Ah, the pope and the president. Again. So much discussion about such fragments of information.
This genre of magical thinking began to explode during the tenure of Pope Francis because he was given to speaking like the Oracle of Delphi in every setting, and his distaste for America and Americans was hardly a secret.
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The practice of manufacturing collisions between the Vatican and the U.S. has continued with Pope Leo XIV because he is new in the job, and the world doesn’t have a fix on him yet. President Donald Trump, of course, always provides copy. Take an unknown and mix in the well-known, and a thousand columns are launched.
The best commentary on this situation actually came from Vice President JD Vance more than a year ago.
Enough, by the way, with the commentary about what Vance “thinks.” Nobody knows except the VP and his wife, second lady Usha Vance. His friends and family, of course, have their necessarily incomplete guesses, and even a perceptive boss like Trump must know he cannot really know. But there are a handful of people who have opinions about the VP’s opinions that could be illuminating. Very few, if any, actually speak about them in public.
Most of what is written about Vance and what he thinks about the world generally, or the battle with Iran specifically, is a numbing combination of junk and wish-casting. There was an avalanche of this in the days leading up to, during, and after the summit with the Iranians in Islamabad. As with the earlier commentary, it’s so much junk.
The vice president gives a lot of interviews. As with all elected officials who may yet face the voters again, the answers in those interviews are guarded. They are molded with messaging and audiences in mind. He may appear more or less candid on any particular day or subject, and he is consistently funny.
But his worldview? What he wishes had happened in Islamabad? His “real” view of China, Russia, Iran, or Israel?
We don’t know and can’t know. We shouldn’t expect to know. He’s the vice president. The job is based on repressing one’s own views and faithfully understanding and implementing the views of the president.
The one interview he has given me since becoming vice president happened to have occurred soon after Leo was elevated to the Throne of St. Peter. It is an interesting read 13 months later, as Leo and Trump are center stage this week. As a lifelong Catholic, I dismiss most “analysis” of what these exchanges mean. After decades of reading interpretations of “what Pope X thinks about this or that,” I realize it’s just as silly an exercise as guessing what presidents actually think.
The vice president brought a similar attitude with him to his new job last year, long before Leo and Trump had their exchanges this week, if they can even be called “exchanges.”
“It’s very hard to fit a 2,000-year-old institution into the politics of 2025 America,” Vance told me in March of last year. “I try not to do that.”
“I am a Catholic convert, and so I come at this maybe with a slightly different perspective,” he continued. “But I try not to play the politicization of the Pope game. I’m sure he’s going to say a lot of things that I love. I’m sure he’ll say some things that I disagree with, but I’ll continue to pray for him and the Church despite it all and through it all, and that’ll be the way that I handle it.”
That would be an excellent way for legacy media to handle “pope and president” stories as well. Just tell us what they said or posted if done specifically with the other party named. Don’t overlay prior points of view onto the record. It’s as silly as playing mind-reader to the vice president.
POPE LEO CAN’T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS
A suggestion: Whenever you hear or read a reporter asserting what a public figure “thinks” or “feels,” change your feed or at least turn on your misinformation shield. They are combining guessing and projection, but they are not reporting.
And if they are relaying what “sources” told them about the views of the principals, that’s a step down from guessing and projection. That’s just making it up to meet a deadline and make a word count.
