with all sorts of crazy theories. What I know is [the] reality is that a whole lot of Texans are grieving right now.”

Cruz would do well to note it’s not just the internet where people believe such things. They do across the Capitol, too.