The president versus the pope
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.6K Ratings
🗓️ 14 April 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, religion correspondent Jason DeRose, and White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.
This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. |
| 0:08.5 | I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House. And we also have NPR's religion correspondent Jason DeRose here with us. Hi, Jason. |
| 0:14.7 | Hello. Good to be back. Yeah, it's great to have you. And today on the show, President Trump versus the Pope. |
| 0:22.2 | These two men have not seen eye to eye on many things since Leo the 14th was elected last spring, and that came to a head |
| 0:27.2 | this weekend. Jason, just get us up to speed on what happened. Many things have happened in the last |
| 0:31.9 | few days. Well, Sunday evening, Trump published a long post on social media that called the Pope Week, very liberal, saying he was soft on crime and wanted to have nuclear weapons in Iran, and really, really quite the tirade. |
| 0:48.4 | And then after he posted this, he spoke to reporters and here's some of what he said. |
| 0:52.9 | We don't like it. We don't like a Pope that's going to say that it's okay to have a nuclear weapon. |
| 0:58.9 | We don't want a Pope that says crime is okay in our cities. I don't like it. I'm not a big fan of Pope Leo. |
| 1:05.4 | He's a very liberal person and he's a man that doesn't believe in stopping crime. |
| 1:10.7 | Now, I will say that the Pope is not a law enforcement... liberal person, and he's a man that doesn't believe in stopping crime. |
| 1:17.1 | Now, I will say that the Pope is not a law enforcement official, and the Pope has never said that he wanted Iran to have nuclear weapons. What he has done, though, is spoken out |
| 1:22.1 | about peace and about concerns about immigration enforcement policy, which is what I think Trump is saying is about being weak on crime and about wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon. |
| 1:34.3 | I did feel like this whole kerfuffle got a little conflated with another social media post, Danielle, though, right? |
| 1:40.8 | Where Trump, just describe it for me, because I'm not going to do it justice, really. |
| 1:46.6 | Absolutely. Well, understandably conflated because this happened right after the president posted that's tirade against the Pope. |
| 1:54.1 | He posted an apparently AI-generated image that has since been deleted of himself looking quite a bit like Jesus. |
| 2:03.6 | He's wearing these flowing white robes with the red sort of sash or shawl, things that you often see Jesus depicted wearing. |
| 2:10.6 | There's glowing lights coming from his hands as he heals a man in a bed. |
| 2:15.6 | There are people sort of looking up at him beatifically, a woman making prayer hands. |
| 2:20.1 | So a lot of religious imagery here. |
| 2:22.8 | There was a lot of backlash. |
... |
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