Trump vs. the Pope

This podcast is supported by Instagram. Instagram teen accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see. Explore teen accounts and all of our ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily. An unusual disagreement has broken out between the president of The United States and the pope. This week, after president Trump lashed out at him, pope Leo the fourteenth openly took on the administration, setting up the most direct confrontation between a head of state and the pope in modern history. Today, my colleague, Matoko Rich, explains why Trump cares so much about what the pope thinks and why it matters the two of the most powerful Americans in the world are so deeply at odds. It's Thursday, April 16. Motoko, you have just embarked with the pope on this tour of several African countries. You are traveling on the papal plane with him surrounded by top Vatican officials at this really tense moment in which the American president is attacking the first American pope. So just set the scene for me. Where are you, and what is the feeling right now among the papal entourage? Well, we're on the third day of Pope Leo's first trip as pope to Africa, and we just came from Algeria and landed this afternoon in Cameroon, and I'm currently in the capital of Cameroon in a hotel. You might hear a little background noise because I'm in the Press Center, because that's where the best WiFi is. Wow. The mood here, it's an interesting mix because, of course, the people who are waiting for the pope's visit are super excited. Like, when we're driving on the road from the airport to the hotel, we're just seeing tens of thousands of people lining the road. So for them, this is an incredibly important pastoral visit, and yet, in the bubble of the papal plane, there's this great awareness of this huge rift that has opened up between the pope and the president of The United States due to some very public attacks by the president on social media, and then following up by the vice president in various interviews. And this is a particularly stunning moment, because this pope has, during most of the first year of his papacy, been very mild mannered, and attempted to create a sense of unity. He's not been confrontational, and yet, on Monday, we saw him kind of fight back. Okay. Let's get into the whole story of this rift. Walk us through how it started. So from the moment that Pope Leo was elected, because he was the first pope from The United States, there were some expectation. Is he going to be sort of the anti Trump? Pope Francis' predecessor had been perceived as this more left leaning pope. Right. He had famously gone up against Trump in a number of ways in terms …