The President and the Pope

Jamie Stiehm
Wed, 15 Apr 2026 09:40:01 -0700
Opinion

Call him the "antisocial" media president.

When a president attacks the Pope, he telegraphs: "There's nothing I won't do or say." That is a profoundly troubling message.

There are no lines I won't cross, no rules I won't break, President Donald Trump is telling the whole wide world. Nobody is safe nor sacred in my book. Got it? And the White House press corps meekly accepts that.
Updated: Wed Apr 15, 2026

Call him the "antisocial" media president.

When a president attacks the Pope, he telegraphs: "There's nothing I won't do or say." That is a profoundly troubling message.

There are no lines I won't cross, no rules I won't break, President Donald Trump is telling the whole wide world. Nobody is safe nor sacred in my book. Got it? And the White House press corps meekly accepts that.

The worse Trump gets, the worse Trump gets, in a vortex of flexing power and expressing anger. This week he insulted the Roman Catholic Church and its 1.4 billion members. Last week, he threatened to end Iran's Persian "civilization."

That last bit sounds like something Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth made up: massive retaliation for defending itself in a war that we, the United States, started one day before dawn.

Trump and Hegseth (a Christian-right religious fanatic) are so close that it's scary to see the way they look at each other in Cabinet meetings, side by side. They egg each other on.

Neither Trump nor Hegseth has any idea how to end a war they started without informing Congress or the public. His latest bright idea, a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, is copying the John F. Kennedy playbook in the Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) asked for a Pentagon briefing over the spring recess, a request that was refused.

Trump is the first and only president of the modern era to communicate constantly with posts. As we know, they are often profane, insulting or boastful, with no sense of proper presidential speech. His language in posts is the way he speaks in real life — mean-spirited, in a word. "Low IQ" is a low-IQ way to belittle others.

Without posts as his medium of communication, Trump could not bombard the press and public day in, day out with his trash talk or new architectural plans for the capital.

The medium really is the message, as author and thinker Marshall McLuhan told us. The press should not define their job as covering every message.

The other night's posts raised concerns about Trump's state of mind, which are circulating on Capitol Hill. He posted an image of himself as Jesus, then posted articles about former President Joe Biden and Rep. Eric Swalwell, topped off with a piece about his illegal (for now) White House ballroom for a thousand people and finally, at 4 a.m., a missive on Iran.

Is Trump quite well? The fact that he's fuming in the White House at that hour reveals an unquiet, erratic mind.

This portrait of a president shows he's full of sound and fury, to echo Shakespeare. Murderous Macbeth could not sleep either.

To paraphrase Macbeth, "Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

But in our case, Trump's sound and fury signifies everything. Our lost place in the world, our standing with allies, whom he's alienated. Our American "exceptionalism," gone. Also our rule of law, our commitment to diversity, our support of higher education and research; our strength as a nation of immigrants.

Somehow one angry man managed to take all that away from us as he ripped the body politic apart. And somehow we let him do it because we thought his dark side — political violence, racism, misogyny and one ugly post after another — could be overlooked.

So much for the political science theory that it doesn't matter who the president is because the federal government runs on its own. Remember, Trump's first order of business was to strip the federal government down to the bone, except for defense and homeland security spending.

It's not too much to say that Trump has polluted political discourse over the last 10 years, with his tweets and posts. Yet two things can be true: "Antisocial" media was his path to the White House.

But how about peaceful Pope Leo? You don't have to be Catholic to love him. He's now on a trip to Africa.

Before departing, the first American pope declared, "Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!"

It's all there on Trump's "Truth Social."