Will Donald Trump, a president who has no sense of reverence, maintain unwavering support from white evangelicals as his support among Catholics slips?

Trump, the healer (Truth Social)

Did Donald Trump commit a political gaffe when he initiated a public quarrel with Pope Leo? The best source of information I've seen for addressing that question comes from a podcast at The New Republic (TNR). Greg Sargent, of TNR, conducts an interview with religion scholar Robert Jones that produces a wealth of information for assessing Trump's strategy of going after the leader of the Catholic Church. Let's take a look at a transcript of the Sargent-Jones conversation, which comes under the headline "Trump rages as Pope's harsh new rebuke lands surprise blow." A sub-headline reads "As the president's retaliation against Pope Leo goes off the rails, a scholar of religion explains why the pope's criticism of him could prove much more damaging than you might think" -- providing a number of clues to what lies ahead:

Greg Sargent: When Donald Trump viciously attacked the pope and then posted a picture depicting himself as a divine figure, it provoked a massive backlash from many in his own base. That was bad enough, but then Trump offered some rambling spin on it all that was so preposterous in its dishonesty, so insulting, that it quickly made things worse. We think this mess hints at deeper truths about how Trump approaches religious voters, particularly the right-wing evangelicals who are critical to his support. It also helps explain why the Trump coalition and the Trump project are so fragile right now. So we invited on Robert Jones, president of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of several books about religion and the American right, to make sense of all this for us. Robert, good to have you on.

Robert Jones: Thanks. Glad to be here.

Sargent: So Trump is angry because Pope Leo has repeatedly criticized the Iran war and especially Trump’s threat to obliterate Iranian civilization. In response, Trump unleashed this crazed rant describing the pope as “weak on crime,” adding this: “I don’t want a pope who thinks it’s okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Trump also said, “I don’t want a pope who criticizes the president of the United States” because I’m doing what I was elected for. Robert, I wanted to get your general thoughts on that first.

Jones: Well, I’ll start with the last one. “I was doing what I was elected for”—Trump, of course, thinks that now that he’s been elected, he can be constrained by nothing but his own whims. That’s really what he’s reacting to here.

But in this case, he’s got the leader of a worldwide church who is also operating out of a 2,000-year-old theological tradition. Leo is not firing from the hip here. He really is digging pretty deep. And this criticism is not just about the war. It is weighing these decisions about state violence against Catholic moral teaching. Trump thinks that there should be no criticism of him whatsoever. This is the authoritarian playbook. That you should have no dissenters, and certainly no dissenters with influence or power.

In two short paragraphs, Jones sums up Trump's mindset perfectly. The president cannot handle anyone trying to constrain him -- whether it be Congress, the Judiciary, or lawful protesters on the streets of Minneapolis. And get this: Trump actually believes he was elected to launch an unprovoked attack on Iran, which likely will unsettle the global economy for months, maybe years. Does Trump think Americans will gladly put up with "pain at the pump," when history tells us they won't? The conversation then turns to Trump's lack of respect for religion in general -- even though many religious conservatives have inexplicably supported him:

Sargent: So Trump also posted this deranged image that portrayed him as a divine figure in a white robe, healing a sick man by placing his hand on the man’s forehead. This got MAGA figures angry.

Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an anti-Christ spirit.” A Daily Wire reporter called it “outrageous blasphemy,” adding “he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness.” Christian MAGA activist Sean Fucht said: “This should be deleted immediately.” And former Republican spinner Ari Fleischer said “it’s inappropriate and embarrassing—it’s offensive.”

There was much more like that. Robert, can you just explain at the core why this image is seen as blasphemous?

Jones: Well, Trump is clearly displaying himself as Jesus. In the image he’s got on a white robe with a kind of red robe over it. You could find hundreds of images like that of Jesus dressed this way—this white robe, this red sash over the top. He’s got this glowing hand as he’s leaning over this person in their sickbed.

So this is also his depiction of supernatural divine healing power that he’s claiming for himself. One other thing is that this is not the first time Trump has done this. It was just after Easter last year that Trump actually posted an image of himself as the pope, dressed up in papal vestments. This is not the first time he’s posted things like this, assuming either the chair of the pope himself or the image of Jesus.

The conversation then turns to Trump's effort to spin his way out of trouble -- the bipartisan kind that can come with comparing yourself to Christ:

Sargent: Well, Trump actually deleted the image of himself as a divine figure. Now let’s listen to how he tried to spin his way out of this.

Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President, did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, it wasn’t a depict—it was me. I did post it and I thought it was me as the doctor and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker there, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one. So I had—I just heard about it. And I said, “How did they come up with that? It’s supposed to be me as a doctor.”

Were Jones and Sargent buying this one? No way. In fact, they treated it like the absurdity it is:

Sargent: Robert, apparently Trump thinks doctors have celestial light pouring forth from their palms and can heal people by touching them, as the picture showed. What did you make of his excuse?

Jones: He’s reaching deep for this one. The problem is that the image really didn’t allow much wiggle room. So the best he could say is, I’m a doctor, I’m at a bedside.

But there are angels in the air behind him. And as we said, these glowing palms. So he’s just trying to obfuscate and back away from it. And again, if he thought this was just an image of him as a doctor and did this innocently, why remove it? Just leave it up if you really believe in it. 

Whenever Trump engages religion, it comes off very tin ear, because he just has no sense of piety. It becomes very clear, whether it’s his misnaming a book of the Bible, walking across the street, clearing it with some violence and then holding up a Bible awkwardly in front of a church. These are all things that actual religious people wouldn’t do that way. But he just has no innate sense of that. 

That brings the conversation around to the different ways religious groups view Trump -- and Jones provides intriguing data on the subject:

Sargent: So Robert, I wonder if part of what we’re seeing here is that in Trump’s genuine understanding of the situation, evangelicals really do matter a lot more within his base than Catholics do. What does the data show on that? It confirms that, right? How would these different groups perceive this controversy generally?

Jones: That’s right. His strongest supporters have always been white evangelical Protestants. They have voted more than eight in 10 for him every time he has been on the ballot. Catholics are a much more complex story. His support among Catholics has actually been split pretty starkly along racial and ethnic lines.

He’s always had white non-Hispanic Catholics with him, but they vote about six in 10 for him, not 85 percent for him. The real difference is that inside the Catholic Church, Hispanic Catholics have actually voted Democratic, typically. In the last election, it was only about 43 percent of Hispanic Catholics that supported him, compared to 60 percent of white Catholics. There’s this racial tension inside the Catholic Church, and it’s just not a monolith in the way that it is among white evangelicals.

His statement that he could walk down the middle of the street and shoot somebody in the middle of the day and people would still vote for him—I think that’s actually largely true among white evangelicals today. In fact, he made that comment at an evangelical college in the first place. It’s not so true among Catholics.

Sargent: I want to ask you about that, because it seems like there may be a fundamental difference between how devout evangelicals and how devout Catholics perceive Trump. Evangelicals are much more prone to understand Trump as a flawed vessel sent to them by God to carry out his and their plans in the world. Whereas Catholics aren’t really at that place. Is that distinction correct?

Jones: That’s fair. Catholics have much more complex reasons for supporting Trump than white evangelicals do. His messianic appearances actually resonate much stronger with evangelicals than they do among Catholics. You can see that in the favorability numbers, too—Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals, even today, is 70 percent. It hardly ever wavers, no matter what happens.

But his favorability among even white Catholics who voted for him is only about 53 percent. It’s just barely in majority territory today.