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Donald Trump’s approval rating among American Catholics has collapsed to thirty-eight percent — the lowest of his political career and a ten-point drop in less than two years, according to a new Washington Post survey.

That is the gap Trump’s media surrogates are racing to close. Their strategy is not to defend the president’s policies on Iran or immigration. They have decided instead to delegitimize Pope Leo XIV’s authority to speak on those issues at all.

Today, Pastor Robert Jeffress — the senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas and one of Trump’s longest-serving evangelical advisers — went on Fox News and said it out loud.

“It looks like President Trump has a better understanding of what the Bible teaches about the role of government than the pope has,” Jeffress told the network, reacting to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s audience with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Thursday.

This is the same pastor who has previously called the Catholic Church a “counterfeit” religion and promoted theories suggesting Satan founded Catholicism. Trump has called him “a wonderful man” and personally promoted his books from the Oval Office.

In the same Fox News segment, Jeffress reiterated his long-standing claim that Romans 13 — the Pauline passage on government authority — gives Trump “moral authority to use whatever force necessary, including assassination or even war” against foreign leaders he deems “evil.”

He made the identical claim in 2017 about Kim Jong Un, and he has now extended it to justify the ongoing American war in Iran. Pope Leo XIV, Jeffress said, “is sincerely wrong” about that war.

Here is where the pattern matters. This is not the first time in recent weeks that a major MAGA media figure has used a national pulpit to instruct the leader of the world’s largest organized religion on Scripture.

Three weeks ago, Sean Hannity used his Fox News program to lecture Pope Leo XIV on the Bible, invoking his Long Island Catholic-school upbringing and a year as a seminary dropout as credentials before citing “over 400 references to war” in Scripture as theological cover for the Iran campaign. Hannity framed his segment as a direct “message to the Vatican.”

The American hierarchy — Cupich, Tobin, McElroy, Broglio, and Cardinal Parolin in Rome — closed ranks around Pope Leo XIV across every ideological divide. Three weeks later, Jeffress is reading from the same script.

The pattern is deliberate. A Fox host questions the pope’s biblical knowledge. Days later, a White House pastor declares the president the better theologian. The president himself then amplifies the assault from Truth Social, calling Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and accusing him of “endangering a lot of Catholics.”

Jeffress’s argument collapses on its own terms. Romans 13 does not authorize the assassination of foreign heads of state.

Here’s the full background.