Pope Trump and MAGA American heresy
The U.S. president's attack on Pope Leo is a reminder: millions of Americans chose him over their faith.
It is no knock on one's sincere beliefs to observe that some people — perhaps more than a few — adopt religion for less than holy reasons: to assuage guilt over their sinful thoughts and actions, their behavior unchanged by their professed beliefs, or just to obtain a better angle for throwing stones at other sinners.
For all its faults as an institution led by flawed human beings, the Roman Catholic Church is at least constituted as an institution for all children of God, regardless of race, gender or nationality. It transcends borders and promotes adherence to a law higher than any imposed by mere governments.
This is unacceptable to any real follower of Donald J. Trump. His movement is built, if nothing else, on inequality: the notion that there is a natural human hierarchy, with white, American men at the top, and the bottom determined by the political needs of the moment — Haitians on Monday, Somalis by Friday — but assuredly of darker pigmentation.
Trump owes his power to millions of his fellow Americans abandoning any pretense of love for their neighbors. But he has, up to now, allowed his Christian supporters to maintain the self-preserving fiction that their politics were at least arguably compatible with their claimed religion.
That is to say: he did not pick a fight with the literal pope, for instance. But an open confrontation was inevitable between this president and an institution that treats him as another mere mortal.
“I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo. He’s a very liberal person, and he’s a man that doesn’t believe in stopping crime,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. He went on to describe the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics as "weak on crime" and "terrible for foreign policy," while also claiming credit for his appointment, saying the church only made Leo pontiff because it believed "that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump."
Why would the Catholic Church need someone who could "deal with President Donald J. Trump," and why would that person need to be an American? The 79-year-old's narcissism does not allow the reflection necessary to grasp how the answer is unflattering: because, incapable of empathy, he could only be persuaded by someone in whom he sees himself. His behavior — including the posting of a blasphemous image likening himself to an American Jesus — also demonstrates how no critic, however meek, could avoid injuring his grandiose ego.
Indeed, what sparked the president's rage was a modest defense of human life.
“Attacks on civilian infrastructure [are] against international law [and] also a sign of the hatred, the division, the destruction that the human being is capable of," Pope Leo said on Easter Sunday. This came after Trump threatened that a "whole civilization will die" if he did not get his way.
A more sophisticated politician would have dismissed the pope's comments with a metaphorical pat on the head; as romantic idealism befitting a man of God. But the American president is not just lacking in emotional regulation, but has been rewarded for it by an American electorate that gave him a nuclear stockpile. He has been given no reason to change, were he capable of it.
It is not clear that personally attacking the pope, in the defense of his right to kill millions, will cost him anything among the right-wing faithful, either. A recent poll found that nearly half of American Catholics approve of Trump's performance in office despite his assault on their immigrant brethren and his cosplay as the Antichrist. Even after he threatened genocide, the conservative Catholic League criticized not the president, but the head of the Roman church, saying Leo had "left himself open for rebuke" by suggesting there's no such thing as a good bombing campaign.
The dark triad, not the trinity, is the bedrock of America's right-wing religion, and criticizing Donald Trump its gravest form of heresy. Is the pope Catholic? Irrelevant. Is he MAGA?
