This week, after the mourning period for Pope Francis in the Vatican, the College of Cardinals gathered for the task of electing his successor. A media favorite was Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who is Latin head of the Church in Jerusalem, which is a pretty important posting these days. Plus: There’s the name. Unfortunately, it was unlikely that he would be elected, and even if he was, it has been the case since after the fall of the Roman Empire in Italy that the Pope takes a “regnal name” other than the one he was born with, so it’s doubtful we would get a Pope Pizzaballa, however much we would want to.
In any case, Thursday May 8, the conclave elected Robert Francis Prevost, an American cardinal (although he spent much of his ministry in Peru and speaks Spanish) who took the name Leo XIV. The good news is that having the first American Pope probably means that Vatican City is no longer subject to Trump tariffs.
Which raises the question of Donald Trump as Pope. I’m sure that if he were appointed, he would simply take his own name, in honor of the patron saint of all Seven Deadly Sins, along with hypocrisy, self-pity and willful ignorance.

Around May 2, just days after falling asleep at the Pope’s funeral in Rome, Trump posted an AI picture of himself on his wannabe Twitter site, and apparently this was after reporters asked him earlier in the week whom he would support as Francis’ replacement, and he said “I’d like to be pope, that would be my number one choice.” And because the Church of Trump is more fanatically loyal than the Catholic Church laity at this point, Senator Lindsey Graham (BR.-South Carolina) said we should “keep an open mind” about the idea.
Of course, when Trump was pressed on the issue later by reporters, His Assholiness dodged. “You mean they can’t take a joke? You don’t mean the Catholics, you mean the fake news media. The Catholics loved it,” he said. And on another round of questioning, he said, “Somebody made up a picture of me dressed up as the Pope and put it on the Internet. Maybe it was AI. I just saw it last evening. My wife thought it was cute.”
MAYBE the picture showing Trump dressed as the Pope was AI. Maybe he dressed up in the papal attire deliberately and posed for the camera and just totally forgot. After all, he IS senile.
Which gets to two points. One, this is yet another case of Trump being Schrodinger’s Comedian, creating a quantum state of uncertainty between seriously posing a truly stupid and awful idea and demanding that it be taken as a joke when the rest of the world does take it seriously and roundly rejects it.
But more troubling, it’s one of many, and more frequent, instances where Trump is called to account for something he did and says it wasn’t his idea or he had no knowledge of it. Like when Kristen Welker of NBC asked him if he thought it was his job to uphold the Constitution, and he said, “I don’t know” and said his policy was based on what his lawyers told him. Now, part of this may be what he learned from role models like John Gotti and Vladmir Putin in always attempting to avoid legal liability, but given his many, many MANY other on-camera examples of non-sentience, such as not knowing what a stroller is, it just cements the impression that the government is the way it is now because Trump is a doddering old pudding brain and such work that actually gets done is executed by even crazier people whose ideas Trump just signs off on.
And there are many other stupid and offensive things that Trump did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.
But it is frankly tiresome to keep going over all the ways in which Trump and his ‘administration’ are being stupid, offensive, and offensively stupid. Going over Trump being offensively stupid is like going over the fact that the Earth revolved around the Sun again. The question is whether anything that happens makes a difference with the people who elect our politicians, and so far the answer is: Not yet, and maybe not ever.
Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute (taken before March 20) says that 92 percent of those who voted for Trump are still satisfied with their vote. In April 14, a University of Amherst poll showed only 2 percent of Trump voters regret their vote. And Pew Research Center reported in a poll that while Trump retains a slightly positive approval rating (51 percent) with white Catholics and non-Evangelicals, white Evangelicals give him an approval of 72 percent. Not all Trump voters, especially in 2024, are hardcore Christianists, but many of the people who actually make policy are, such as Russell Vought, a veteran of the first ‘administration’ and currently director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought has described himself as a Christian nationalist and was quoted as saying his position is a commitment to an institutional separation between church and state, but not the separation of Christianity from its influence on government and society. In this regard he seeks to correct a government that he sees as “post-constitutional” due to its long domination by the liberal-left. Other right-wing influencers who are Catholic call themselves integralists, seeking to create a civil law based on Catholic dogma, as it was in Ireland before they realized that that wasn’t working out.
For some reason, I have been seeing more and more of a quote from the Book of Job, Chapter 13, verse 15: “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.” Now, reading over the Book of Job, and all the tribulations Job goes through, the main thing I notice is that Satan put God up to it. But the denouement is that God appears and simply tells Job that it is not his place to question: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!” The point of the book is not to question God’s destruction of mortal life and happiness, but to have faith in his actions: “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.”
It is hardly a coincidence that Trump’s rise is supported by an Evangelical religion whose approach to faith has always been anti-humanist and anti-rational. As opposed to Catholicism or mainline Protestant churches, a belief in biblical inerrancy means that the Bible is taken literally and therefore the faithful should still believe in miracles. These people have always thought of the ultimate authority as a mercurial tyrant who dispenses favor and wrath in equal measure and eradicates all who will not serve him, and it just so happens they’ve got one of those guys right now. Their religion teaches them that we are made to suffer and obey, and they expect to live in hardship, unlike the rest of us, who believe in capitalism, abundance, and America. Which is why the American way of life is what Trump needs to undermine in order to stay in power.
And while Christianity, unlike Judaism or Islam, tells us to believe in a God who is an individual personality rather than a bodiless abstraction, Jesus in Heaven is still too much of an abstraction for these people. They would rather worship a God in the flesh. And Donald Trump has a lot of that.
And I’ve also been thinking a lot about something I said when I first started this page, because it has never been more true than now: “When these people reject any argument against Trump, what some of them are saying, consciously or not, is, “My life sucks, and it will never get any better. I am too old and too poor to retrain for a decent-paying job, assuming there are any left in my town. And the only power I still have is the chance to force everyone else to live in the existential hellhole that I am now trapped in for the rest of my life.”
Blind faith and spite. An unbeatable combination.
So, really, if you control an apocalyptic religion that in turn controls the richest and most powerful country on Earth (for now), why would you need to be Pope? Getting back to that subject, I’m sure there are plenty of technical reasons why the College of Cardinals wouldn’t have accepted Trump as a candidate. Like, the whole not being Catholic thing. But it really comes down to the point that the College of Cardinals is that much more of an old-boys’ network than the US Senate, and unlike the Senate they aren’t going to bow down to some parvenu celebrity, especially not because commoners voted for him. I’m sure their collective reaction to the idea was like, “Please. We may be corrupt hierophants who live like princes and enable child abuse in our parishes, but we DO have standards.”