Catholic supporters who helped deliver President Donald Trump his 2024 margins are starting to ask out loud whether they can still support him.
Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV, followed by an AI-generated image of himself mimicking Christ on Truth Social, have turned Catholic faith into a fault line inside his own coalition. Catholic voices who were once politically aligned are now publicly divided: some condemning Trump in explicitly moral terms, others defending him and criticizing church leaders for overstepping into politics. The Iran war has only deepened the split.
In this Reporter Extra, Vox correspondent Christian Paz explains why the political implications are real. Catholics were central to Trump's swing state numbers in 2024, and unlike evangelicals, they don't have a long history of unconditional alignment with the GOP. A sustained rift creates problems for the Republican coalition, for the MAGA movement, and for a Catholic Church being pulled into a political battle it didn't ask for.
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