Why Donald Trump couldn't honour the Pope

New Statesman​

22-04-2025

Photo by Tom Williams/ Getty Images
Donald Trump may well be the funniest politician of the 21st century. But he hits the heights of comedy when the issue at stake is as profound as Heaven and Hell. In these moments, his absurdity reaches biblical proportions. It's the asymmetry between the severity of the topic and the speaker. It's not that Trump is indecorous. It's that he has constructed a world in which the idea of decorum does not exist.
Recall Trump's reaction when he learned that the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed; he had been speaking at a campaign event in Minnesota. 'She just died? Wow. I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time,' he said on the tarmac, as Elton John's 'Tiny Dancer' blared from speakers in the background. He then paused, shrugged his shoulders and rearranged his face into a serious expression: 'she led an amazing life – what else can you say?'
Or remember the photo in the Oval Office of pastors in a semi-circle around Trump touching his shoulder in prayer as if he was sent down from up high. Trump is the only president to change his denomination in office since Eisenhower, dropping his Presbyterianism for the politically flexible refuge of non-domination (Eisenhower made the same transition in reverse).
On 21 April, as centuries-old traditions were unfurling in Rome to mark the death of Pope Francis, the annual Easter party took place on the White House South Lawn. There was hopscotch, a brass band and five year olds in red Maga hats, while Trump's adviser, deporter-in-chief Stephen Miller, watched the children with disdain through aviator sunglasses and Don Jr refereed the egg rolling with camp flourish. The South Portico columns were braided in white peonies and blue hydrangeas. The President's Marine Band played piccolos and tubas under the dull and cloudy sky. In Trump's words, the event was 'beautiful and spiffy'.
But what was Trump's judgement on the life of the recently departed Pope Francis? Flanked by the First Lady and the Easter Bunny on the balcony, Trump told the audience the Pope was a 'good man, worked hard – he loved the world'. Trump then walked down the stairs, stopped and turned to salute the Easter Bunny.
Where traditional orators try to make the mundane profound, Trump turns the sacred sacrilegious – and he is more effective for it. After his speech, Trump and the Easter Bunny posed for photos along the white picket fence separating him from the crowd. One child ran up to his mother and said with pride: 'I saw Trump!'
Trump's unseriousness often masks the enormity of the Maga movement. In the same way that Trump's love for the Windsor family gives No 10 more hope for the special relationship than America First allows, the president's comedic instincts make his administration look more innocuous than reality. The last time the president was in the White House gardens for an event was the Trumpian gameshow known as Liberation Day, where both allies and foes became contestants trying to win the prize of low tariffs. Afterwards, Trump flung Maga hats from the podium as the world recoiled and markets plunged.
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Contrast Trump's flexible embrace of religion with his vice-president JD Vance, a practicing Catholic, who converted in 2019 and met the Pope the day before his death. Vance got into a theological spat on social media with the Church in late January over whether you should love those closer to you more than those far away. In a letter to American Bishops on 10 February, Pope Francis directly attacked the administration. He criticised Trump's mass deportations as 'damag[ing] the dignity of many men and women' and warned against the idea that the 'will of the strongest [was] the criterion of truth'.
Trump's clipped eulogy was fitting, then, because Pope Francis opposed the type of politics which the president represents. Pope Francis sought to walk the beam between conservatism and modernity, between both the tradition which the Catholic Church represents and the Christian love which Francis tried to practice in a world with rising migratory flows and a reckoning over social justice. Trump rejects the binary between the two. His instincts rebel against the idea that the meek will inherit the Earth and that establishments which don't include him – whether ecclesiastical or political – have moral authority over everyone else. Top-down liberalism is poison to the populist: Trump is a New York reactionary.
Trump is funny in religious moments because his arrogance and self-centredness is deeply un-Christian. He cuts a blasphemous figure. His online followers revel in his unknowingly Nietzschean embrace of strength as the sole criterion of truth. At the same time, many in his coalition rejoice at this administration's reassertion of religion. 'We are bringing religion back!' Trump announced from the White House balcony on Easter Monday.
Humour is one of the most potent ways in which the president keeps these tensions at bay. When his followers worship him – and even think he was saved by God when he was shot in Pennsylvania during the campaign – his religiosity (or perhaps lack of it) matters less. In fact, they can project onto him whatever saving grace they want. Yet the schisms lurk beneath the frivolity. No wonder Trump was more interested in the Easter Bunny.
[See more: The myth of progressive Catholicism]
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