President Donald Trump took to social media Saturday evening to attack Pope Leo XIV for meeting with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Trump’s criticism of the mayor and the Chicago-born pope comes after Johnson visited Leo with a delegation of city leaders on Thursday.
Johnson and the pope discussed faith and lighthearted topics like their differences on Chicago baseball, but also talked about serious matters, including the Trump-directed immigration raids that flooded the city last fall.
Mayor Brandon Johnson invites Pope Leo XIV to celebrate Mass in Grant Park
“Someone should explain to the Pope that the Mayor of Chicago is useless, and that Iran cannot have a Nuclear Weapon! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” read Trump’s post on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Along with the message, Trump shared screenshots of Johnson’s own posts with pictures of him and the pope sharing gifts and praying together.
The post was only one of a barrage Saturday evening from Trump, whose account shared around 30 more in the next two hours. Trump appeared to use artificial intelligence in many of those later posts to cast himself in a glorified light.
One showed him ominously peering over a mountain at a Greenland town, while another, labeled “Drone Port,” depicted military drones on the roof of the White House.
But despite the president’s often strange and prolific social media posting, his barb at the pope stood out because it carried an underlying message: He had noticed and been troubled by Johnson’s visit to the Vatican.
Johnson has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s for as long as he has been mayor. He has carefully and repeatedly blasted Trump’s policies and has routinely reserved his most cutting affronts for the president.
The mayor gained national attention for his condemnation of Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” as hundreds of immigration agents descended upon the city last fall. Johnson also frequently remarks that Trump wants to “relitigate the Civil War.”
For his part, Trump has also lobbed attacks at Johnson. Just Tuesday, he wrote in another social media post that Johnson and Gov. JB Pritzker should “call for help” after a large youth gathering in Hyde Park ended with three people shot.
Before Johnson and his sprawling delegation left for the Vatican, he promised Wednesday morning to thank the pope “for his courage.”
“Particularly his moral stance around these endless wars, his stances around protecting workers, his clarity around the dreadful and the most barbaric form of slavery,” Johnson said, referring to Leo’s criticism of the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran, his recent criticism of artificial intelligence in a major encyclical and the formal apology he issued earlier this week for the Church’s role in legitimizing slavery.
Johnson later told reporters that he and the pope discussed “endless wars” during their meeting.
In April, Leo pointed the attention of bishops gathered in Iran to “inhuman violence” in lands important in Christian history now “desecrated by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives.”
He told the bishops that no cause can justify the spilling of innocent blood and urged them “to proclaim clearly that God does not bless any conflict; to cry out to the world that whoever is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, never stands on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today drop bombs.”
A day later, he issued his strongest condemnation of the war, denouncing the “delusion of omnipotence” that he said fueled it as he demanded political leaders stop fighting and negotiate peace.
“Enough of the idolatry of self and money!” Leo said during an evening prayer service in St. Peter’s Basilica. “Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!”
The next day, Trump took to his social media accounts to bash the pope in a lengthy Truth Social post. He called the pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”
“I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump wrote. “I don’t want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.”
Trump then took credit for Leo’s election as pope.
“If I wasn’t (sic) in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican,” he wrote. “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.”
Tribune reporter Alice Yin and the Associated Press contributed.