What do we make of Pope Leo XIV, the "Latin Yankee" and first from the United States?
Plus, After 100 Days, What We Should Prepare Ourselves For?
Dear #WhiteTooLong readers:
The big news of the day is the surprise selection of Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as the 267th pope. Now known officially as Pope Leo XIV—but colloquially in Rome as “the Latin Yankee” because of his dual U.S. and Peruvian citizenship—he today became the new leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. Although he is a native of Chicago, he spent over half of his career as a missionary in Peru, and he recently served as the president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
We’ll learn more about him over the next few days and weeks, but Pope Leo XIV was an ally of former Pope Francis and is expected to continue many of his predecessor’s reforms, including a focus on the plight of the poor and migrants and efforts to include women and the laity in church leadership decisions. This news will be welcomed neither by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, nor by the Catholic right in the U.S. Here are just two early signs of that conflict:
In his first address just hours ago, Pope Leo XIV admonished his fellow Catholics, “Help us, and help each other, build bridges.” The appeal to building bridges was a frequent theme of Pope Francis, including his sharp 2016 rebuke to Donald Trump: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel.”
A few weeks ago, posting on his X profile as Cardinal Robert Prevost, he criticized J.D. Vance’s defense of harsh immigration policies based on a claim that Catholic theology justified limiting love and compassion to those outside our immediate circles. “JD Vance is wrong,” Prevost said. “Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
In other news, we’re all still analyzing the tumultuous first 100 days of Trump’s second term as president. ICYMI, PRRI took the pulse of the public in a new poll released last week. ICMYI, Here’s my take on the key findings. Journalist Chauncey Devega asked me—along with the Lincoln Project’s Ryan Wiggins, author David Pepper, author D. Earl Stephens, investigative reporter Heidi Siegmund Cuda, and U.C. Berkeley political science professor M. Steven Fish—to take a step back and answer three big picture questions about Trump’s first 100 days. My response is below (you can read the full piece at Salon here).
Question: Starting with emotions. How are you feeling given these first 100 days of Trump’s return? How are you managing, trying to make sense of this?
By nature, I’m generally an optimistic person. I’m anything but alarmist. But, just 100 days in, it’s clear that Donald Trump presents a clear and present danger to the future of American democracy. As Trump is slowly but surely steering our country toward authoritarianism, the divides in the country can no longer be understood with the traditional labels of Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal. Given the clear Constitutional crisis in which we already find ourselves, if we are going to survive as a nation resembling anything like the principles outlined in our founding documents, the political battle lines are going to have to be mentally redrawn, in the short run, as MAGA authoritarianism versus democracy. That will require, on the most difficult end, a coalition standing up for democracy that includes a courageous minority of Republicans and Republican elected officials, along with majorities of independent voters and the engagement of approximately 40% of Americans who sat out the previous election.
PRRI’s new poll on Trump’s first 100 days, released last week, shows that we may be seeing the beginning of such an awakening. Like a raft of other polls, PRRI finds Trump’s job approval at 40%, the lowest of any president not named Trump at the 100-day mark since World War II. Notably, Trump’s favorability has dropped 12 points among Latinos (from 39% to 27%), and a whopping 19 points among Latino Protestants (from 51% to 32%), two-thirds of whom voted for him in 2024.
This much is also crystal clear: White Christian groups — particularly white evangelical Protestants but also majorities of white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics — are the groups responsible for allowing Trump’s return to power and for continuing to lend him support and legitimacy. White Christian groups and the three in ten Americans who support Christian nationalism are the principal groups continuing to hold majority favorable views of Trump.
Question: What has been most surprising (or not) about these 100 days? Is it developing as you expected?
Even as someone who lives in D.C. and has tracking politics as part of my job description, I’ve been surprised at the pace of the destruction and the transparency of the grift and power grab by Trump and his administration. Particularly, I’ve been surprised at the way Trump has treated executive orders like kingly decrees for the digital age, declaring nonexistent emergencies to broaden his power, undermining the basic tenets of the rule of law like due process, and even attacking established constitutional principles like birthright citizenship. According to the American Presidency Project, he has issued 143 executive orders in 100 days. By comparison, Joe Biden only issued 162 executive orders during his entire term, and the last Republican president, George W. Bush, issued only 118 in his final term.
Most notably, the new PRRI survey shows an American public that may be waking up to the danger Trump represents to the nation’s founding principles. In PRRI’s recent poll, a majority (52%) of Americans — including 87% of Democrats, 56% of independents, and even 17% of Republicans — believe that Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy. Two-thirds (68%) of non-voters who expressed regret for their decision not to vote, and even a majority (55%) of the small number of Trump voters who now say they regret voting for Trump, also agree that Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited.
Question: These are the good times, and will be looked back upon in that light given what will and is happening. What do you want to prepare the American people for?
I wouldn’t say these are the good times. I’d say these are the liminal times, when it still may be possible to pull the United States back from the abyss. For those with eyes to see, the signs are already there. In her blistering dissent in the case involving the hundreds of Venezuelans Trump deported to the Salvadoran gulag, Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor has already warned us that “the implication of the government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal.” My own book, "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity," was one of 381 books recently banned by the government at the US Naval Academy for espousing “improper ideology."
Unless the public sends a strong message to Trump and this regime sooner than later, we need to prepare for scenes I never thought we’d see in my lifetime: militarized internment camps (which an alarming 62% of Republicans support), jailed journalists, politically-motivated disappearances and deportations of US citizens by ICE and the FBI, book burnings, and the other trappings of fascist regimes. If we allow Trump to celebrate such outrages to democracy alongside the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, there may be no turning back.
Two Other Reflections on Trump’s First 100 Days
If you haven’t checked out my joint podcast with
, , and over at , click below to check it out. We had a wide-ranging unscripted conversation last week about faith, politics, and our current moment.
New PRRI Poll: Most Americans Believe Trump is Dangerous Dictator--and Six Other Key Findings on Trump's 100 Days
The PRRI team is out today with a major new poll evaluating public opinion of Trump over the first 100 days of his term. Here’s the bottom line: This new survey provides clear evidence that most Americans want to rein in President Trump’s overreach, stop his undermining of democratic norms, and protect our system of checks and balances.
That was damn depressing. The upside is the news on the Pope.