It’s no accident that the figure emerging as the global challenger to the might of Donald Trump is a priest in white, known as Pope Leo XIV. In recent weeks, the pope has issued a string of barely coded denunciations of the US president, unfazed by the insults that have come his way in return. It’s no longer fanciful to imagine that what an eastern European pontiff, John Paul II, did by confronting the Soviet empire in the 1980s, an American-born pope may do in the 2020s by daring to speak truth to the would-be emperor in the White House.

Of course, several heads of government have stood up to Trump too. Canada’s Mark Carney has done it most explicitly, while his European counterparts have taken a stand by refusing to join the president’s reckless, wrong-headed war on Iran. But none has the global reach of the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

There’s more to it than numbers, though. Carney has articulated powerfully the geopolitical case against Trump, laying bare his destruction of the post-1945 order. But that does not capture the deeper objection so much of the world has long had to Trump. That antipathy resides less in the realm of policy, and more in the sphere of morality, character and human decency. And that is the pope’s terrain.

So, naturally, when Leo inveighs against the war it is not in the language of strategic waterways and the global oil price. Rather he speaks of “masters of war” whose hands are so “full of blood” that God does not hear their prayers. He talks of a world “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” and sends woe to those who drag “that which is sacred into darkness and filth”.

JD Vance has tried to defend his boss, rightly earning worldwide derision for the brass neck he displayed when he, a Catholic for all of seven years, told the pope to be more careful when discussing “matters of theology”. But just as revealing was his demand that Leo “stick to matters of morality”, confirming that Vance does not understand that the revulsion stirred by Trump is a moral one.

Ever since Abraham Lincoln coined the phrase in his first inaugural address, US presidents have felt at least some obligation to summon the “better angels of our nature”. But Trump has always done the opposite, appealing to Americans’ worst demons, their basest instincts. In the TV debates of 2016, Hillary Clinton said that Trump had paid no federal income tax for years. He didn’t deny it, saying instead: “That makes me smart.”

In other words, be selfish. Get away with what you can. Only a fool would put the collective good ahead of their own individual gain. It’s the same cast of mind that led Trump to cancel a visit to a military cemetery in 2018, because he considered the US’s war dead “losers” and “suckers”. If they’d have been smart, like him, they’d have dodged the draft, as he did.

Name the ugliest human quality, and Trump will demonstrate it and glory in it. Greed? Trump has used high office to enrich himself and his family, profiting from the presidency to the tune of at least $1.4bn (£1bn), according to a New York Times analysis in January – and that figure will have grown since then. “Conflict of interest” is a quaint archaism in Trump’s Washington, where the president’s son-in-law solicits billions for his investment firm from the very Middle Eastern governments with whom he negotiates on behalf of the US, and where unnamed, but mysteriously well-informed speculators scoop millions in winnings by betting on presidential decisions of war and peace.

What of dishonesty? Trump lies the way other people breathe. The Washington Post calculated that he made 30,573 false and misleading statements in the four years of his first term: that’s more than 21 a day. The habit has never left him. Witness, to pick one example almost at random, his claims that a war that has strengthened the hand of Iran’s most implacable hardliners has, contrary to all evidence, achieved his goal of regime change.

Or consider Trump’s cruelty. It takes its most serious form in bloodlust, threatening via social media that “a civilisation will die tonight” or using Easter Sunday as the moment to tell Tehran: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell.” But the cruelty is also personal and direct. When the beloved actor and director Rob Reiner was killed in horrific circumstances with his wife late last year, Trump posted a string of insults to the dead man, apparently rooted in the fact that Reiner was not a Trump supporter. When the former FBI director and longtime public servant Robert Mueller died last month, aged 81, Trump declared: “Good, I am glad he’s dead.”

It’s surely no exaggeration to say that Trump embodies the very worst of us. He brims over with flaws – we used to call them sins – most people try to tame within themselves. Though the self-regard and vanity is beyond egregious, we’ve somehow grown used to it. This is the man who took a memorial to a young president gunned down in his prime, and slapped his own name on it: behold, the Trump-Kennedy Center. This is the man who plans to build a gold victory arch, an Arc de Trump, so gargantuan at 250ft tall that it will loom over Washington DC. This is the man who posted an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure.

It’s all of a piece. The racism that’s meant that, of the 4,499 “refugees” admitted into the US since October 2025, all but three were white South Africans. The misogyny that ensured that, naturally, he was pals with Jeffrey Epstein. The bovine stupidity that led him to launch a war against Iran without thinking even one move ahead, leaving him surprised to discover that he had handed a mighty economic weapon to a vicious, theocratic dictatorship.

So of course he has made an enemy of a leader who stands against needless war, prejudice, vanity, indecency, callousness, mendacity and avarice. It makes perfect sense that it is the pope who has emerged as the anti-Trump, because Trump represents the polar opposite of Christianity. He has little regard for the poor, but reveres the rich. When he speaks of faith, he means self-belief – confidence in his own greatness. It’s one reason why Pete Hegseth’s accidental delivery of the gospel according to Quentin Tarantino, mistakenly quoting Pulp Fiction rather than Ezekiel, registered so widely: it laid bare that the Christianity of Trump and his circle is, like the decor at Mar-a-Lago, gaudy and fake.

Two conclusions suggest themselves. First, that the conclave chose well in electing Leo, who took his name from Leo XIII, the “labour pope” who insisted on the rights of poor workers amid the convulsions of the Industrial Revolution. And, second, that it is essential that the Trump presidency comes to be understood and remembered as a terrible failure; that it endures as a cautionary tale for future generations, a warning that, at least sometimes, those who are dishonest, cruel and greedy do not prosper. Otherwise, the better angels of our nature will be dismissed as losers and suckers – and discarded for ever.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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