Lindsey Graham Calls the Pope Dumb on Live TV While Defending Trump

Donald Trump has become his party’s golden calf.

Republican lawmakers and politicians are turning on the Catholic Church to defend the president’s warmongering.

Speaking with Fox News Monday night, Senator Lindsey Graham spoke directly to Pope Leo XIV, telling him that he was “miscalculating” by advocating for world peace.

Last week, reports emerged that the Pentagon had openly threatened a Vatican ambassador in January, days after the pope made anti-war remarks during his State of the World address. In the days since that report, Trump has fired off several antagonistic comments against the leader of the Catholic Church, repeatedly attempting to sour the pope’s reputation by claiming that Leo is “terrible for foreign policy” and “weak on crime.” That is, despite the fact that religious leaders are neither responsible for foreign policy nor in charge of lowering crime rates.

Graham went on to compare Iran’s ayatollah to Nazi Germany, claiming that the religious order really did not “get” the level of “evil” that Trump was contending with in Iran.

Also Monday night, In a roundtable on CNN, prominent Republican donor Hal Lambert claimed that the clash was “all about trying to hurt President Trump’s Catholic vote for Republicans during the midterms,” citing former Obama strategist David Axelrod’s visit last week to the Vatican.

The Catholic Church has 1.42 billion baptized members around the world, with more than 70 million in the U.S. Roughly 20 percent of Americans identify as Catholic, making it the second most popular religion in the country behind Protestantism.

Vice President JD Vance—who converted to Catholicism in 2019—tried to squash the beef, telling Fox News that “it’s a good thing” that the White House and the Holy See are at odds with each other.

“We’re always going to have disagreements on matter of public policy,” Vance said. “We certainly have a good relationship with the Vatican, but we’re also going to disagree on substantive questions from time to time, and I don’t think it’s particularly newsworthy.”

It’s not clear how “good” that relationship is, however. Many in the Vatican reportedly interpreted the Pentagon meeting as a threat to use military force against the religious order. The church has since rejected the White House’s invitation to host the pope for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4.

But feuding with a peace-loving pope has not been Trump’s only recent Christian faux pas. Over the weekend, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ to his Truth Social, setting off sparks among even some of his most ardent supporters. Several Floridians interviewed by MS Now on Monday said that they were “disgusted” and “ashamed” of the image, which depicts Trump as a haloed messiah.

“That’s a disgrace. I’m very upset about that. I mean how egotistical can you possibly be?” said John North, a medical lab worker. “I’m ashamed that he would actually do that. A man I voted for and trust. How could he do that? I mean people are going to see this at work. I’m upset about that.”

Trump has since deleted the post, telling reporters at the White House that he thought it illustrated him as a doctor healing people.