The recent attack and capture of President Maduro of Venezuela by American law enforcement and military, and the first consistory of the world’s cardinals convoked by Pope Leo, show two contrasting approaches to leadership that I wish to analyze in this essay. In the last eight months or so, people have begun to draw a sharp contrast between the two most prominent Americans on the world stage today, Pope Leo XIV and Donald J. Trump.
My comparison in this analysis is not an exercise in polemics. It is, rather, a meditation on power—its sources, its use, and its limits. I will propose that Trump’s MAGAlomania is short-sighted, lacks a strong moral foundation, is purely functional and sadly corrodes the politics of America and the world. On the other hand, Pope Leo’s approach is humble, open, prophetic, synodal and compassionate and is infusing the Catholic Church and the world with a moral vision and hope. Through Pope Leo’s leadership, many people are already seeing that there is a possibility for the restoration of the world and that religious faith driven by sound ethical and transformative servant leadership can contribute to finding an alternative site for reimagining the future of the world.
Global Influence and the Sources of Authority
First, both Pope Leo and President Trump exercise enormous global influence. Pope Leo’s influence derives from the papacy itself—an office with ancient apostolic roots, thick symbolic capital, and a moral authority that transcends borders. As Bishop of Rome and head of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo leads the largest and most globally diffused religious institution in the world. The Church’s influence does not rest on military or economic coercion, but on a remarkable historical capacity to preserve its distinctiveness across epochs, cultures, and civilizations.
Friends and critics alike acknowledge that Catholicism has survived precisely because it has resisted total capture by political regimes, cultural experimentation, moral relativism, or economic orthodoxies. It has managed in the best of times to hold together paradoxes: universality and locality, tradition and reform, authority and conscience. Catholicism represents, as it were, a little of many things people love, without dissolving into a single ideological narrative or being partitioned by dialectically opposed ecclesial tribes.
President Trump’s influence, by contrast, flows from the office he occupies: the Presidency of the United States of America. The power of that office is inseparable from the power of the American state itself—its unmatched military reach, financial dominance, technological capacity, and geopolitical leverage, consolidated especially since the end of the Second World War. Few would dispute that the United States remains the most powerful nation on earth, even as its moral authority and democratic credibility are increasingly contested, particularly after the mob violence and insurrection against the state on January 6, 2020.
Personality and the Shaping of Office
Secondly, while President Trump heads one of the most influential states in the world, Pope Leo heads what many consider the most influential religious body in the world. Both have brought distinct personalities into their respective offices, and in doing so have reshaped expectations about leadership.
Both Pope Leo and President Trump are still within the first year of their leadership, yet the contrast in style and substance is already striking.
In less than a year at the helm of the Church of Rome, Pope Leo has quietly—but decisively—reframed the papal office through gentleness, reverence for tradition, attentiveness to listening, and a non-threatening proclamation of the Gospel. Many have compared him to a modern-day St Paul, apostle to the nations; an older Italian friend of mine once remarked to me that he appears as an improved Pope Paul VI—intelligent, polished, reflective, compassionate, firm, and deeply attuned to the priorities and practices of the Lord he serves; equipped to transition the Church, like Pope Paul VI, from a conciliar moment (Synod on Synodality) to reception, from words to action.
Pope Leo’s power is patient, mediated, and institutional. It does not seek visibility or dominance but durability. His authority flows from moral credibility, continuity, and the weight of tradition rather than coercion.”
President Trump, by contrast, has brought into the presidency his familiar traits: a commitment to nativism, an apocalyptic “America First” ideology, and a renewed pursuit of American power through transactional, coercive, and often unilateral means. From Venezuela to Nigeria, from Greenland to Taiwan, Trump’s foreign policy rhetoric and posture signal not partnership but dominance and confrontation. In this sense, Trump’s first year has rendered painfully vivid the warning of Alexis de Tocqueville, who reflected on American democracy in the Jacksonian era during the mid-19th century: that by watching America, the world can discern both the promise and the peril of democracy—its capacity for liberty and its temptation toward arrogance, conformity, and abuse of power.
A Nation and a Church in Self-Questioning
Just as the Catholic Church, through the Synod on Synodality, has asked itself what kind of church it wishes to be, the United States is undergoing a period of intense inner questioning about what kind of society it wants to become.
American political life is marked today by a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the two major political parties. Politics has hardened into warfare. Partisanship now colors almost every aspect of public life, even when lives are being lost daily through gun violence, sometimes in the hands of ICE officials and other law enforcement officers. When American citizens are killed in cold blood, outrage is selective, compassion is politicized, and empathy—if it is ever reflected in the words of the president and his blind loyalists—is rationed along ideological lines.
The Catholic Church, too, faces its own internal struggles over the meaning of reform, the exercise of authority, the tension between centralization and devolution of power, and on the inclusion of women in mainstream leadership in the Church among many other contested issues. Yet Pope Leo’s leadership style has had a visibly de-escalating effect. The sharp fault lines that emerged during the Synod on Synodality appear to be softening. There is a renewed sense of convergence, born of his commitment to bridge-building, listening, and a refusal to govern through fear, diktat, or exclusion.
On the Use of Power and Authority
One lesson among many that Pope Leo offers President Trump and other world leaders who govern is the saving, liberating, and healing use of power. This lesson was brought out so clearly by David Gibson in his recent article in the New York Times, “Pope Leo Confronts Trump on His Own Terms.” Gibson presents Pope Leo and President Trump as embodying two radically different grammars of power on the global stage.
Trump’s power is immediate, personalized, and performative. It relies on command, spectacle, disruption, and the visible projection of force—military, rhetorical, and political. Authority, for Trump, is personalized power, and diplomacy is treated as leverage, bargaining, and pressure. Power here is something exercised over others, often impatient with institutions, norms, and due process or procedures that slow what Trump always, in his narrow world, sees as the need for decisive action.
The contrast here is not simply political versus religious power, but two visions of how authority works in the world: power as forceful intervention versus power as moral orientation and institutional memory, shaping the future not by command, but by preserving the conditions for rebuilding after rupture.”
Pope Leo’s power, by contrast, is patient, mediated, and institutional. It does not seek visibility or dominance but durability. His authority flows from moral credibility, continuity, and the weight of tradition rather than coercion. Where Trump’s leadership style privileges volatility and tactical advantage, Leo’s privileges restraint, stability, and long horizons. Trump operates in electoral cycles and news cycles; Leo operates in civilizational time and in patience and is considered reverent for alterity.
In this sense, Pope Leo affirms the agency of others and invites them into an expansive space for dialogue and mutually self-mediating engagement for building bridges of love and friendship to repair the world on the foundations of justice and peace. While Trump treats power as something to wield, Pope Leo treats it as something to steward.
Power as Domination and Retaliation or Power as Relation of Care
One of the most luminous lines in Dilexi Te (no. 120) captures the heart of Pope Leo’s vision: the Church does not have enemies to pursue, but people to love. This theological framing of the “other” is not sentimental; it is profoundly political. Power begins with perception. How leaders see others determines how they act toward them.
In numerous instances, as we see in President Trump and many autocrats, the state is personalized as if we were still in the era of King Louis XVI of France’s notion of absolute monarchy: L’État, c’est moi. This absolutist mindset is clearly evident in the way Trump sees America as his own to be used as he wills.
Power begins with perception. How leaders see others determines how they act toward them. How they see the institution they lead determines whether they serve it—or use it.”
— Stan Chu Ilo
Trump sees American citizens and other nations as extensions of his political will, to be manipulated to achieve pragmatic ends in his MAGAlomania.
Pope Leo’s convocation of the world’s cardinals for consultation was not merely procedural, but pedagogical—a discipline of listening. He has spoken consistently against war and violence, denounced the objectification of the poor, resisted the weaponization of faith, and affirmed continuity without vendetta. His leadership embodies power as care, not conquest.
Gunboat Diplomacy and the Misreading of Power
President Trump’s reliance on gunboat diplomacy and hemispheric dominance reveals a failure to grasp the limits of power. Noam Chomsky has long warned that America cannot remake the world in its own image through unilateral force. Such efforts generate resentment and instability.
Hannah Arendt’s insight remains decisive: power is not domination but collective action—the capacity to act together toward shared ends. When power relies on coercion, it corrodes legitimacy.
Trump and Pope Leo represent two American visions of power. One treats power as leverage over others; the other as responsibility with others. Time will judge which vision endures. But already the contrast is visible.
The paths are clear. One leads toward healing and life. The other toward chaos and domination. And history, as it always does, will render its verdict.