Good morning. The two most powerful Americans in the world — the pope and the president — are clashing.
President vs. popePope Leo’s visit to Algeria today was meant to be stirring. The first member of the Order of Augustine to ascend to the papacy is visiting the place where Augustine was bishop starting in A.D. 395. Instead, President Trump is hammering him. Leo doesn’t like to see war in the Middle East. Trump doesn’t like other leaders criticizing him, even implicitly. After he called the pope “weak on crime” and posted an A.I. image of himself as a Jesus-like figure, he said, “I’m just responding to Pope Leo.” The pontiff seemed unfazed. (“Too many innocent people are being killed,” he said on his way to a 10-day Africa tour. “Someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way.”) But Catholic clerics in America called on Trump to apologize. He declined. It’s an odd conflict. The people in these two roles have generally treated each other with deference, or pretended to. What gives? A curious tableau
This image Trump posted, then deleted, was especially strange, and not only because the patient in it bears a resemblance to Jon Stewart, as the late night hosts pointed out. I asked Jason Farago, our art critic, about it: The image — do not call it a painting — is like other works of propaganda during this second term: the ideology of Leni Riefenstahl expressed in the style of Lisa Frank. The incumbent appears as Christ the Healer. Supplicants, or their disembodied heads, ring the messiah-president like the saints and donors in an early Renaissance altarpiece; note the grizzled veteran at left, whose cap has nonsense A.I. lettering more Cyrillic than Roman. When he took down the image, Trump said he hadn’t meant to compare himself to Jesus. “I thought it was me as a doctor,” he said. Popes and politicsLots of popes have waded into the political muck, as my colleague Elisabetta Povoledo reports from Rome.
A question of stabilityWhere is all this rancor from the president coming from? Peter Baker, who has covered six presidencies, wrote about that yesterday: Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade. It’s a debate you can see in the polls. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in February found that 61 percent of Americans think Trump has become more erratic with age. Just 45 percent say he is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges.” That’s down from 54 percent in 2023. Trump’s language fuels the fire. “He uses more profanity, speaks longer and regularly makes comments rooted in fantasy rather than fact,” Peter writes: He wanders off into odd tangents — an eight-minute ramble at a Christmas reception about poisonous snakes in Peru, a long digression during a cabinet meeting about Sharpie pens, an interruption of an Iran war update to praise the White House drapes. He has confused Greenland with Iceland and more than once boasted of ending a fictional war between Cambodia and Azerbaijan, two countries separated by nearly 4,000 miles. (He evidently means Armenia and Azerbaijan). Still, part of Trump’s base loves it. A Princeton historian put this question to Peter: “What can be more anti-establishment than someone who is willing to be out of control?”
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Eric Kim’s from Atlanta, where lemon-pepper chicken wings emerged, and his recipe for them is legitimate. I cook them a little differently, though. I make a mixture of lemon pepper, cornstarch and kosher salt, then swirl some neutral oil into it to make a kin |
