In the bad old days, mothers preached this simple adage: “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything at all.”
At least my mother was one of those who sermonized that sentiment. Seems President Donald Trump has forgotten that motherly maxim or chooses to ignore it.
The target of our petty president’s latest bashing is Pope Leo XIV, the first American leader of the Catholic Church, who seems to be a guy with Midwestern common sense.
The pontiff’s crime to generate presidential ire?
Criticizing Trump’s threats to “wipe out” the Iranian civilization, as the air war we started enters its sixth week with no end in sight. The pope added earlier this month that the president wanting to have the U.S. military attack civilian infrastructures violates international law.
Such declarations are fairly normal for men of the cloth when it comes to choosing between war, peace and faith. But President Trump took umbrage with the pope’s statements and began piling on.
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Perhaps it is because the Vicar of Christ, the former Robert Prevost, is originally from Chicagoland, born in the Windy City and raised in the south suburbs of Cook County. We all know how Trump feels about Illinois and Chicago.
So the pope became yet another target of the increasingly unpresidential president’s attempted ridicule. “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” Trump posted on social media. In other interviews, the president said, “I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”
Yet Trump praised the pope’s elevation to the Holy See in May, calling it “an honor for our country.” Which indeed it was.
Maybe the president’s outbursts stemmed from an NBC News poll last month, which found U.S. voters viewed the pope more favorably than they do the president. Forty-two percent of respondents said they had positive views of the pope, while just 8% had negative views of him.
Forty-one percent of the survey’s respondents said they had positive views of Trump; 53% said they had negative views of the president. In Lake County, part of the church’s Chicago Archdiocese, I’d bet the spread is even greater.
Trump consistently makes inflammatory remarks when he hears something he doesn’t care for. He threatens “losers” with prison, execution, hog-tying, and/or beatings.
“Losers” is one of his favorite denigrating terms, like when he disparaged U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, as a “loser” for being captured during the Vietnam War. McCain, who ran for president in 2008, was a Navy aviator who died in 2018. He was severely injured after being shot down in 1967 over North Vietnam and was tortured during his time as a prisoner of war.
Journalists are “stupid people” and “nobody cares about them.” His bashings, especially toward female reporters who cover the Trump administration, have become vulgar, rude and crude.
During a tour of a Ford truck plant in Michigan in January, a worker cursed Trump, who retorted with his own F-bomb and additionally flipped the guy the finger. Surely our past presidents have used salty language, but normally behind closed doors.
Or his social media post following the death late last month of Robert Mueller, a decorated Marine Corps officer during the Vietnam War, and the second-longest director of the FBI: “I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people.”
Or what U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, termed a “scurrilous” social media attack in February on President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, depicting them as primates. “It is beneath the dignity of the office of president,” Durbin added.
The silence from Republican lawmakers and Trump supporters speaks volumes when the president issues spiteful slights. Maybe they quietly agree with his inconsiderate statements.
Trump isn’t the only person in his administration to dish out nasty comments. In January, Vice President J.D. Vance made fun of Tammy Duckworth, the soon-to-be senior senator from Illinois, following a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Vance compared Duckworth — an Army helicopter pilot during the Iraq War who lost both her legs when the craft she was co-piloting was shot down in 2004 — to movie character Forrest Gump, who had physical and intellectual disabilities. “Watching Tammy Duckworth obsessively interrupt Marco Rubio during this hearing is like watching Forest (sic) Gump argue with Isaac Newton,” the vice president posted on social media.
But then Vance, a Roman Catholic, sided with the president’s poke at Pope Leo, noting: “It would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality… and let the president stick to dictating American public policy.”
Some might say that’s what the pontiff was doing. Taking the nice moral high ground, not the low road.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor. [email protected]. X @sellenews.