The Schism

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, April 13, 2026

 

I have an outside-the-box possibility for J.D. Vance’s future in case this whole politics thing doesn’t work out.

 

Which it might not, given that the vice president is on a generational run of high-stakes failures. He failed to talk Trump out of war with Iran. He failed to strike a peace deal with Iranian negotiators at this weekend’s summit in Islamabad. He failed to rescue his friend and ideological sherpa, Viktor Orbán, who got run off the field in yesterday’s Hungarian elections after Vance held a last-minute rally on his behalf.

 

He’s become the least popular VP in modern history at this stage of a presidential term. And with even his boss sounding pessimistic about gas prices dropping anytime soon, there’s nowhere to go but down.

 

Given the trajectory that this nightmare of an administration is on, winning a national election in 2028 might be impossible for someone as drenched in Trump-stink as J.D. Vance is. He needs a backup plan.

 

My suggestion: antipope. Hear me out.

 

Last week, reports circulated that the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States had been summoned in January to the Pentagon, of all places, to discuss the Pope’s criticism of Trump’s foreign policy. The most sensational claim, that someone present at the meeting invoked “the Avignon papacy” of medieval times as a threat, was disputed by a church official who spoke to the Washington Post. But a senior Vatican figure admitted to the paper that the conference was “unusual” and not “a walk in the park.”

 

Pope Leo XIV was unbowed and has kept up the pressure since then, repeatedly rebutting the White House’s religious rhetoric about the Iran war. When the president threatened to end Iranian civilization, Leo called it “truly unacceptable.” Last night 60 Minutes lent those complaints a megaphone when it interviewed three American cardinals who backed the pope’s objections to the war and to mass deportation.

 

Donald Trump’s entire life has been building to an online flame war with the Vicar of Christ. After the 60 Minutes segment aired, his destiny arrived at last.

 

“Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” began a lengthy message on Truth Social from a guy who’s freed numerous sociopaths, at least one of them a child molester, from federal prison. Amid complaints about Leo’s views on Iran and Venezuela, Trump huffed that “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”—which is emphatically not true per his polling on the war and immigration.

 

“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,” the president concluded. Then he turned around and posted an AI-generated image of himself as … Jesus Christ, healing a man.

 

Hence my suggestion for J.D. Vance’s career path. The president’s following has always been more of a cult than a political movement; given his delusions of grandeur, the obvious move for him after condemning the head of the Catholic Church is to go full Henry VIII and found a more compliant alternative. (He’s done it before. The Board of Peace is just a Trump-friendly United Nations, no?) Who better to lead that new church than a Catholic convert rebuked by two different popes for bending the faith to suit his postliberal politics?

 

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. Installing him as Pope James David I of the new MAGA Catholic Church would make it official. Then the more politically talented Marco Rubio could be elevated to vice president, giving Republicans a puncher’s chance of winning in 2028.

 

“That’s insane,” you say. Yeah? More insane than the president posting memes of himself as Jesus?

 

As we wait for the antipope to be crowned, let’s chew on this: Why does Trump care so much that Leo XIV dislikes his policies?

 

Under pressure.

 

It’s not like it’s a surprise. Pro-migrant and anti-war were standard church beliefs back when I was a kid attending Catholic school. I recall our headmaster, a priest, addressing students before the first Gulf War and saying something to the effect of “If you believe that war is the answer in Iraq—”

 

At which point a huge cheer went up from the crowd, as the Gulf War was quite popular.

 

“—then you can march yourself right through the exit, because that’s not what this school or this church is about.”

 

If that’s how Catholic officials felt about a war of aggression launched by Saddam Hussein, with the U.S. leading a multinational effort to liberate Kuwait, there was no doubt how they’d feel about a war started by America in which the White House routinely posts sizzle reels of blowing Iranians up.

 

Trump could have done what every president does when the Vatican calls for peace during war, which is to bite his lip, smile politely, and treat it as background noise. And as out of character as that might sound, he did in fact do it for the past 15 months. Even the most successful troll in history understands that attacking the pope is a bad look. Something changed to finally crack his meager message discipline. What was it?

 

One Dispatch colleague floated a theory that’s persuasive to me: “In his rudimentary thinking about religion, I’m sure he had bought all of the hype about Catholic converts being MAGA and super excited about J.D./the New Right.”

 

Given the thickness of the information bubble in which Trump operates and his prejudices about Christians inescapably favoring right-wing politics, he may have imagined that the Vatican itself would be rooting for his war. (Never mind that Vance, the most prominent Catholic in the administration, initially opposed the conflict.) At the very least, he might have expected that Leo would temper his criticism of it: Why would a new pope risk alienating the supposedly pro-MAGA American Catholic majority by rebuking their favorite president, right?

 

That Catholics aren’t on his side, that the pope doesn’t just serve Americans, and that church teachings aren’t tailored to majoritarian politics may not have occurred to him. And so Leo’s scolding was destined to grate on a guy who thinks the Orbánists who surround him in the White House are representative of Catholics as a whole.

 

The politics of the present moment are also plainly grating on him. It can’t be a coincidence that the insane Jesus memes started during one of the worst passages of Trump’s five years in the White House—stuck in a stalemate with Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, bleeding popular support as gas prices inch higher, helpless as the ur-Trump in Hungary was annihilated at the polls despite Trump’s and Vance’s best efforts to save him.

 

A case can be made that this is the bleakest his political movement has ever looked, January 6 included. He had two weeks left as president when that happened and hardly any part of his core base abandoned him over it. This time, he’ll spend the better part of three years trying to clean up the mess he made—or making it worse—while former MAGA stalwarts howl at his blasphemy and his unexpected turn toward warmongering.

 

To be governed by Trump is to forever worry about how his brain is working. Between his infamous Easter tweet, his threat to end Iranian civilization, and his lashing out at the pope, the president might indeed now be “playing on tilt.” He can’t get out of the jam he’s in, and the pressure is eroding whatever meager ability he still had to pick his fights judiciously. And so thoughts like “I should punctuate my attack on Catholics’ spiritual leader by mocking their messiah” have begun to seem sane to him.

 

Having said all of that, I think a confrontation between Trump and Leo XIV was inevitable during this presidency. In fact, I predicted it.

 

A moral alternative.

 

The truest thing the president said in his broadside at the pope was when he took credit for Leo’s elevation: “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

 

I doubt that Trump’s presidency is the only reason Leo was chosen. But I’m on record as believing it was a reason, and an important one.

 

The new pontificate would inevitably be sucked into the disgraceful reality show of American politics even if Leo strained to remain above the fray, I wrote last May. That’s because Trumpism is less a political project than a moral one—“do unto others whatever you think you can get away with doing”—and at some point the pope would feel obliged to provide a moral counterweight, especially if the White House began practicing that ethos abroad.

 

“America is poised to do a lot of damage to the world in its death throes as a liberal society and global power, and not just material damage,” I predicted. “Trumpism will have a malign moral influence on the world as liberalism’s discontents abroad look to it for political inspiration. … Shouldn’t the Catholic Church, of all institutions, be proactive in trying to limit that malign influence?”

 

It should be, and it has been. By picking a guy from Chicago, the church’s leaders offered a moral alternative to might-makes-right authoritarianism that Trumpists wouldn’t be able to demagogue as “foreign” and insidious. And by choosing an American, they gave the American people extra reason to pay attention to the Vatican’s guidance.

 

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.

 

“He will pick a fight with the pope, as totally moronic as the idea of such a thing is, because that’s who he is,” I wrote at the end of last May’s column. “The church provoked him by offering a different model of moral leadership to Americans and tacitly inviting them to pledge their allegiance to it. They’re coming after Trump’s people. He’ll take it personally.”

 

He has. Once you understand his resentment toward Leo as a moral disagreement more so than a political one (the usual boilerplate about the pope “catering to the Radical Left” aside), the Jesus image that the president posted makes more sense. It’s not just a case of idle trolling or typical fascist megalomania, it’s a matter of Trump symbolically asserting that his morals should take precedence over Christ’s among his supporters. 

 

The intensity of the contempt I feel for Christians who are pretending to notice this only now, in 2026, because the president literally drew them a picture of it, is unspeakable. “God did not ordain Donald Trump to rescue the American church, or revive the American church, or redeem the American church,” journalist Tim Alberta, a Christian believer, aptly wrote of the Jesus image. “God ordained Donald Trump to test the American church. And the American church has failed.”

 

Us and them.

 

Right-wing reaction to last night’s tweets will ultimately fall into four groups, I suspect.

 

One is the “mean tweets” minimizers. It’s just a meme, it’s just AI slop, it’s just a joke: Nothing the president posts, no matter how foul or alarming, should be held against him as long as it can be trivialized in some way. This sort of grace is owed only to him and other lowbrow MAGA heroes, needless to say, and never to politicians with whom one disagrees. If Barack Obama satirized the tenor of his first presidential campaign by posting an image of himself as Jesus—well, you can finish that sentence as well as I can.

 

Some minimizers might even accept the absurd lie Trump told today that the image he posted last night was meant to depict him as a doctor, not as Jesus.

 

Second are the opportunists, the people who’ve soured on Trump for other reasons yet now profess to be shocked, shocked by his boorishness. Think Tucker Carlson, suddenly aghast that Donald Trump—Donald Trump—would post something churlish and dismissive about Islam on Easter Sunday. Or Marjorie Taylor Greene, who accused the president of posturing “as if he is replacing Jesus” after he posted last night’s image. “I completely denounce this and I’m praying against it!!!” she wrote.

 

Chud populists happily endured 10 years of obnoxious garbage from him. They’re clutching their pearls about “mean tweets” today only because he stopped following their “America First” script on policy and they resent it. It’s nice to see his support shrinking, but the supposed eleventh-hour moral awakening from some of the worst cranks on the right is simply too rich.

 

Last are the loyalists, the Christians who even now will dutifully heed his call to treat the head of the Catholic Church as MAGA’s newest us-and-them enemy. In fact, I wonder if the Jesus image inadvertently made that easier by giving them a way to hedge their coming attacks on Leo. (“I didn’t like the Jesus meme, to be clear, but he has a point about the pope.”) Many evangelicals are destined to fall into this group, some because of old axes to grind with Rome and others because they’ve already transitioned to treating evangelicalism as a political identity rather than a religious one.

 

Trump is the head of their church, and if he says Leo is a blasphemer, that’s canon.

 

Anyone who cared earnestly about the president’s grotesque messiah complex, contempt for Christianity, or vicious hatred of enemies walked away from this endless parade of degeneracy ages ago. All that’s left are pretenders and power-worshipers who grudgingly endure the moral ordeals to which he regularly subjects them, knowing that they’ll need to squirm for only a day or two before everyone forgets what happened and we’re on to the next thing.

 

Today it’s flaming the pope, tomorrow it might be celebrating the death of someone he dislikes, the day after it might be bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. In the church of MAGA, under James David I, the only true virtue will be ruthlessness.