Trump tried to out-holy the Pope. His evangelical supporters are not amused

On Palm Sunday, as Christians around the world began to celebrate the holiest week of their calendar, Pope Leo XIV stood at the Vatican and read Isaiah 1:15: “Even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood.”

Much has been made of Leo’s comments, especially as they came from the first American-born pope as the US administration waded into a globally disruptive war that it has not even attempted to justify.

Leo has previously spoken about peace, and he has continued his predecessor’s focus on the poor, migrants, and those affected by war. But the pontiff’s use of this passage was more pointed – it was a specific criticism of the hypocrisy of an American crusade wrapped in a Christian nationalism that few other than the pope had the moral authority to decry. This was as much an appeal to Christian Americans as it was to world leaders attempting to stop the violence.

Fifty years ago, the American Christian right began to emerge. Political activists and televangelists coalesced conservative Christian groups around a rejection of Roe v Wade and prayer bans in schools. Over time the movement grew into a powerful political project that built a version of Christianity in which American military and political dominance was evidence of divine favour.

Any threat to the movement’s dominance over society carried holy weight, and in that fight, its leaders found a natural ally in Donald Trump. He holds none of their religious convictions but every bit of their confidence in his interpretation of the world. Trump aggressively courted conservative Christian voters, wrapping his political destiny in a flag and a burning cross. Leo’s words were aimed at the entire apparatus of sanctified power that Trump has laid claim to.

Trump responded by describing the Pope as “weak”, then posted an AI-generated image of himself as a Jesus-like figure healing the wounded as fighter jets and bald eagles soar overhead.

The president has borrowed similar imagery before. After the assassination attempt on him in 2024, he and his followers rendered him as this same Jesus, one painted in the colours of Christian nationalism. In the past, this imagery had been accepted by right-wing Christians because it was being deployed to attack outwards. They were a part of his army; he was fighting their war. Evangelicals have recently been comfortable with Trump’s use of their beliefs to attack Islam and for his Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth to justify war. Just days prior, this same base was happy for Trump and Hegseth to use such iconography to threaten the destruction of “a whole civilisation”.

But this time, it went too far.

MAGA media darling Megyn Kelly and a senior pastor in Hegseth’s evangelist church called Trump’s image “blasphemous”. Brilyn Hollyhand, a 19-year-old MAGA influencer with more than 230,000 followers, posted “Faith is not a prop”. Former Fox host and powerful podcaster Tucker Carlson had earlier questioned how Christians could continue to support a man who openly threatened to wipe out a civilian population.

And in trying to out-holy the pontiff, Trump accidentally exposed the transactional nature of the whole set-up. His political instinct is to never let an insult go unanswered. His genius has been in choreographing those fights so that they only strengthen his political standing. His political trick has always been to turn any attack on him into a galvanising force, to draw a boundary around his flock. Any attack on him becomes an attack on them.

But that trick has a limit. Trump borrowed much of his political power from an evangelical movement that takes its identity very seriously. When the Pope quotes the prophet Isaiah back to them, the message is not from an enemy from the outside.

Leo’s intervention is reminiscent of his predecessor John Paul II, who played a role in toppling the regime in his native Poland. He held an authority that the Polish government could not contain, and he held up a mirror in a way that only a native son could. A fight against the Pope is a battle Trump can’t win.

Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served the Biden-Harris administration.

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