Hello and happy Saturday. President Donald Trump announced a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon on Thursday, though the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah was not involved in the negotiations. In response, Iran declared Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was “completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire,” and reports indicate that negotiations continue between the U.S. and Iran. But a conflict of a different nature dominated news coverage this week.
Pope Leo XIV, the first American pontiff, has been outspoken about his opposition to the war in Iran, and the president has not taken kindly to those sentiments. Tension has been building for weeks, but spilled over last weekend.
On Sunday, the president posted a direct attack on Pope Leo, saying, “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” For good measure, Trump separately posted an AI image of himself as a Jesus-like figure, light emitting from his hands as he reached down to heal a man in a hospital bed. (He later removed the post and said, implausibly, that he thought the image portrayed him as a “doctor.”)
Pope Leo used his Palm Sunday homily on March 29 to note that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’” And after Trump claimed on social media on April 7, that “a whole civilization will die” if Iran did not meet his conditions for a ceasefire, the pope called the threat “unacceptable.”
In Sunday’s Dispatch Faith (published before Trump’s social media rant), Dan Hugger explained that the pope’s stance on the war is not political.
Pope Leo’s comments should not be construed as a political statement. Nor is he making a prudential judgment. He is simply restating the church’s traditional moral teaching. The Council Fathers at Vatican II made plain in Gaudium et spes that, “it is one thing to undertake military action for the just defense of the people, and something else again to seek the subjugation of other nations. Nor, by the same token, does the mere fact that war has unhappily begun mean that all is fair between the warring parties.”
Kevin D. Williamson, for one, is grateful that the pontiff is up to the job. On Tuesday, he wrote: “The pope, in his role as a public man—which a bishop must be—is right to speak against the moral corruption of the Trump administration and against its brutality. He is right to reiterate: ‘I have no fear of the Trump administration.’ To take the job at which Robert Francis Prevost currently works is necessarily to put one’s soul at risk: The pope is always playing at the high-stakes table, for the whole of the church and, consequently, for himself. There is much to fear in that—the psychological incontinence of the American president is, in comparison, a truly trivial thing.”
Trump’s war of words puts Vice President J.D. Vance, who announced weeks ago that he’d be publishing a book in June about his conversion to Catholicism in 2019, in an awkward spot. Which side would Vance take in this modern-day twist on Catholics vs. Convicts? “I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said at a Turning Point USA event in Georgia.
In Boiling Frogs, Nick Catoggio had a guess for why Pope Leo’s statements bothered Trump so much. He wrote:
I think the president believed, with some reason, that in 2024 he won not just a political argument with the left but a moral one. Wokeness was vanquished, supposedly; the border would be sealed and immigrants packed off en masse; crime would be crushed brutally; and the feeble Democratic leadership would have nothing meaningful to say about any of it. Ruthlessness toward enemies in the pursuit of dominance had triumphed as an ideology.
Then the church threw Leo into the mix. Suddenly there was a homegrown voice with a stature equal to Trump’s preaching charity for immigrants and an end to war. Postliberalism’s moral vision had competition again. The president couldn’t help but resent it.
Nick also had a (tongue-in-cheek, I think) suggestion for a new job for Vance: antipope. “J.D. Vance is already a sort of Vicar of Trump, the most prominent American example of reactionaries and authoritarians embracing Catholicism to signal their cultural determination to RETVRN,” Nick wrote. “Installing him as Pope James David I of the new MAGA Catholic Church would make it official.”
Before I let you go, a special announcement: Regular readers are hopefully familiar with Scott Lincicome’s Capitolism newsletter (and it’s been my privilege to edit Scott all these years, even if I’ve never gotten any of his famous hot sauce out of the deal). When Scott decided to go to an every-other-week schedule to accommodate his other commitments—it’s not easy being a leading expert on tariffs in these interesting times—we wanted to keep providing our readers excellent coverage of trade and free-market economics. So we’re excited to announce Dispatch Markets. Scott kicked things off this week, appropriately enough, with a newsletter about Tax Day and how Americans spend more than $500 billion in costs and time just to file their taxes. On the weeks Scott isn’t writing, look for great stuff from our roster of authors, including Center for Strategic and International Studies fellow Karl Smith, New York Times contributor and Substacker Kyla Scanlon, and Cato Institute fellow Marian Tupy. To make sure you receive Dispatch Markets—which is available to all readers, not just paid members thanks to our partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—check your newsletter preferences here.
As always, thank you for reading, and have a great weekend.
“I’m a RINO now, because I’ve been pushed out of the MAGA party,” retiree Jeb Bishop told The Dispatch sarcastically, after voting early in the Republican primary here for one of the eight Hoosier state Senate incumbents President Donald Trump is attempting to oust for opposing middecade redistricting. Trump’s failed bid to redraw Indiana’s congressional boundaries before 2030’s regularly scheduled reapportionment, and his retribution campaign to replace legislators responsible for killing redistricting, have inflamed tensions and stoked divisions across the state’s normally collegial and staid GOP. And it’s filtering down to some “lifelong Republican” voters like Bishop. After casting a ballot for incumbent state Sen. Greg Walker on the first day of early voting for Indiana’s May 5 primary, the 64-year-old Army veteran excoriated the president and his allies in this effort—especially Walker’s Trump-endorsed primary challenger, state Rep. Michelle Davis. “The only reason why I voted today was to strike a vote against her,” Bishop, a retired factory worker with a bushy gray beard and clad in a green flannel shirt and green work pants, said in an interview with The Dispatch, standing next to his gray Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck outside of Columbus’ early voting site. “I had a real problem with [redistricting]. That is just unfair.” Spotting Davis and a couple of campaign volunteers (including her husband) across the parking lot, Bishop tilted his head in her direction, raised his voice slightly, and said mockingly: “I voted for RINO Greg Walker—RINO Greg Walker’s who I voted for.”
Tucked at the end of his newest book, Notes on Being a Man, Scott Galloway outlined for his sons “the three legs” of what it means to be a good man: to protect, provide, and procreate. Alarmed by the “crisis with the boys and young men just ahead of you,” he walks his boys through what each of those attributes means. Being a man, he writes, is a birthright in the most rewarding sense. “You have an obligation to protect and advocate for others, because you were born with advantages others don’t have,” Galloway writes. He doesn’t wield privilege in a demeaning way: It’s an invitation to do better and elevate those around you.“I hope you embrace your strength, physical and mental, as you go forward,” Galloway continues. “The most masculine people leave a legacy of surplus value from a place of kindness, generosity, and strength. They give more love, hope, and encouragement, pay more taxes, and create more jobs than they get back.” If this sounds different from the toxic pillars of the oft-discussed “manosphere,” it is. The unifying principle of the manosphere and its boosters—men like Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and Myron Gaines—is an unabashed view that women belong in the kitchen and that men should exercise absolute social control, all of which is predictably laced with racism, antisemitism, and a general hatred for men not like them. Galloway is different. And he’s part of a new group of podcasters, researchers, and public intellectuals I call the Gentlemanosphere.
Rock, as Johnny Rotten knows, is both a product of affluence and a route to it. It is not exactly a swindle, as the Sex Pistols insisted, but there is a kind of swindle at the heart of it: Rock is a rebellious pose for the rich kids of the world. It is not a product of rebellion, nor is it, in the American context, an instrument of rebellion. It costs a little money to rock. The Gibson Custom Shop will sell you a nanometer-by-nanometer copy of Greeny, the famous 1959 Les Paul Standard owned by Peter Green, Gary Moore, and currently by Kirk Hammett, a guitar that has been played on everything from Fleetwood Mac records to Metallica anthems. It’s great. And it’s 30 grand. That’s high-end stuff, but, at a certain level, rock and capitalism are the same thing: The post-punk band Fugazi was famous for refusing to sell T-shirts and other merchandise and for trying to keep ticket prices at five bucks or less (adjust for inflation), but the band’s most famous member, Ian MacKaye, was, and is, a businessman, one who started an influential record label as a way to do the things he wanted to do in the world the way he wanted to do them. That’s where the rock thing really intersects the bigger American thing: Freedom is about having choices, and, unromantic and adultified and boring and Protestant and old-fashioned Republican as this particular piece of wisdom might be, money gives you choices. Private-plane money gives you a lot of choices, but even punk-rock, DIY-type money—the kind of money that allows you to make music or art or whatever without having to hold down a soul-sucking hourly job to pay the rent and keep ramen in the pot—that gives you choices, too. People in rich countries have a lot more leeway when it comes to choosing their own course in life—or in history. The world wants what we’ve got. That is because the world has been paying attention to America—whether the world wants to or not.