The White House cannot stop fighting with the pope.

On Tuesday night, Vice President JD Vance — who converted to Catholicism in 2019 — accused Pope Leo XIV of not understanding the Church’s stance on war, saying it was “very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Later in the evening, President Donald Trump continued to berate the pope for not supporting his strikes on Iran.

In Leo, though, they’ve found a feistier opponent than they might have expected. He calmly held his ground, hit back with some jabs of his own — he called the Trump-owned platform Truth Social’s name “ironic” — and, perhaps most importantly, has brought support to bear from prominent right-leaning Catholics in the US. The top Senate Republican sounds unnerved. Trump, who is used to quickly cowing nonpartisan public figures into a more conciliatory stance, is not winning this time.

This isn’t the White House’s first run-in with a pope. Trump, and sometimes Vance, were in a long-running conflict with Pope Francis going all the way back to the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when Francis indirectly suggested that Trump “was not a Christian,” because of his focus on “building walls…and not bridges.” Back then, even Trump’s fellow GOP primary contenders, including Catholics like then-Sen. Marco Rubio, backed him up.

As a result, Trump might be surprised by how much stronger the backlash is this time. Even before he doubled down on his initial Truth Social attacks and posted a controversial (and sacrilegious) AI-generated image of himself as Jesus Christ, many of his usual allies, including conservative Catholics, were calling him out.

“The statements made by President Trump on Truth Social regarding the Pope were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” the Catholic Bishop Robert Barron, a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission who is popular with conservative Catholics, said on X — a statement emblematic of right-leaning Catholics’ responses. 

Why is the current spat so different? A lot of it has to do with Pope Leo, who starts with a much stronger base of support from American Catholics on the right. After years of sparring with Francis, Trump and Vance may find they’ve messed with the wrong pope this time. 

Traditionalist and conservative Catholics in the US trust Leo a lot more than Francis

Since assuming the papacy, Leo has shown himself adept at leveraging the optics of his office, winning over critics, and building popular appeal to strengthen his hand — all moves that Trump would surely recognize. 

A lot of the goodwill on the right toward Leo has nothing to do with US politics, but with matters of faith: internal Vatican debates about doctrine and the role of the papacy. He’s made significant inroads with traditionalist and more orthodox Catholics, who were far more suspicious of Francis’ approach, and they’re more inclined to take his side as a result.

When Leo was elected pope, American Catholics, who lean more theologically and politically conservative than in other parts of the world, weren’t sure what to make of him. He wasn’t one of the so-called frontrunners, so his election shocked the world.

He was the first American-born pope, from Chicago, but like the Argentine-born Pope Francis had spent decades in Latin America, where the Church had a reputation for sometimes challenging capitalism from the left. He came from the Augustinian order, a more hermetic and austere tradition, as opposed to the more visible and liberal-leaning Jesuit order that trained Francis. Though elevated by the “liberal” Francis through the Vatican hierarchy, Leo was well-liked by both progressive, conservative, and traditionalist clerics in the Church.

Traditionalist and conservative Catholics were cautiously optimistic, and soon saw signs that Leo was rewarding their faith in him. They cheered on his restoration of the elaborate, grand, traditional symbols of the papacy, which Francis had disregarded. During his first public address, he gave a blessing in Latin — traditionalists strongly opposed the Church’s 20th-century turn away from the language — and wore the more traditional garb of the pontiff, including a red mozzetta, or short cape, (as opposed to Francis’s simple white attire).

These and other symbolic moves were a sign that “at the very least he is intentionally not following directly in the footsteps of Francis” the conservative Catholic editor-in-chief of Crisis magazine, Eric Sammons, said at the time.

And sure enough, the overtures that followed allowed a lot of traditionalists to breathe a sigh of relief. Leo was, at worst, a centrist: traditional in style and conservative in dogma, even if he carried on Francis’s tradition of Catholic social teaching. He did not immediately wade into social and cultural debates, instead prioritizing thinking on artificial intelligence, economic justice, and respect for human rights; he spoke spontaneously less often than Francis, who was known for his off-the-cuff remarks; and he did not antagonize those supporters of the Traditional Latin Mass.

He moved back to the pope’s apartments in the Apostolic Palace, which Francis had abandoned during his papacy, and picked back up old traditions, like carrying a cross through the Colosseum on Good Friday this year — something Pope John Paul II used to do. Even now, Catholic observers look for clues and signs of Leo’s theological and stylistic leanings: looking to see what vestments he wears, what regalia he bears, and who he promotes.

And perhaps most importantly, he seemed willing to reconcile and repair differences between promoters of the traditional Latin Mass and the dominant vernacular Catholic tradition that Francis promoted. Leo has gone so far as to allow discussion of the Latin Mass during gatherings of cardinals, opening up the possibility that previous restrictions might be reexamined, and called for “generous inclusion,” of its supporters, though he has reminded traditionalists not to allow their support for the Latin Mass to become a political tool.

A common knock on Francis in America was that he earned praise from secular liberals, but not new converts to counter shrinking Church attendance in the US. Leo is benefiting from the opposite trend: The American Church, in particular, is seeing a cultural revival: Young Catholics are filling pews in big city parishes and posting their experiences online. Catholicism, and its traditional aesthetics, is trendy again. Converts and baptisms are rising again, albeit slowly. Clergy and Catholic influencers are more vocal. And Leo is part of that revitalization.

The Iran war has actually divided conservative Catholics in the US

It’s not just Leo’s base of support that’s coloring the reaction to his argument with Trump; it’s also the issue that’s at the center of it: the war in Iran, and the rising use of military force more broadly. 

Republicans and Democrats have grown used to ignoring or explaining away certain conflicts with the Church that fall along partisan lines — immigration for Republicans, abortion for Democrats. President Joe Biden was denied communion at one South Carolina church over his support for abortion rights, which fit into a longstanding debate about how to punish pro-choice Catholic politicians.

But Leo is speaking up over an issue that is actually dividing conservative Catholics: the joint US-Israeli war in Iran. Polls show disapproval by Catholics of both Trump’s handling of the war, and the fact that the war is even happening — both departures from the double-digit margin of victory Catholic voters gave Trump in 2024, according to exit polls.

These splits aren’t just theological; they also run into cultural and political divides within the party. But Vance’s leaked reservations about the war and the resignation of Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a conservative Catholic, show these tensions are present even within Trump’s own White House. 

Francis was seen as the aggressor in his fights with Trump

As mentioned above, popes frequently take principled stands on issues that are divisive in US politics. But they typically try to avoid getting caught up in spats with politicians and keep their critiques more generalized.

As a result, when Francis took on Trump, it was seen by many as a violation of what religion professor Stephen Prothero termed “an unspoken gentleman’s agreement in American politics” that the Catholic clergy steers clear of domestic campaign issues.

In case you need a refresher, back in 2016, Francis took time as he was wrapping up an apostolic visit to Mexico to comment on the news of the day. This was the peak of Trump’s anti-immigrant, nationalistic, “build-a-wall” upstart campaign for the Republican nomination — and just days before the make-or-break South Carolina primary — and Francis injected himself right into the middle of it. 

Though he didn’t use Trump’s name, he responded to a question about the candidate by saying that “a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.” The comments were seen as a direct attack on the candidate. 

Francis came from Argentina, where the Church played a bigger role in commenting on politics, and perhaps didn’t realize how far he was going. He had a knack for spontaneity, which sometimes led him to weighing in on issues on inopportune moments. And perhaps he was a poor fit for doing politics in a polarized time: In singling out a border wall rather than Trump’s more unique takes on moral issues, he named a position widely backed in some form by Republican politicians and even some Democrats. 

Regardless of his intent, it triggered a wave of criticism from Republican Catholics: Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio sided with Trump over the pope: “We should have a strategy to secure our border…that’s not an un-Christian thing to do,” Bush said, while Rubio made the case that sovereign countries have “a right to control who comes in, when they come in and how they come in,” just like Vatican City. 

And of course, Trump fired back, accusing Francis of being a Mexican “pawn” and warning that the Vatican would be “attacked by ISIS” if he were not elected president. And so kicked off the tense and standoffish relationship between the pope and Trump.

By contrast, while Leo has proven willing to respond to Trump, the “feud” this time only really began when Trump launched a lengthy personal attack against him on Truth Social.

In Francis’s case, it also didn’t help that he had already earned skepticism on the right by 2016 for his other forays into politically fraught topics, which made them less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. His frequent focus on the poor, on immigrants, on the persecuted, and more progressive or nuanced takes on controversial issues like homosexuality, climate change, abortion, and capitalism, all opened him up to attack and dismissal from politically conservative Catholics. 

Taken together, you can see two very different popes: Francis was a trailblazer, but a controversial leader who was viewed as more antagonistic toward politicians and issues conservative American Catholics cared about. Leo has been seen as more temperate and moderate in his stances, giving him more influence when he chooses to speak up, which he has chosen to do on an issue in which he could actually project some sway. 

Trump paid no obvious political price for his fights with Francis. Whether that changes with Leo, either for Trump or for his successor, he’s picked a far tougher foil this time.

President Donald Trump, in between blockading the Strait of Hormuz and posting blasphemous AI images of himself as Jesus, claims he still wants to strike a deal with Iran’s government to end the current conflict, reopen the Strait, and curtail the country’s nuclear program. 

So far, he’s been unsuccessful — and during his first term in office, he tore up the US’s previous nuclear agreement with Iran, negotiated under Barack Obama in 2015. 

To find out how the US and Iran got to yes last time — and why they haven’t under Trump — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, who led the Obama administration team that got a nuclear deal with Iran.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What do you think it would take for the US to get a new deal with Iran right now?

It depends on what the objectives are for the president and for Iran. Right now, President Trump wants to make sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon. He wants to open the Strait of Hormuz, he wants to stop Iran from funding proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen, because he thinks they create a risk for Israel, who is our ally and all of the countries in the Gulf region. 

Iran, on the other hand, has control of the Strait of Hormuz, so they’re looking to maintain that leverage because it allows them to project power in the region. They want to ensure that they maintain a right to enrichment and they want to be able to continue to have relationships with Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis. 

There’s a big gap and it’s curious, because the negotiation team on our side is quite small. The negotiation team on their side includes people like Abbas Araghchi, who was my counterpart during the 2015 negotiations. He’s now the foreign minister and he knows every single detail of that deal.

Back when you were negotiating with Iran, were there moments looking back when you thought, This is just not going to happen?

Absolutely. There were many points along the way where I said to my counterparts, “If you can’t do it, you can’t do it.”

We thought we were very close to a set of parameters and the supreme leader at the time gave a speech and set out a whole new set of parameters that I think surprised even his foreign minister. 

We had to figure out how we could get from where we were, which we thought was on our way to a deal, to now consider what the supreme leader had publicly said.

We know, in part because President Trump articulated this early and often, that there were some Americans who thought we could have gotten a better deal with Iran. What do you hear as the main complaint and what do you say to those critics?

The critics say that the strongest part of the deal only lasted for 15 years. They wanted it to last forever. We argued that it gave us what is called a one-year breakout timeline so that we would have a year — if somehow we discovered Iran was cheating, which we thought was highly unlikely — to do something about it. 

I think some critics wanted to go to war. They thought they could create a regime change. We constantly said to the United States Congress, if we risk war, it could close the Strait of Hormuz, it could increase the gas prices, it could take down the international economy, it could mean the lives of our military and an enormous cost to our economy and to American citizens.

Are the right people at the negotiation table?

I find it difficult to believe that Vice President Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner can be successful in two weeks. I fully suspect that the negotiations will continue beyond two weeks if they get any traction at all. 

I think part of the reason the vice president is there is because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who has no formal role in the government, don’t have credibility with Iran because twice before when they were negotiating with Iran, we attacked. 

It’s hard to believe that someone’s going to keep negotiating with you if the two other times, they’ve attacked in the midst of negotiations.

Is there a risk this time around that the US comes out weaker and Iran comes out stronger?

I think it’s very hard to be that reductive. There are parts of Iran that are weaker. They don’t have the navy they once had. They don’t have the missile programs they once had. They don’t have the nuclear programs they once had. 

They can rebuild all of that and if they get millions of dollars in tolls and sanctions relief from the United States, they will be able to rebuild all that capacity faster. But at the moment they have been set back. 

The United States, in my view, has been set back. We have just spent billions of dollars. We have reduced our inventory of weapons that we may need for other theaters. We have undermined our alliances. We have put Russia and China in stronger positions. We have removed oil sanctions from Russia and oil sanctions from Iran, already putting money in their coffers, giving Russia more money so they can prosecute their horrible and illegal war against Ukraine. 

All of this has cost everyday average Americans much more out of their pocketbooks. The regime in place in Iran now is more hard line than the one before, if you can believe it, and may decide it must have a nuclear weapon in order to deter future attacks. 

If Iran decides it wants a nuclear weapon, I can assure you many other countries, even some of our closest friends around the world, will think they need a nuclear weapon as well.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: After the US and Iran failed to reach a longer-term peace agreement over the weekend, President Donald Trump is trying something new: blockading the Strait of Hormuz. 

How does that work? Iran already closed the Strait, a crucial passage for oil and natural gas, to most foreign traffic shortly after the US-Iran war began. Now, Trump’s blockade will also stymie traffic to Iranian ports and limit Iran’s ability to sell its own oil, further disrupting the global market. 

CENTCOM, the US military command covering the Middle East, has said that the blockade does not extend to ships “transiting the Strait of Hormuz to and from non-Iranian ports” — but given the Strait’s ongoing closure, it’s unlikely much other traffic will resume unless Iran wants it to. 

What is Trump trying to accomplish? Trump still wants the Strait of Hormuz fully reopened, which last week’s ceasefire — despite his demands — did not achieve. Now, he appears to be betting that imposing his own closure targeting Iranian shipments will force Iran to give ground.

In a Truth Social post over the weekend, he wrote that “At some point, we will reach an ‘ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO IN, ALL BEING ALLOWED TO GO OUT’ basis” for the Strait. 

What’s the context? As we mentioned above, US and Iranian delegations met in Pakistan over the weekend to try to negotiate a peace deal addressing the ongoing conflict, the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. That didn’t work out, so it’s back to the drawing board. 

Now what? The blockade aside, the US-Iran ceasefire is still in place until next week, and we may get another round of talks before it expires. Whether that will bear fruit is another question: Vice President JD Vance described the US proposal over the weekend as “our final and best offer.” 

The blockade is also likely to drive prices higher worldwide — and increase economic pressure on both countries to reach an agreement.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, have I mentioned that bike racing is maybe the most beautiful sport in the world? I’m sure I have. Specifically, I am thinking about this weekend’s edition of Paris-Roubaix, a race also known as the Hell of the North, and its winner, Wout van Aert, who triumphed on Sunday after years of injuries, mishaps, and being almost but not quite there.

Patrick Redford, Defector’s steadfast cycling correspondent, does a better job than I can of capturing what van Aert’s victory means, and you can read his story here with a gift link (and watch van Aert’s triumphant sprint here).

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow! 

This past week has been a disaster for Vice President JD Vance. He embarked on two foreign adventures — campaigning for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and leading peace negotiations with Iran — that ended in total failure. Orbán lost by an enormous margin; Iran quit the talks, and President Donald Trump announced a new blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.

These events are not just humiliating for Vance, but reflect a deeper failure of his vision for the world — one that he hoped to advance as vice president, but appears to be crumbling just as he tries to take the MAGA mantle. 

When it came to US foreign policy, Vance has had two overarching goals: to turn the United States into a patron of Europe’s far-right parties, and to move away from the kind of military adventurism that had long defined the Republican Party.

In both areas, he is failing spectacularly. European far-right parties across the continent are increasingly distancing themselves from Washington; Trump’s foreign policy has been militaristic since pretty much day one, and has only escalated over time. 

And these failures are related. Trump’s foreign policy aggression, on issues ranging from Greenland to Iran, has alienated Europeans en masse. Rather than see him as a kindred spirit, populists increasingly see his nationalist ambitions as in conflict with their own. 

“The Trump administration is currently toxic for most far-right parties in Europe,” said Cas Mudde, an expert on the European right at the University of Georgia.

The stakes here are big — not just for Vance’s personally, but the future of the broader right.

Vance, like other would-be successors to Trump, has tried to stake out a distinctive vision for the MAGA movement and its future after the president. His ambitions for a stronger global right are part of that package. But as vice president, Vance has been forced by necessity to defend Trump’s record even when it betrays his own purported core principles. The weekend’s twin disasters showed just how politically and practically untenable this marriage is turning out to be.

It’s a tough spot for him to be in, but ultimately a problem of Vance’s own making. He thought Trumpism could be a vehicle for his own ideology — when in fact it was always defined by to Trump’s own impulses. Vance, and his ideological fellow travelers, will have to live with the consequences of his error.

Vance’s postliberal foreign policy

Like many on the right, Vance saw Trump as an ideological opportunity.

Vance is the highest-profile avatar of the right-wing tendency termed “postliberalism:” a distinctive group of mostly Catholic intellectuals united by a particular critique of the pre-Trump political order. Postliberals believe that the greatest problems of modernity are, at heart, the fault of liberalism. 

The liberal preoccupation with individual rights, markets, and social “progress” has, in their view, produced a world stripped of meaning — one in which people feel depressed and impoverished because they lack the spiritual sustenance to feel otherwise. In their view, liberalism should be replaced by a vaguely defined postliberal alternative: one in which the state, guided by religious logic, is much more involved in shaping the moral character of its citizens. Carrying out this project would require not just winning elections, but a kind of “regime change” in America that would force liberal intellectuals and activists from their positions shaping public discourse and morals. 

If this all sounds a bit like an authoritarian scheme for asserting a kind of socially conservative control over a diverse and fractious country — well, it kind of is. There is a reason that postliberals like Vance openly admired Viktor Orbán’s regime: They saw his state as a model for what the United States should become. And they regarded Trump as the best vehicle for their ambitions to smash the liberal institutions in the US and Europe that they both despised. 

Vance, a self-described postliberal, was supposed to drive that vehicle. He focused much of his energy on building a distinctively postliberal foreign policy: one that turned the United States away from the distraction of massive Middle Eastern wars, and toward the allegedly urgent task of spiritual renewal inside the European continent — which is to say, bolstering the far-right parties that share postliberalism’s ideological preoccupations.

This was evident as early as February 2025, when Vance traveled to the Munich Security Conference to deliver a speech upbraiding Europe’s leaders for their alleged persecution of far-right factions. It was most clearly expressed in the 2025 National Security Strategy, written in large part by a Vance aide, that simultaneously calls for a pullback from the Middle East and a policy of soft regime change in Europe.

“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence,” the strategy declares. “Our broad policy for Europe should prioritize…cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”

Vance’s efforts this past week, both in Hungary and Iran, reflected this overall vision. Their failures were not accidental, but reflective of the most fundamental problem with his strategy: the “vice” in his title.

How Trump blew up Vance’s project

Donald Trump is, like the postliberals, a right-wing authoritarian. Unlike the postliberals, however, he has zero attachment to any kind of abstract principles. He has a set of gut instincts that point in a particular ideological direction, but can manifest in unpredictable and downright bizarre ways. 

In the second term, this has produced a Europe policy that seems laser-targeted to weaken America’s standing on the continent, and a Middle East policy that has grown more and more belligerent over time. 

Leading the European far-right would require, at a bare minimum, remaining on good terms with said far-right parties. This seemed like it would be an easy task, but Trump managed to blow it up. His tariffs, and especially his threats to annex Greenland, have made him toxically unpopular on the European continent — forcing far-right parties to distance themselves from their longtime ally in the name of nationalism.

“Our subjugation would be a historic mistake,” Jordan Bardella, a leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, said in a January 2026 response to Trump’s attempts on Greenland.

On the Middle East and military adventurism, it seems Vance just misread Trump from the jump.

While the vice president claims his boss was a dove, it has been clear for his entire career that Trump has deeply hawkish foreign policy instincts. He called for seizing Iranian oil deposits in the 1970s, supported the invasion of Iraq before he was against it, escalated several US wars during his first term, and then bombed Iran’s nuclear program and kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in his second.

Now, these problems are compounding. Few on the European continent support Trump’s Iran war, and NATO allies have refused to provide any formal assistance. That has led Trump to lash out at European countries, which has incited yet another nationalist backlash — forcing a new round of denunciations from the far-right politicians who used to make up his continental fan club. The pushback has included Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, French National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, and the Alternative for Germany party that Vance had personally defended in Munich.

“The MAGA’s should really stop campaigning internationally because everyone and everything they support loses the elections,” Theo Francken, the conservative defense minister of Belgium, posted on X. 

Were Vance currently serving as the junior senator from Ohio, he might be able to mount a principled critique of the president’s record. He could accuse Trump of undermining the “nationalist international” bridging the Euro-American right, or pull a Tucker Carlson and accuse Trump of betraying his base on Iran.

But Vance is vice president, and has taken on responsibilities directly related to these areas. He led the charge on outreach to the far-right, and served as a lead negotiator with Iran. In both areas, he was set up for failure — and, going forward, will have a very tough time distancing himself from Trump in these areas (recall Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in 2024).

In effect, the most promising avatar of postliberal politics in America has been saddled with a record that betrays some of his movement’s core principles. And it’s not clear how he’ll ever escape the baggage.

To celebrate the second Sunday of Easter, President Donald Trump appears to have decided that blasphemy might be the best option.

Late Sunday evening, Trump posted a wordy attack of Pope Leo XIV on Truth Social, saying the first American-born leader of the Roman Catholic Church was “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Leo, by criticizing the joint US-Israeli war on Iran, is apparently “catering to the Radical Left,” “hurting the Catholic Church,” and encouraging Iran to develop nuclear weapons. “I am not a fan of Pope Leo,” Trump later told reporters. 

It’s his most aggressive and direct attack yet on the Vicar of Christ, who has been uncharacteristically vocal this year in his criticism of militaristic foreign policy, including making a direct appeal to the president to end the conflict in Iran and promote peace and respect for human life. The pope indicated he would not back down, telling reporters he had “no fear” of the White House. And he threw in a little barb as well, calling the Truth Social posts “ironic”: “The name of the site itself. Say no more.”

Picking a fight with the spiritual leader for more than 50 million Americans was a risky move, if not unprecedented for Trump, and he faced immediate pushback from some otherwise right-leaning Catholics.

But somehow, things only got worse from there: Trump followed up with an AI-generated image depicting him as Jesus Christ healing the sick, as he’s flanked by symbols of America and both military and spiked figures floating like angels behind him. 

It was that second sacrilege that expanded the blowback into a full-on political crisis: This time not only from Catholics, but from evangelicals and other denominations — including many who are typically aligned with Trump. 

“I don’t know if the President thought he was being funny or if he is under the influence of some substance or what possible explanation he could have for this OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy,” the evangelical writer Megan Basham posted. “But he needs to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.”

“God shall not be mocked,” Riley Gaines, the former competitive swimmer and prominent conservative activist, posted. 

“This is gross blasphemy. Faith is not a prop,” the young Christian conservative Brilyn Hollyhand said in a video condemning Trump’s post. 

“It’s more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit,” said former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal Christian critic of Israel and Trump’s second term.

“Trump is my President; Jesus is my Lord,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost posted. “I am not confused about which is which, and hope this image is removed.”

By Monday afternoon, Trump had deleted the post, a rare climbdown, while claiming he didn’t understand what he had shared. “I thought it was me as a doctor,” he said, according to Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove. 

It’s hardly news that Trump’s personal behavior doesn’t exactly line up with the Ten Commandments, but critics have pointed out this hypocrisy for well over a decade with little apparent impact on his conservative religious support. 

The big question then is: Why is this time different?

The religious backlash to Trump has been building for months

Trump’s latest religious post set off a firestorm, but the kindling has been catching over the last few months.

Christians in the United States have been divided by the joint US-Israeli war on Iran: Some anti-Israel MAGA Catholics were already turning on Trump, much to his fury; conservative evangelicals and Christian Zionist nondenominational believers have already been chafing against American Catholics on the right; and policy criticisms of Trump’s foreign policy and immigration agenda from the Vatican and American bishops were putting right-leaning American Catholics in an untenable position.

Now, it looks like Trump is seriously testing just how much it would take for religious conservatives to break with his movement. And he’s taking every shot he can.

Start with Pope Leo. Right before Trump’s latest post, Catholics were already dealing with a shocking series of reports about a meeting between Pentagon officials and the Vatican’s top diplomat to the US back in January, in which one Trump aide issued what was reportedly interpreted by some church officials as a threat over the pope’s criticism of military operations. Though the tone and content of this meeting is contested by both the Pentagon and the Vatican, the effect of these reports was the same: the growing sense that the pope and the president are at odds.  

Perhaps for that reason, the response to Trump personally attacking Leo was especially strong compared to prior incidents, like when he posted an image of himself as pope after Pope Francis died. The latest episode raised the specter of the president focusing his frustrations over the war on the church writ large, a problem that could worsen if the conflict continues to spiral and his approval ratings worsen.

The Bishop Robert Barron, a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission who is popular with traditionalist Catholics and the religious right, called his statements “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” and urged “that serious Catholics within the Trump administration — Secretary Rubio, Vice President Vance, Ambassador Brian Burch, and others — might meet with Vatican officials so that a real dialogue can take place.” 

Other prominent American Catholics also weighed in: The head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops said he was “disheartened” that Trump would attack Leo, and reminded him that the pope is not a politician, but “the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls.”

Already, there are signs of a clear cleavage opening up between most American Catholics and Trump, particularly over the Iran war. Trump’s net approval is now negative with them, after exit polls reported that he won this religious part of the electorate by nearly 20 points during the 2024 election. The most recent temperature checks of American Catholics on Iran are also negative: they disapprove of the Iran war by 10 points, and disapprove of Trump’s handling of it by a margin of 20 points, per a March Fox News poll.

“Trump has already lost some support from the Catholic right, which leans isolationist, over his decision to go to war with Iran,” Washington Examiner senior editor Peter Laffin, a Catholic writer, told me. “If I were a Republican candidate heading into 2026, I’d be more concerned with how his attacks on Pope Leo are playing among the Hispanic Catholics who swung heavily to the GOP in 2024.”

And this whole episode again brings the future of the Republican Party into the spotlight. It creates a new obstacle for Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, who keeps getting torn between defending the president, managing relations between MAGA factions, and fielding Catholic criticism, all as he defines his political career along the lines of his Catholic conversion (which is the theme of his forthcoming book).

“This will be consequential for JD Vance,” the Trump critic Candace Owens, an emblematic figure of a growing new antiwar, and sometimes antisemitic, Catholic wing of conservative media, posted Sunday. 

“Can we now all admit that this is a cult of personality, the leading worshiper of which is its leader?” Rod Dreher, a conservative Eastern Orthodox Christian writer known for his close ties to Vance, posted. He was also critical of Trump’s posts about Pope Leo.

But in addition to how this plays out with Catholics, it’s with the greater religious conservative community, of evangelical and nondenominational Christians, where Trump has now exposed himself unnecessarily. 

They’ve largely stuck with him as the war carries on, motivated in part by the prevalent Christian Zionist beliefs that underlie their faith and support for the modern Israeli state. Now, Trump’s aggressive sacrilege — casting himself as Jesus on social media — on top of already threatening Iran with annihilation right after Easter, the most sacred time of the Christian calendar, is causing a kind of self-reflection, doubt, and criticism of the president that we have not seen before.

“The media is paying attention to [podcasters] breaking with Trump over Iran,” evangelical radio host Erick Erickson posted. “What they really should be paying attention to are the Christian Trump supporters who have stood with him through Iran, who are waking up to his blasphemy.”

Viktor Orbán, the European Union’s only autocrat, has fallen.

Results from Sunday’s election in Hungary show that the opposition Tisza party, led by Péter Magyar, has defeated Orbán’s Fidesz party — the first election the party has lost in 20 years. Orbán called Magyar to concede the race within hours of the polls closing.

There is a reason for Fidesz’s longevity: After winning the 2010 election, they had so thoroughly stacked the electoral playing field in their favor that it became nearly impossible for them to lose. That Magyar has beaten them is a testament both to his skills as a politician and the overwhelming frustration of the Hungarian population with life under Fidesz.

His victory also required overcoming an extraordinary last-minute campaign by President Donald Trump to save MAGA’s favorite European leader, which included sending Vice President JD Vance to Hungary to rally with Orbán last week. On the eve of the election, Trump promised to devote the “full economic might” of the US to boosting Hungary’s economy if Orbán asked.

But Magyar didn’t just win the election: He won by a massive margin, potentially enough to secure a two-thirds majority of seats in Hungary’s parliament. This would be a magic number: enough, per Hungarian law, for Tisza to amend the constitution at will.

With such a majority, Magyar would have the power to begin unwinding the authoritarian regime that Orbán has spent his tenure in power building — and potentially restore true democracy to Hungary. 

Without it, Tisza will hold nominal power but ultimately be limited in how to wield it. Fidesz’s influence over institutions like the court and presidency would constrain their ability to undo much of what Fidesz already did. The most likely scenario: Tisza has four frustrating years in power, accomplishes relatively little, and then hands power back to Fidesz.

So much depends on the exact ways that the votes are tallied. But now, for the first time in a very long time, there is genuine hope for Hungarian democracy.

How to win an authoritarian election

To understand how astonishing Magyar’s victory is, you need to understand just how much Orbán had stacked the deck against him.

After Orbán’s first term in office, from 1998 to 2002, his party claimed they were cheated — and he became dedicated to never losing again. For the next eight years, he and his allies in Fidesz developed a series of complex and precise schemes for changing Hungarian law to build what Orbán termed “a political forcefield” that could hold on to power for decades. 

When they won a two-thirds majority in the 2010 election, they were able to put these ideas into action.

Fidesz reworked Hungary’s election system, gerrymandering districts to give its rural base vastly more representation than urban opposition supporters. It turned public media into propaganda, and strong-armed independent media into selling to the government or its private-sector allies. It created ballot access rules that forced the several opposition parties to compete against each other. It imposed unequal campaign finance rules that put Fidesz on a structurally superior footing.

The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.

“The state became a party state, in which there is no border between the government, the governing party, [and] state institutions,” says Dániel Döbrentey, the Voting Rights Project Coordinator at the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union. “Sources, databases, and everything which should serve the public interest are sometimes not just handled but misused by the governing majority for their campaigning purposes.”

Recent evidence shows the Hungarian regime also employed more classically authoritarian tactics. A new documentary compiled damning evidence of widespread voter blackmail: where local Fidesz officials threaten voters in remote areas, perhaps with job loss or cutting them off from public benefits, if they do not vote for the party. Döbrentey estimates that this has affected somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 Hungarians — a significant number in a country where the number of eligible voters tops out at around 8 million.

The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.

“The rules are so seriously rigged that Orbán can probably make up a 10-, maybe even 15-point difference” in underlying public opinion, says Kim Lane Scheppele, an expert on Hungarian election law at Princeton University.

And yet Fidesz just lost resoundingly. How?

For one thing, Magyar was an excellent candidate. A regime defector — his ex-wife served as Orbán’s Minister of Justice — he shared many of its conservative views on social policy and immigration, making it difficult for the government to rally its base by painting him as a left-globalist plant. 

Despite this, the entire opposition — including left-wing parties — threw their weight behind his new Tisza party, understanding that the only thing that mattered was ousting Fidesz. This allowed for the creation of a pan-ideological coalition, one united primarily by frustration with the current government and a desire to return to real democracy.

And this frustration ran deep — very deep.

Orbán had badly mismanaged the Hungarian economy, falling well behind other former Communist states like Poland and Czechia to become one of the European Union’s poorest states (if not the poorest). This economic underperformance was inextricably intertwined with his governance model: Fidesz secured its hold on power by empowering a handful of regime-friendly oligarchs to dominate the commercial sector. This system gave Orbán significant power to fend off political challenges and make himself wealthy, but it produced a stagnant and corrupt private sector where connections with the state were more important than having a high-quality business model.

Fidesz’s control over the flow of information, while powerful, simply could not compete with the reality that ordinary Hungarians experienced with their eyes and ears.

Perhaps Orbán might have held if he were facing a lesser opponent, a less united opposition, or a less impoverished electorate. But the conjunction of all three created a kind of electoral perfect storm, one powerful enough to overcome one of the most potent election-rigging machines in the world.

Can Péter Magyar save Hungarian democracy?

When autocrats lose elections, the immediate fear is that they’ll try to annul or overturn them — à la Trump in 2020. Orbán’s concession suggests Hungary may be avoiding the worst-case scenario.

Yet Orbán could still make use of his remaining time with a two-thirds majority to try and protect the system he built on the way out. There are a number of different ways to do so, most of which involve a rapid convening of parliament to pass new constitutional amendments. Perhaps the most discussed one among Hungary watchers is one in which Fidesz amends the constitution to change Hungary from a parliamentary system to a presidential one.

Hungary already has a president — a Fidesz loyalist with little to do given his party’s control over parliament. But Orbán may attempt to turn the office into Hungary’s chief executive, thus stripping Magyar of key powers before he even has a chance to wield them. Orbán might even figure out a way to appoint himself president, a maneuver pioneered by Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

But even assuming none of that happens, the future of Hungarian democracy will still be precarious — hinging, in significant part, on exactly how many seats Tisza has won in parliament.

For the past 16 years, Orbán has not just corrupted Hungarian elections: He has corrupted everything about the Hungarian state. The judiciary, regulatory agencies, bureaucracy, even seemingly apolitical institutions in areas like the arts — nearly everything has, in one way or another, become part of the Fidesz machine, either a vehicle for political control or a means of Fidesz leaders profiting off of power. 

Restoring Hungarian democracy is thus not a simple matter of redrawing electoral maps. They will need to kick Orbán’s cronies off the courts, break up the government’s near-monopoly on the press, rebuild safeguards against corruption, create a truly nonpartisan tax agency, and on down the line — all while trying to manage the nearby war in Ukraine, rebuild a relationship with the European Union, and deal with a United States that nakedly campaigned on Orbán’s behalf.

This amounts to a need for something like constitutional regime change —  a transformation almost certainly impossible to accomplish without a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Absent the power to amend the constitution, Fidesz’s structural entrenchment in areas like the courts will hamstring the Tisza majority’s ability to make real change. A failed Magyar government, and Fidesz restoration in the next elections, would be the most likely outcome: the authoritarian system reasserting itself even after what might seem, on the outside, like a fatal defeat. For this reason, the size of the Tisza majority may matter as much as the sheer fact of them winning.

But if he does get two-thirds, then Péter Magyar and his allies have accomplished the near-impossible: beating an entrenched autocrat in elections that he had spent nearly two decades attempting to rig.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: The economic impact of the Iran war is becoming clearer. 

What’s happening? On Friday, we learned that inflation climbed to 3.3 percent in March, almost 1 percentage point higher than it was in February and the quickest inflation has grown in nearly four years. 

Unsurprisingly, consumers aren’t thrilled. New data from the University of Michigan, also released Friday, shows consumer sentiment from April under 50, its lowest point ever. It’s not even mid-April, so for now, those numbers are preliminary — but they point in a concerning direction. 

What does Iran have to do with this? Shortly after the war began in late February, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial passage for oil and natural gas. It has remained largely closed ever since, driving gas prices over $4/gallon in the US and making many more goods, including food, more expensive. 

Will the ceasefire fix prices? No. The ceasefire, while fragile, is holding. But despite President Donald Trump’s demands this week, there is no sign that it has led to the Strait reopening. 

According to the BBC, four tankers, and only 19 total ships, have passed the Strait since the ceasefire was announced; under normal conditions, well over 100 ships transit the Strait each day.

Even under the most optimistic scenario where the Strait does reopen in the near future, it will take weeks, if not months, for the oil supply to rebound, oil markets expert Rory Johnston told Vox earlier this week.

What’s next? American and Iranian negotiating teams will meet in Pakistan this weekend to discuss a more permanent peace deal, which could provide the US economy with a needed reprieve. How that will go is anyone’s guess: On Friday, Trump issued another threat, writing on Truth Social that “The only reason [the Iranians] are alive today is to negotiate!”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I always enjoy New York Magazine’s “Grub Street Diet,” where someone — a politician, a celebrity, a journalist — lays out a week of sometimes-eclectic culinary choices. Their latest features investigative reporter and author Patrick Radden Keefe, and you can read it here.

Have a good weekend and we’ll see you back here on Monday!

Editor’s note, April 13, 3 pm ET: On April 12, after this story’s publication, Trump posted a tirade against Pope Leo XIV on Truth Social, calling him “WEAK on crime.” In a subsequent interview, Trump told NBC News, “We don’t like a pope that’s going to say that it’s OK to have a nuclear weapon,” and that he was “not a big fan of Pope Leo.” The pope responded by saying he has “no fear” of the White House: “We are not politicians, we don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the gospel, as a peacemaker.” The story below was originally published on April 10.

Most American Catholics were probably not expecting to spend the first week of Easter trying to figure out whether their government was threatening to overthrow the first American-born pope.

Yet a handful of news reports this week raised that very strange possibility. They landed just as both the Roman Catholic Church and right-wing Christian influencers have been ramping up their criticism of the Trump administration over the Iran war.

This burgeoning scandal hinges on news reports that in January, the previous ambassador of the Vatican to the United States was called into an unusual meeting with Department of Defense officials at the Pentagon and dressed down. The Pentagon officials, reportedly, wanted to complain about a speech Pope Leo XIV gave in Rome that appeared to criticize American foreign policy. During the meeting, one official issued what some in the church saw as a veiled threat to the Vatican: a warning that the US wields unlimited military power, and that the pope should be conscious of that.

If true, this episode would mark a low point in modern Vatican-American political relations — on top of being a major religious scandal for Catholics in the US.

The Trump administration denies these accounts; the Vatican is keeping mostly quiet. Meanwhile, the reporters and writers who first surfaced these allegations are standing by their stories.

Whatever the truth ends up being, this scandal points to some important fracture lines in American religious life, and offers a key to understanding the way the Iran war is cracking up the religious right. It  also fits into a broader conflict that is testing MAGA Catholics’ resolve, and setting up the Catholic Church as one of the Trump administration’s most visible and relevant critics. 

So what exactly is the scandal?

This whole saga began with a report from the Free Press on Wednesday, in which Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi reported on a previously unknown meeting between Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, then-top Vatican diplomat in the US Cardinal Christophe Pierre, and a handful of Pentagon officials.

The meeting, which is now confirmed to have happened, was unusual, Ferraresi and other reports noted, because of where and when it happened: at the Pentagon, instead of with diplomats of the Department of State, and after Pope Leo had delivered a speech decrying the breakdown in the post-war international order and the escalating use of force and violence abroad by nations, including the US, to achieve their aims. 

“War is back in vogue and the zeal for war is spreading,” Leo had said in his speech to diplomats.

That the meeting happened isn’t in doubt; but no one seems to agree on what was actually said in the encounter. The Free Press reported that the meeting was meant to be a warning to the Vatican, a reminder that militarily, the US can do “whatever it wants…and that the Vatican, and Leo, better take its side.” And so, it devolved into a “bitter lecture.”

The Pentagon, meanwhile, said Thursday that the group “had a substantive, respectful, and professional meeting” and that “recent reporting of the meeting is highly exaggerated and distorted.” The US ambassador to the Holy See (the Vatican’s political government) echoed that sentiment, and called media reports exaggerations and fabrications.

But other news outlets also began picking up on the fallout. NBC Chicago, of the pope’s hometown, quoted a Vatican source who called the Pentagon meeting “most unpleasant and confrontational.” The Financial Times reported that the meeting was supposed to deliver a “friendly message” to the pope, and to ask the Vatican to be more supportive of the Trump administration’s policies, but unraveled when Pierre said the pope would follow Catholic values in conducting Vatican foreign policy.

That’s when one specific term jumps out, which caused this whole episode to become an actual scandal. Someone in the room, according to the Free Press, the Financial Times, and independent journalist Christopher Hale, invoked the name “Avignon” — which some Vatican officials reportedly understood to be a military threat against the Vatican. 

Why did this particular phrase set off alarm bells? To answer that, we have to go back 700 years. 

Did a Trump official really threaten the Vatican?

Though these accounts don’t agree on who invoked Avignon, the term is a trigger for Catholics, historians, and history buffs: It references the French city that served as the home base for popes in the 14th century after a French king, Philip IV, sent an army to Italy where they attacked the sitting pope, Boniface VIII, after years of feuding over who was the preeminent political power. 

Phiip IV went on to force the election of a new French pope, who moved the papacy to Avignon. For 70 years, popes held court and governed Christendom from the city’s papal palace — and when the last Avignon pope tried to move the office back to Rome, it spawned a crisis for the church and the rise of rival “antipopes” in Avignon claiming to be the real pope for nearly 40 years after.

As you might now understand, “Avignon” is a loaded term. And combined with the nature of the meeting — at the Pentagon, having to do with comments Pope Leo had made about America’s use of force — you can see how this episode could be interpreted as being a veiled warning about the church staying in its lane when it comes to criticizing the dominant military power.

Why are the US and the pope so at odds?

Regardless of who invoked Avignon or how confrontational the meeting was behind the scenes, it fits into a pattern of growing public conflict between the Church and the Trump presidency. 

This applies to both style and substance: Pope Leo, and the American bishops, have become loud critics of Trump’s immigration and mass deportation policy, his foreign interventions abroad and use of force against other nations, and the breakdown of the US-European alliance. For all intents and purposes, MAGA has forced the Catholic Church to appear like the chief resistance.

But it’s the joint US-Israeli war on Iran that has caused the most visible strain and direct condemnation of Trump and the American government by the Roman pontiff. After spending weeks calling for peace talks and ceasefires, and preaching the Church’s anti-war message during Holy Week commemorations, Leo used Trump’s name for the first time last week, expressing hope that he was “looking for an off-ramp” from the war.

And after Trump warned that Iranian civilization might “die” on Tuesday, Leo condemned the statements as “truly unacceptable” and urged “the citizens of all the countries involved to contact the authorities, political leaders, congressmen, to ask them, tell them to work for peace and to reject war.”

Has Pope Leo weighed in on Avignon-gate?

The pope hasn’t said anything on this latest development, but the Vatican has weighed in — a significant move given their traditional reluctance to address these kinds of political disputes. 

After the Vatican Press Office initially declined to comment earlier in the week, Vatican press secretary Matteo Bruni released a statement on Friday confirming Cardinal Pierre met with Colby “for an exchange of views on matters of mutual interest,” and that “the narrative offered by certain media outlets regarding this meeting does not correspond at all with the truth” — without clarifying which narrative that was, or where existing reporting got things wrong. 

Meanwhile, the Vatican diplomat involved in the meeting, Cardinal Pierre, told one independent journalist he would “prefer not speak.”

But the Free Press report suggested that this dustup is leading the Vatican to keep the US government at arm’s length while Trump is president. The first American pope has declined invitations to come to the US during its 250th celebrations, and will instead spend that time at an island in Italy where migrants fleeing danger in Africa frequently stop off while trying to reach Europe. The Trump administration has openly supported anti-immigrant political parties and leaders in Europe, while also trying to block asylum seekers and refugees from entering America.

Where does JD Vance come into all this? 

Vance, a Catholic convert who has a book coming out later this year on his faith journey, was asked about the Pentagon episode on Wednesday while traveling in Hungary. He denied knowing the Vatican diplomat in question, and said he’d rather not comment on an unconfirmed report.

Vance is the highest ranking of a significant number of Catholics serving in the Trump administration (including Secretary of State Marco Rubio), was one of the last public leaders to meet with the late Pope Francis before his death, and was famously rebuked by two popes (Francis and Leo, albeit before the latter became pope) for invoking his new faith to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policy. 

As Vance’s prior papal feuds indicate, the Free Press story also runs into some intra-Catholic tensions. Colby, the Pentagon official embroiled in the mess and a reported ally of Vance, is also Catholic. Some of the leading intellectual figures on the right in MAGA circles are traditionalist Catholics who have been critical of the current and former popes for what they see as concessions to modern liberal political values.

Within US politics, Vance also represents a wing of the GOP that is being split apart by the Iran war, partly over religious lines — and in ways that could threaten his potential aspirations for the presidency in 2028. This story could make that divide even more difficult to navigate. 

How does this latest story fit into MAGA’s current civil war? 

Beyond being a spectacle, Avignon-gate is also a helpful key to understanding what is happening on the religious right in 2026, and how the Iran war is affecting both the MAGA coalition and the American Catholic Church.

The report landed just as arguments over Israel and Iran were driving a wedge between the GOP’s pro-Trump evangelical base, who tend to be Christian Zionists sympathetic to Israel, and a group of prominent Catholic and non-evangelical commentators who are increasingly hostile to Trump’s foreign policy agenda and critical of Israel. 

Among the latter group, which includes Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Carrie Prejean Boller, and Nick Fuentes, Avignon-gate quickly became a hot topic, with many eager to embrace the most explosive interpretation of events. 

“On the pope thing, that is how you know this administration is the antichrist…these people hate Catholics,” the self-described Catholic and white supremacist Nick Fuentes said on his show Thursday. Boller took aim at Colby on X, saying, “you won’t bully or threaten the Catholic Church into your unjust war.”

Many of these more isolationist and antiwar figures have also been condemned within the right for either tolerating or openly espousing antisemitism. As they rally to the church’s side now over the war, and justify their opposition to Trump in increasingly theological terms, this episode puts more pressure on Leo to address the church’s relationship with them as well. Ferraresi, the author of the Free Press article that kicked off this affair, challenged Pope Leo in the same piece to condemn “the growing choir of Catholic pundits injecting bigotry into the MAGA infosphere,” and not just focus the church’s fire on the pro-war right. 

In short, it’s a mess. Avignon-gate is almost perfectly calibrated to raise temperatures not only between the White House and the Vatican, but within the US Catholic community, and within the MAGA movement. And the issues it raises are nowhere near being resolved.

Even before the Trump administration went to war with Iran, it was talking differently about its approach to combat. 

President Donald Trump relabeled the Department of Defense to something more in line with his values: the Department of War. His Defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, promised to deliver on a philosophy of “maximum lethality.” For many years, Hegseth has wanted to unleash an American warrior and fight the enemy, no holds barred. (In 2024, Hegseth authored a book titled The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.)

After notching successes in Venezuela and in last year’s limited strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, Hegseth and Trump began the Iran war confident and with a seemingly unbridled willingness to inflict damage. Trump’s post earlier this week threatening to wipe out a whole civilization may have resulted in a temporary ceasefire, but it seems like that strategy isn’t going anywhere.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with the New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells about how that philosophy has been realized in Hegseth and Trump’s first big war. Wallace-Wells explains Hegseth’s need to unleash that warrior ethos at every opportunity and how it might be driving the US’s next step with Iran. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How is [Hegseth] executing this concept of his?

I’d say a couple of things. The first is, it’s interesting to note, in all of the reporting that we’ve seen from many different outlets, that Hegseth is the only person who’s in the president’s circle who seems as optimistic as Trump does about the progress of the war and the possibilities of the war. 

You see [Vice President] JD Vance distancing himself very actively from the war. You see [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio taking an ambivalent position. Gen. [Dan] Caine sees risks as well as possibilities. But Hegseth has been gung-ho the whole way. 

His approach to the war, I think, has been that American lethality will deliver whatever the president wants. In the very first hours of the war, you have this massive bombing raid that kills [Iran’s Supreme Leader] Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and then President Trump comes out a few days later and says, in that raid, not only was Khamenei killed, but some of the other senior figures in the Iranian regime who we had hoped might succeed Khamenei [were killed]. Within a day of the war beginning we see 175 people killed in a school in southern Iran, presumably through a targeting error, though we’re still not totally sure exactly what happened there. 

In both of these cases, you see a program of unleashed lethality. And I think you can see in both those cases that it undermines the aims of the United States and the stated war aims of the president, both in eliminating some of the potential replacements in the case of the initial bombing, and then also in making it just a little harder to imagine the Iranian public getting behind the kind of uprising that President Trump has said he wants to trigger. 

How much of his approach do we think is coming from his own belief in this concept of maximum lethality, and how much of it is so many in his Cabinet just wanting to please the president?

It’s interesting to think of Vance, Rubio, and Hegseth as each representing one idea of the president. Vance represents the sort of nationalism of the president. Rubio represents maybe a more traditional Republican transactional approach. And Hegseth just represents the full military maximalism. And he has become more influential because he has been the one who has, I think, successfully seen what the president wants to do in Iran and made himself the spokesman and enabler of that.

I do think that there’s a pretty good chance that this doesn’t turn out so well in public opinion and the progress of the war. I’m not sure that it’s been a very savvy long-term play for Hegseth, but I think we should remember that Hegseth did not have a political base or role in the world before Trump tapped him. He had never been a senior military commander. He’d served in the military as a younger man. He was the weekend co-host of Fox and Friends.

He owes his position in the world to President Trump. He’s, according to public opinion, now deeply unpopular, as is the war. If we’re thinking just in pure personal terms, it’s not crazy for him to take a shot and try to position himself as the maximalist face of this war. But I do think that there may be real costs for the rest of us. 

Another thing that feels significant to this conversation and feels like maybe a companion piece to this idea of maximum lethality is Pete Hegseth is really tying this war [together with] his approach to God.

I would say to a Christian God, even more specifically. He’s specifically asked during military press conferences for people to pray to Jesus Christ on the troops’ behalf. 

Another element that matters here is, he’s referred to the Iranian regime as apocalyptic, and together with delivering prayers from the podium where he’s giving technical updates on the progress of the war, it does give an atmosphere of holy war to the whole operation.

Pete’s whole thing is maximum lethality. The president seemed to go even further with his post, the whole world was on edge, and then we got a ceasefire out of it, however tentative it may be. Does that prove something about this concept of maximum lethality as a viable foreign policy?

If you threaten nuclear war, you can spook some people. I think that that’s pretty intuitive, but I don’t know that that really proves anything in terms of foreign policy. We’re looking at a situation where Iran seems like they’re likely to have full control of the Strait of Hormuz, where the regime is still in control, where the United States has alienated a huge number of its own allies around the world with its willingness to play brinksmanship. 

In the narrow sense of, Trump had managed to get himself into a real trap and then by threatening enormous lethality, to use Hegseth’s word, he was able to maneuver out — I guess it worked, but it’s really hard for me to say that in any bigger-picture sense this was effective. I have to look back at this whole month and just say, what was this all for? It feels to me like a whole lot of fury and bombs and death, and it’s really hard for me to see a lot that’s come from it.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Hi readers, big news broke just after yesterday’s newsletter went out: The US and Iran reached a temporary ceasefire agreement, averting President Donald Trump’s threats of civilization destruction.

While we may have missed the breaking news yesterday, there’s still plenty to catch up on today. Here’s what you need to know: 

What’s the latest? As of Wednesday afternoon, a US-Iran ceasefire appears to be in place, but shaky. Iran has already accused the US of violating several points of the agreement, and it’s not clear whether the sides are even on the same page about what has been agreed to. 

In particular, Israel’s offensive into Lebanon is still ongoing; on Wednesday, more than 250 people were killed by Israeli strikes. Both Iran and Pakistan, which has served as a mediator for recent US-Iran talks, have said Lebanon is supposed to be covered by yesterday’s ceasefire. 

Nonetheless, talks appear to be moving forward: Vice President JD Vance and two other US negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, are set to meet with Iranian officials in Pakistan on Saturday. 

What has Trump said about this? On Tuesday evening, Trump wrote in a post that he had agreed “to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks” because the US was “very far along with a definitive Agreement concerning Longterm PEACE with Iran, and PEACE in the Middle East.”

Early Wednesday morning, he added that “[the] United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz. There will be lots of positive action! Big money will be made.” 

So far, however, it doesn’t seem like the strait has reopened: According to Bloomberg, as few as three ships — out of hundreds — may have passed through on Wednesday.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

I’d like to extend an official Logoff endorsement (do we have those? I’ll have to ask my editor) to this recent article from the Washington Post: 5 ways to add a little inconvenience to your day — and improve your brain (as always, it’s a gift link). 

It might sound counterintuitive, but as the piece explains, adding a little bit of friction — whether that means cooking a meal instead of ordering one, or trying something new that challenges your brain to work in a different way — is ultimately beneficial. If you have any other suggestions in the same vein, I’d love to hear them. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

The 25th Amendment is having a moment.

According to a tally by NBC News, over 70 Democratic lawmakers called for President Donald Trump’s Cabinet to invoke an obscure constitutional provision that would allow them to temporarily prevent Trump from acting as president, after Trump threatened to wipe out “a whole civilization” in Iran. (Trump has backed away from that threat, at least for now.)

Notably, their call for a 25th Amendment solution was echoed by some voices on the far right, including former US Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene, radio host Alex Jones, and MAGA influencer Candace Owens.

It’s not the first time the amendment has come up. There’s been a regular background hum of Trump critics demanding its invocation throughout both his terms in office, which peaked in the days after January 6, 2021, with real conversations in his Cabinet and in congressional leadership about the process.

As a practical matter, Trump is not going anywhere, even if he didn’t command the near-universal loyalty within his party that he currently does. By international standards, it is extremely difficult to remove the president of the United States, and much harder than it is to remove the leaders of many of our peer democracies. And the 25th Amendment is not a viable shortcut around this problem, which is rooted in the fundamental structure of America’s government.

How the 25th Amendment actually works

Let’s cut to the chase: Trump is about as likely to be removed via the 25th Amendment as he is to be deposed by an army of unicorn-riding elves. 

While it is theoretically possible to remove Trump from office (or, at least, to strip him of his powers permanently) using the amendment, the removal process is too cumbersome, has too many failure points, and requires too much of a bipartisan consensus to be an effective method of removing a president who is merely bad at being president, rather than one who is literally incapable of performing their duties.

The 25th Amendment was enacted shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and was intended to solve a different problem than the one the United States faces today — what if the president of the United States was still alive, but was physically or mentally incapacitated in a way that prevented him from exercising the powers of office?

Before the 25th Amendment was ratified, the Constitution provided that the vice president shall assume the powers of the presidency should the president show “Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office.” But the original Constitution did not lay out a process to determine when the president was unable to exercise their duties. That created a risk that the president may be unfit for duty, but no one could be sure how to formally transfer power to the vice president.

The process laid out in the 25th Amendment is, to put it mildly, complicated. It allows the vice president to declare the president unfit for duty, provided that a majority of the president’s Cabinet officers consent. Once the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet inform Congress that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

But such a declaration is unlikely to amount to much if the president is still capable of clinging to power. The 25th Amendment also provides that the president may regain their authority merely by transmitting his own “written declaration that no inability exists” to congressional leaders. If that happens, the vice president and the Cabinet may force a congressional vote on whether the president should retain power, but if two-thirds of both houses of Congress do not agree that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” then the president remains president. And they can’t stall the vote for too long: if Congress does nothing in 21 days, the president regains his executive powers. 

To even begin the process of removing Trump, in other words, a majority of Trump’s hand-picked Cabinet officials (plus Vice President JD Vance) would need to agree that he was unfit. Then, when Trump inevitably told Congress that he was resuming his duties, a supermajority of both the US House and the Senate — both of which are controlled by Trump’s Republican Party — would have to vote to install Vance as acting president. 

There really was some limited bipartisan chatter in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol about removing Trump via the 25th Amendment. But Trump was a lame duck with only two weeks left in office then, meaning a Cabinet vote to strip him of his powers, combined with the 21-day time limit in Congress, could actually run out the clock on his presidency. 

That wouldn’t be a possibility this time. Indeed, because the 25th Amendment requires a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress to remove Trump against his will, it is even more cumbersome than the impeachment process, which only requires a simple majority in the House and a two-thirds majority in the Senate. In 2021, the Senate couldn’t even secure a two-thirds majority to disqualify Trump from office while he was on trial for stirring up a violent attack against the Senate itself.

Other democracies make it much easier to remove an incompetent, unfit, or unpopular leader

The United States is unusual in that it elects its chief executive separately from its legislature. The US often elects a Congress that is controlled by a different party than the one that controls the White House. And the Congress has only limited power to remove a president — a power it has never successfully used in all of US history.

Compare this system to parliamentary democracies such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and Japan. In these systems, the people elect the members of the legislature, but the legislature chooses the official who will run the government. That official also can often be removed by a no-confidence vote in the legislature, frequently by a simple majority.

The founders saw this as a key feature: The executive branch and legislative branch were expected to each jockey for control in order to keep either from consolidating power. But as the late political scientist Juan Linz observed in 1990, presidential democracies such as the United States have proven inherently unstable, because the president and the legislature may deadlock on some crucial issue and both can simultaneously claim to have a popular mandate if such a deadlock occurs. The US system also locks in place a president who may have lost the confidence of both the Congress and the people, but who is nonetheless entitled to serve out their entire term.

One additional advantage of parliamentary democracy is that it allows a political party to remove an unfit or unpopular leader without triggering a political crisis. In 1990, for example, British Conservatives replaced unpopular Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with John Major, and then retained power for seven more years under new leadership. A similar drama recently played out in Canada, where the governing Liberal Party replaced former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with current PM Mark Carney — allowing Carney to lead the Liberals to another electoral victory in 2025.

In parliamentary systems, in other words, removal of a head of government isn’t an unheard-of event that humiliates the outgoing leader and places them in a class of one. It is a normal political tactic that allows the outgoing prime minister to leave office gracefully. That sort of system gives political parties an incentive to remove bad leaders.

Meanwhile, the United States is almost certainly stuck with Trump until his term expires in 2029 — even if Democrats win back both houses of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, there is no plausible outcome where they win two-thirds of the seats in the Senate. Some new controversy would have to generate near-universal bipartisan demand for his removal, and it’s frankly not very pleasant to imagine what the world looks like in that scenario.