Mr. President, Peace Be With You

Yesterday was Divine Mercy Sunday. This special day for Catholics around the world builds on the Gospel accounts of the resurrected Jesus’s appearances to his inner circle of followers. His most common and consistent message to his followers after rising from the dead?

“Peace be with you.”

Not long after Pope Leo closed the holy Easter Octave on this important liturgical day by leading an evening peace vigil at the Vatican, President Donald Trump tore into the Holy Father on social media, calling him “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible on foreign policy.”

In many ways, the post was classic Trump: the most powerful man in the world was not just writing with the random capitalizations and uppercase blocked phrases, but offering a series of unhinged attacks interspersed with increasingly questionable accounts of his own record. (How many times do we have to hear that someone who won the 2024 election by 1.5 percentage points did so “IN A LANDSLIDE”?)

Even as a Catholic who hated this post on multiple levels, parts of it do remind me of what makes Trump genuinely appealing to so many, even now. He refuses to play pietistic games and directly criticizes those whom he feels deserve it. He does so with a performative self-assuredness that, even as it misleads, makes easy, sweeping analysis more complicated because it often brushes up against something true. (He was not wrong to speculate that Pope Leo is probably not pope today if someone else were president.) Despite hurting so many people with his words and actions, he is also at times genuinely funny and engaging, not least because he puts his humanity on full display. His supporters (and sometimes even his detractors) love this humanity, especially when contrasted with the inauthentic, poll-tested, AI-scrubbed, robot-like affect we get from most other politicians.

But Trump’s humanity needs redemption. Badly.

Saying so isn’t a politically motivated attack; it is simply asserting the truth of Christianity. Human beings are born with fallen natures, with primordial wounds which play out in our desire to accumulate, to dominate, and to prove ourselves worthy of love and affection at the expense of others. Trump’s wounds in this regard are not different in kind from those writ large on the hearts of humanity.

But his wounds are on full display in front of the whole world. Not just on social media, but on the skyscrapers and other massive buildings with his name on them, in his renaming institutions after himself, and in his ferociously putting other people down in an attempt to build himself up. These are obviously not the marks of a man who is at peace with himself.

And then there was the assassin’s bullet in Pennsylvania, which came less than an inch from ending his life. At a recent prayer breakfast, Trump said that this “changed something in me.” And in what appeared to be a moment of self-reflection on his own life, he told the crowd, “You can’t be happy without religion—without that belief.”

In speaking with those who know him and have discussed this topic with him, I’ve come to believe that we should take this shift in him seriously and not be cynical about it.

But we must also ask whether the person who said this believes it. Really, really believes it. In his bones. In the deepest part of who he is.

If Trump truly believes that faith in God is what brings one true happiness, would he be on social media launching unprecedented attacks on the pope? If the kid from Queens really knew that he is loved beyond measure—loved in this unimaginable way before he accomplished even one single thing in his life—would he still need to build himself up by tearing his perceived enemies new metaphorical holes?

We are now weeks away from celebrating the 250th anniversary of a founding document that declared we are created equal by God. Our equality and value come from one source and one source alone: the way God made us. Nothing about our position, age, size, level of dependence, IQ, net worth, families, health, successes, or failures—nothing—can add to or take away from the intrinsic dignity that makes all human beings equal. We are loved with the unconditional love of a heavenly father for a child. And in the president’s case, a son.

What would Trump’s life (including, but not at all limited to, his presidency) look like if he really believed that he was loved in this way? Unconditionally, warts and all? If he knew that if he sincerely asked for forgiveness, the Peace that Christ offers all of us (and in a special way at this time of year) could be his? Would he feel the need to portray himself as a Christ figure, King of Kings, and spiritual healer, as he did in a post on his social media site, Truth Social, over the weekend?

I feel comfortable saying that he wouldn’t spend time on social media attacking the pope and others like this. Reasonable people, including faithful Catholics, can and do disagree with the pope on prudential policy matters. But a man at peace doesn’t feel the need to humiliate someone else when offering a different point of view.

Perhaps the most important thing a Christian should do in this context is wish something for Donald Trump, the person, the child of God, quite apart from Donald Trump the politician and president.

Donald, you’ve been used by Christian leaders and others in the faith who wanted to advance their own agendas through you. I’m genuinely sorry that your primary exposure to the faith and to Christians over the last decade has been like this. I want to genuinely invite you to put aside the wisdom of the world, which has made you and so many others anxious and angry. I want to genuinely invite you to embrace the unimaginable good news of the Cross and Resurrection. It turns the wisdom of the world on its head: we lead authentically when we put others before ourselves; the proper way to respond to our enemies is with love; we receive in direct proportion to what we give away; and it is in dying to self that we find who we truly are.

The peace that comes from this divine wisdom is what you are missing, Donald. You know this on some level. It is the only thing that truly satisfies and makes one truly happy.

Mr. President, Peace be with you.

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Charles Camosy is a professor of moral theology and bioethics at the Catholic University of America.