How is Trump similar to the pope? They’re both disrupters who rattle elites and staff

Reporting from Washington —  Amid the rambunctious American presidential campaign, Pope Francis joined the fray, telling reporters on his papal plane that Donald Trump’s pledge to build a border wall was “not Christian.” Trump fired back, calling the pope’s remarks “disgraceful.”

Now Trump is president, and as he and Francis prepare to meet for the first time in Rome on Wednesday, the two seem as far apart as ever — on immigration, refugees, caring for the poor and climate change. But one thing unites them: a propensity for sending shock waves through the normally staid, tradition-bound institutions they lead.

“They are both populist outsiders. They are both gregarious. They are both loose cannons,” said Andrew Chesnut, a professor of Catholic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Francis made that plain on his first foreign trip as leader of the world’s Catholics, when he went to Rio de Janeiro in July 2013. Asked by reporters traveling with him about the church’s treatment of gays, remarkably he did not condemn homosexuality, which has been the long-standing position of the Roman Catholic Church. Instead he replied, “Who am I to judge?”

But if both Francis and Trump are unconventional iconoclasts, they come to that place from very different perspectives and backgrounds, and with diametrically opposed agendas.

Francis is shaking up church conventions to renew Catholics’ emphasis on helping the poor and disenfranchised; to pull priests from their safe sanctuaries and push them into the streets and slums of their communities; to spread a benevolent and inclusive faith. He is a voice of moral authority.

Trump, on the other hand, shook political conventions to get himself elected and, in the words of one of his top advisors, nationalist provocateur Stephen K. Bannon, to blow up the administrative state. The president seems to like to flout norms for the sake of showmanship and publicity. He is often inconsistent, even contradictory: His new budget proposal is decidedly not populist; it would slash taxes for the wealthy and cut programs that benefit working-class and low-income Americans.

“Pope Francis really is a true populist and has gravitated closer and closer to liberation theology, adopting this preference for the poor,” Chesnut said. “Whereas Trump really is a populist in terms of rhetoric, but as we see his policies actually unfolding they favor the financial and corporate elites.”

In terms of their outlook and interests, the two “could not be further apart,” said James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large of America, a national Catholic magazine.

“You are taking a New York real estate mogul who has made his mark by conspicuous consumption with an Argentine Jesuit priest who has spent his life serving the poor,” said Martin, who is also an advisor to the communications office at the Vatican.

Substantively if not stylistically, that will make finding common ground difficult for the two leaders.

Francis advocates open-arms policies for immigrants and refugees. Trump sought a travel ban on people from countries, mostly Muslim, that produce many refugees, and he is pressing ahead with the wall Francis condemned, to keep out immigrants from Mexico and Central America, many of them fleeing murderous violence.

Francis has made confronting climate change a priority of his papacy. Trump once called climate change a “hoax,” and although he has stepped back slightly from that position, his administration is undoing a raft of Obama-era environmental regulations intended to alleviate global warming.

Popes have been meeting with heads of state for more than 1,000 years, going back to Charlemagne. They typically receive any leader who requests a meeting. Veteran Vatican observers say the average such session lasts about 20 minutes, but when Francis really hits it off with a visitor — as he did with President Obama in 2014 — the session can go longer, to nearly an hour in Obama’s case.

The pope and his visitor traditionally exchange gifts. Francis is said to especially appreciate simple things — like the seeds from Michelle Obama’s White House garden the Obamas gave him. Obama, for his part, routinely carries the rosary that Francis gave him, according to a new book by Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega.

Traditionally, the pontiff allows the visitor to raise the topic for discussion.

Trump plans to discuss religious freedom and ways to combat religious persecution and human trafficking, national security advisor H.R. McMaster told reporters before the trip.

Where they could agree on is the importance of religious freedom and the scourge of persecuted Christians, including in the Middle East, where Trump just visited, and in Africa.

The pope frequently decries violence against Christians. In December, he beatified 17 Catholic priests and laypeople killed in Laos in the mid-1900s for their faith, and in April he led a special prayer service for Christians slain since the start of the 20th century. Those “martyrs,” he said at the time, “teach us that, with the strength of love, with tenderness, you can fight bullying, violence, war, and that with patience, peace can be achieved.”

Trump has blamed Islamic terrorists for the killing of Christians and says the threat must be battled militarily as well as through intelligence and cyberwarfare. In the United States, Trump sees the threat to religious freedom in laws that force businesses to serve gay and lesbian clients.

“Of course the administration’s idea of religious freedom is quite different from the Vatican’s view of religious freedom,” Martin said. “The Vatican is dealing with people who are being killed for being Catholic, which is different from what is going on in the United States.”

Twitter: @ByBrianBennett

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