American Catholics support Pope Leo XIV and the world views him as an antidote to poisonous Donald Trump evilism

Since his election in May as the first American pope, Leo XIV has become a political and temperamental counterweight to an incendiary American president. Echo opinion published in The New York Times by David Gibson. 

Pope Leo draws extraordinary large crowds of the faithful

A face-off between the two most prominent Americans on the world stage was inevitable, if only for the contrast between Donald Trump’s blustery inconstancy and Pope Leo’s soft-spoken yet firm dignity. The Pope is “neither quiet nor shy — if he has something to say, he will say it,” in the words of his eldest brother, Louis Prevost. 

Indeed, after Trump sent forces to seize the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the pope declared that Venezuela’s “sovereignty” must be guaranteed along with “the rule of law enshrined in its Constitution.” Leo had already urged the United States not to follow through on threats against Venezuela and criticized the administration’s military buildup in the Caribbean. He also repeatedly lamented the treatment of immigrants by U.S. authorities and called on American clergy members to be vocal and active on the issue, which they have been.

But rather than viewing Pope Leo’s statements as one half of a mano-a-mano between pope and president, they may be better seen as the articulation of a post-Trump global order, one informed by universal values and institutional norms rather than tribal and individual self-interest. Leo is not looking for a fight with Trump; he is looking past him. When he challenges the president’s policies, he does so as an American-born pope recalling the American-inspired system that Trump is dismantling — one that values statesmanship over gamesmanship, the common good over national conquest and common decency over jingoist (over the top patriotism❗💢) bullying.

In early December, Pope Leo met with President Volodymyr Zelensky

leader of the Ukraine and said he would like to visit the country, which has suffered a years long assault from Russia. 

Hours later, he criticized the Trump administration’s peace plan: “Trying to reach a peace agreement without including Europe in the discussions is not realistic,” he said. “The war is in Europe.”

Soon after, in remarks that could have been aimed at the MAGA movement, Pope Leo told European politicians on the center-right that “the mark of any civilized society is that differences are debated with courtesy and respect.” 

Later, the Pope told diplomats that honesty is the greatest virtue in “an international context plagued by prevarications and conflict” and he blasted the “war of words armed with lies, propaganda and hypocrisy.”

Throughout the Christmas season and into the new year, Pope Leo continued to call for a world based on old ideals, pushing for “the strengthening of supranational institutions, not their delegitimization.” He lectured civic leaders on how to be responsible public servants. On Christmas he urged world leaders to pursue peace through dialogue — even as Trump was launching military strikes on Islamic militias in Nigeria, ostensibly to protect Christians.

In his state of the world address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican on Friday, Leo delivered his most thoroughgoing defense of postwar multilateralism, calling the rule of law “the foundation of all peaceful civil coexistence.”

“A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force,” the pope said. “The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined.”

The Catholic Church, it is said, thinks in centuries, and Pope Leo is unlikely to worry about such pushback. He is a fit 70-year-old who could potentially set a papal record as the oldest pope to die in office, outlasting another Leo, his predecessor Leo XIII, who was 93 at his death in 1903. Donald Trump, who turns 80 on June 14, has three years left in his (terrible❗ chaotic 💥) second term and faces political headwinds that has conservatives talking about a post-MAGA vision for the Republican Party. 

Of course, even three more years of Trump could do incalculable damage not only to the United States but to the global commonwealth.

When Leo was elected, there were regular references to the first pope to take that name, Leo the Great, who served in the fifth century amid the declining Roman Empire. As barbarian armies swept across Europe, that first Pope Leo led a delegation to northern Italy to meet Attila the Hun and his invading forces. Leo’s holiness and diplomacy (perhaps aided by a menacing vision Attila was said to have had of SS. Peter and Paul brandishing swords) is credited with persuading Attila to turn back and spare the Italian peninsula.

But a more apt parallel for our current circumstances might be the legend of Leo’s meeting three years later, in 455, with Gaiseric the Vandal outside Rome. On that occasion, it is said, Leo was able to persuade the barbarian king only to spare several large churches so that thousands of Romans could find sanctuary from the ensuing devastation. In the aftermath, Pope Leo and his successors were able to rebuild city and society.

Catholicism has a knack for preserving the best of the past to help seed a better future. Today’s Pope Leo may be the surest guardian of a legacy that America, and the world, will desperately need.

Pete Hegseth side by side in Senate hearing with Joint Chiefs General who spoke truth to power! Hegseth looked stupid. Who knew?

Donald Trump’s top general- Joint Chiefs General just undercut his ‘invasion’ claims. Echo report published in CNN by Aaron Blake. 


One of the problems with making a series of brazen and hyperbolic claims is that it can be hard to keep everyone on your team on the same page. 

And few of Donald Trump Republicann administration claims have been as brazen as the idea that the Venezuelan government has engineered an invasion of gang members into the United States. This claim forms the basis of the administration’s controversial efforts to rapidly deport a bunch of people- that it claimed were members of the gang Tren de Aragua – without due process. IOW, without proof. 

But one of the central figures responsible for warding off such invasions apparently didn’t get the memo.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine testifies during a Senate Appropriations Committee

At a Senate hearing Wednesday June 11, 2025, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman retired Lt. General Dan Caine acknowledged that the United States isn’t currently facing such a threat.

“I think at this point in time, I don’t see any foreign state-sponsored folks invading,” Caine said in response to Democratic questioning.

This might sound like common sense; of course the United States isn’t currently under invasion by a foreign government. You’d probably have heard something about that on the news.

But the administration has said – repeatedly and in court – that it has been.

When Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport innocent migrants, without due process, that law required such a foreign “invasion” or “predatory incursion” to make his move legal. And Trump said that’s what was happening.

“The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States,” reads the proclamation from Trump.

It added that Tren de Aragua’s actions came “both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

So the White House said Tren de Aragua was acting in concert with the Maduro regime to invade; Caine now says “state-sponsored folks” aren’t invading.

Some flagged Caine’s comment as undermining Trump’s claims of a foreign “invasion” in Los Angeles. Trump has regularly applied that word to undocumented migrants.

But the inconsistency is arguably more significant when it comes to Trump’s claims about the Venezuelan migrants.

Perhaps the administration would argue that Trump has halted the invasion and it is no longer happening; Caine was speaking in the present tense.

Caine did go on to cite others who might have different views.

“But I’ll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time, and defer to DHS who handles the border along the nation’s contiguous outline,” he said.

But, if an invasion had been happening recently, it seems weird not to mention that. And if the invasion is over, that would seem to undercut the need to keep trying to use the Alien Enemies Act.

The Department of Homeland Security is certainly not in the camp of no invasion. (IOW Fake News❗)

On Wednesday, DHS posted on Facebook an image with Uncle Sam that reads: “Report all foreign invaders” with a phone number for ICE.

When asked about the image and whether the use of the term “foreign invaders” had been used previously, DHS pointed CNN to a number of posts from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller using terms like “invade” or “invaders” when referring to undocumented immigrants.

Plenty of Trump administration figures have gone to bat for this (false❗)claim.

White House press secretary (3-D printer Barbie) Karoline Leavitt said soon after Trump’s proclamation that Tren de Aragua gang members “have been sent here by the hostile Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

Then-national security adviser Michael Waltz claimed Maduro was emptying his prisons “in a proxy manner to influence and attack the United States.”

But, of course, CNN soon learned that the intelligence community had concluded Venezuela had not directed the gang. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood by Trump’s claim.

“Yes, that’s their assessment,” Rubio said last month about the intelligence community. “They’re wrong.” #IDTS❗ 🙄🤥

Trump administration border czar Tom Homan has said the gang was an “arm of the Maduro regime,” and that Maduro’s regime was “involved with sending thousands of Venezuelans to this country to unsettle it.”

The question of Venezuela’s purported involvement actually hasn’t been dealt with much by the courts. A series of judges have moved to block the administration’s Alien Enemies Act gambit, but they’ve generally ruled that way because of the lack of an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” – without delving much into the more complex issue of whether such a thing might somehow have ties to Maduro’s government.

One of the judges to rule in that fashion was a Trump appointee, US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr.

So the intelligence community and a bunch of judges – including a Trump-appointed one – have rebutted the claim the underlies this historic effort to set aside due process.

And now, the man Trump installed as his top general seems to have undercut it too.

Does Republican Ron DeSantis know the identity of "Perla"? Who is she?

Venezuelan migrants:  "Many reported that they had been recruited to the flights in Texas by a woman identified only as “Perla,” who promised expedited work papers and other opportunities in Boston".

What do we know about the identity of "Perla" 

TALLAHASSEE, Fl. – Republican Governor Ron DeSantis paid $615,000 in Florida taxpayer money to relocate almost 50 Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, his opponent tweeted Friday, as calls intensified from Democrats demanding an investigation of the action.

Republican Governor DeSantis if Florida flew Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Florida and then to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, to promote his human trafficking political stunt - Sacramento Bee.

Democrat Charlie Crist, who is challenging DeSantis in the November governor’s race, tweeted the dollar amount after campaign researchers found the Sept. 8 payment to Destin-based Vertol Systems, a transportation services company, on the state’s transparencyflorida.gov site.

The payment was from the Florida Department of Transportation, which oversees a new, $12 million program to relocate "unauthorized aliens" from the state.

“Ron won’t answer questions, so we looked ourselves,” Crist tweeted.

Further uncertainties linger about the state’s role in transporting the migrants, who are mostly Venezuelans. Many reported that they had been recruited to the flights in Texas by a woman identified only as “Perla,”  who promised expedited work papers and other opportunities in Boston.  

Maine Writer question?  How did Republican Ron DeSantis find "Perla" and what is her true identify? In fact, this mysterious solicitor facilitated the illegal trafficking of human migrants. 

Governor Ron DeSantis Bible Study 101: Matthew- "When did we see you a stranger...?"

God views our compassionate treatment of refugees as an indicator of our true Christianity.

Bible Study 101- Matthew: “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (New International Version).

Florida's failed Governor Ron DeSantis' - leads the cruel Martha's Vineyard stunt: Uses innocent migrants as human pawns, helping no one.

It’s possible to believe America’s immigration system is broken while also condemning the behavior of governors shuttling migrants across the country like cattle to score political points.

Brace yourselves for Rex Huppke reports in USA Today:

"I believe that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to use Florida taxpayers’ money to fly two planes of Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, dumping them on the island without advance notice, is morally reprehensible and an inhumane political stunt."

Martha’s Vineyard resident quickly stepped up to help the migrants, Governor Charlie Baker may move the migrants to Cape Cod.

Although the refugee/immigrant crises at the U.S. southern border continues to grow, The New York Times editorial reports, "The Trump administration tried a number of methods to discourage people from filing new asylum claims, including forcing some people to remain in Mexico while they applied for asylum in the United States. Nevertheless, asylum claims actually rose steeply under President Donald Trump, partly because of a surge in migration but also as a defense against his stepped-up effort to deport people".

"They feel lied to and they feel betrayed....", migrants sent by DeSantis to Martha's Vineyard.

Migrants flown to Martha's Vineyard given misleading information, lawyers say: Volunteers continue to help the dozens of Venezuelan migrants who were brought to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, immigration attorneys speaking with the men, women and children are getting a better understanding of how they ended up on two chartered planes.

"They were told in Texas that they were coming to a place that had jobs and homes and shelter waiting for them," said Larkin Stallangs, with Maratha's Vineyard Community Services.

Frankly, Republicans are engaging in a humanitarian zero sum game. They will not benefit from their political resettlement stunt. In fact, the GOP cannot fix our nation's broken immigration system. But, nevertheless, they are responding with cruelty directed to innocent migrants, refugees and immigrant asylum seekers, but the GOP has zero plan to improve the situation, while a growing humanitarian ground swell of desperate people are fleeing from Central and South America.