Maybe someone who thinks President Trump’s Sunday blast at Pope Leo was reasonable can explain this sentence to me:

“He talks about “fear” in the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside, and being ten and even twenty feet apart.”

• What does this have to do with the war in Iran? What does it have to do with Pope Leo, who was serving as a bishop in Peru at the time? What does it have to do with… anything?

• Who is the “they” who were arresting priests and ministers? Not the Catholic Church, obviously. Arrests are made by government officials. When the lockdown began, the top government official in the US was Donald Trump.

• What point is the president trying to make? That Catholic bishops were wrong to be fearful of Covid, or to comply with the lockdown restrictions on public worship? Did he oppose those restrictions while he was in the Oval Office, and federal officials were implementing them?

It seems to me that Trump is calling attention to the most egregious policy error of his own first term— and needlessly so, since that error has nothing to do with his current differences with the Pope.