As world media and leaders normalise US President Donald Trump’s erratic behaviour, Pope Leo XIV must resist and keep his distance.

“I urge you: never sell out your authority!”

Pope Leo XIV recently used those words to encourage journalists to fight for a free, independent and objective press, urging them to stand up against “the ancient art of lying” and manipulation. He did so on 9 October in an address to MINDS International, a consortium of news agency executives.

To be clear, history’s first US-born pope never named any group or individuals he believed were doing this. But Donald Trump immediately leapt to my mind, and probably the minds of many others. The president of Leo’s native country is easily the leading culprit, being far and away the most prominent world leader today who spreads lies and fake news in an attempt to manipulate others.

Leo, born Robert Prevost in Chicago, served as an Augustinian missionary in Peru during the 1980s and 1990s. He then spent 12 years as the international head of his religious order based in Rome until 2015, when Pope Francis sent him back to his native South American country as a bishop. However, in 2023, the Jesuit pope called Prevost back to Rome and appointed him to a leading position at the Vatican, shortly afterward making him a cardinal.

The new pope’s pastoral work in Peru was more extensive than his work in the US and that experience has certainly shaped his views on many issues, including freedom of the press.

In just the last three years alone, Peru has dropped 53 places in the world press freedom index, falling to 130th place in 2025. This represents one of the most significant declines in the Americas during that time.

A vast network of Trump sycophants and grovelling aides spreading fake news

But back to Trump and how the big-shot celebrity reporters in the White House Press Corps (the ones the networks showcase during their commercial breaks) have handled him since 2016, when he emerged as one of the most bizarre and unconventional Republican candidates in decades. He actually praised Vladimir Putin and openly and brazenly urged the former KGB agent’s Russian Government to spy on his Democratic rival.

Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump not only told one bald-faced lie after another, he began assembling what is now a vast network of sycophants and grovelling aides and administration officials, the primary mission of which is to spread fake news.

Many of the people involved in this operation are terrified to do anything that might provoke the mercurial president’s anger. Instead, they can no longer distinguish black from white or right from wrong as they seek to conform to his latest whim. And, in considerable measure, it is thanks to the White House Press Corps that enough voters in the United States have fallen for Trump’s lies.

Shamefully selling out one’s decency and normalising Trump

From the very beginning of his hunt for the presidency, up to this very day, Trump has berated, screamed, lied about and done everything he can to utterly humiliate any reporter who dares ask a question he does not like.

Some of us complained about this on social media early on and urged these reporters to boycott his rambling and outrageous press conferences. They did not do so even when Trump, like an adolescent schoolyard bully, cruelly mocked one of their fellow reporters who has cerebral palsy. That’s not only selling out your authority, it’s selling out your very humanity and decency.

Allowing Trump to continue this behaviour, and reporting on him as if he were just some other typical politician (“because, you know, all politicians lie”), has helped normalise a narcissistic sociopath president who is destroying the long-standing law-based institutions of the US and emboldening the world’s various autocratic and kleptocratic strong men, whose unfettered power he craves.

Of course, it’s not just the White House reporters or the media in general that have helped normalise Trump beyond even the blind eyes of his cult-like supporters. Too numerous are the world leaders, heads of government, and international institutions that — out of fear or retribution — tried to appease or “build a bridge” with the US president.

Even religious leaders have helped normalise Trump. The members of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops maintained a collective silence. And others, like Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, have gone even further, showing their support for him.

But there is no such thing as bridges and walls dealing with Trump – just sewers. He has always said, since the early 1970s, that his favourite thing in life is to “get even” with people whom he thinks have wronged him.

Leo must shun Trump

Pope Leo, in his 9 October address to agency executives, quoted Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, saying that the world needs free and objective information. But that’s something Trump & Co purposely and studiously refuse to provide.

The pope cited Arendt’s warning that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist”.

That’s why Leo XIV must never meet Trump under any circumstances. Doing so could entirely obliterate that distinction.

Republished from UCA news, 17 October 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.