COMMENTARY With Trump's presidency all but in ashes after this week's apocalyptic midterm elections, Pope Leo XIV's Latin America tour also augurs the demise of Trump's hemispheric Donroe Doctrine.
As if poor President Donald Trump hasn’t suffered enough humiliation this week.
First, the country he believed he owned — the United States of America — hands him and the party he commands — the Republicans — a midterm election butt-whipping so severe that even a (to quote Trump) “great ass” like Ohio Senator John Husted’s is wearing stripes.
Now, the continent Trump believed he owned — Latin America — is set to sing hosannas to the pope he hates — Leo XIV — as His Holiness starts a two-week-long tour that will only remind His Hoariness that the Donroe Doctrine is as dead as Vivek Ramaswamy’s soul.
Perhaps you’ve already forgotten what the Donroe Doctrine is. It’s Trump’s Monroe Doctrine “corollary” that the U.S. — meaning Trump — controls the western hemisphere, its governments, its resources, its branding rights, as if the Americas were a subsidiary of America.
READ MORE: Trump deserves his Leo backlash. But, especially in the Americas, the Pope is not off-limits, either
It’s why Trump insists he can order hostile, gunboat diplomacy takeovers of Greenland, Canada, Cuba, the Panama Canal, Venezuela’s oil reserves, Ecuador’s drug interdiction, and even the presidency of Brazil, as easily as he used to bully Atlantic City casino contractors.
The Brazil thing, though — the stunning failure last week of Trump’s candidate, right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, to unseat leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Latin America’s largest country — has all but thwarted the Donroe Doctrine design.
So also, it seems, will the Democrats’ decisive control of Congress. It could block Donroe policy favorites like vaporizing civilians in alleged drug boats in the Caribbean for political theater — and all the potential war crimes that makes the U.S. military liable for.
Leo’s visit promises to evince theology over thuggery, and Trump can only gnash his teeth like some sad sinner on the wall of the Sistine Chapel.
Enter Pope Leo, who arrives in South America on Nov. 6.
This is the same pontiff Trump this year called “soft on crime” and “radical left” because he criticized Trump’s Iran war and his cruel-for-cruelty’s-sake immigration enforcement campaign.
He’s the same Bishop of Rome who Trump thought he could vengefully kneecap by canceling an $11 million federal contract with the nonprofit Catholic Charities to aid unaccompanied migrant children in Miami — a move that essentially tossed 6-year-old refugees into the street.
Soft power
And, starting Friday, he’s the same Vicar of Christ who’s going to be walking the moral high ground through Argentina, Uruguay and Peru — his red leather shoes crunching through the ashes of Trump’s Donroe Doctrine dream.
Leo’s visit promises to evince theology over thuggery, and Trump can only watch and gnash his teeth like one of those sad sinners on the wall of the Sistine Chapel.
More practically, it will be a reminder of the soft yanqui power, like USAID, that Trump tore out of Washington’s Latin America manual in favor of hard Donroe extortion, like tariffs.
Why? Because, as an Augustinian priest and bishop, Leo spent years in Peru carrying out the Roman Catholic Church’s own soft power — teaching and aiding the poor — a tenure that, more than anything else, formed the first American pope and his defiance of this American president.
Leo has acknowledged in advance that he has the Church’s own thuggery to atone for in South America — namely, the vile legacy of clerical sexual abuse, and its hierarchical cover-up, which has ravaged countries like Argentina and Peru every bit as much as it’s traumatized the U.S.
In fact, Leo himself has been under scrutiny for his handling of abuse claims when he was bishop of Chiclayo in Peru from 2015 to 2023, before becoming Pope last year.
Even so, if Trump were to raise the issue, he knows he’d be opening the door to fresh outcries at home over his own underhanded handling of the Epstein files.
On balance, then, Leo’s Latin American tour, and its message of partnership with the region, only stand to highlight — by starkly contrasting with — Trump’s conquest and kleptomania crusade.
It will simply throw into bolder relief, for starters, Trump’s refusal to expedite Venezuela’s transition to democracy after he had U.S. special forces raid and remove dictator Nicolás Maduro this year. He’s instead indulged his obsession with swiping the country’s vast crude reserves for his cronies, while keeping cooperative holdovers from Maduro’s brutal regime in power.
That’s just one more Donroe Doctrine grift the next, Democratic-majority Congress is apt to probe.
But for now, it’s the Holy Father who’s adding to Trump’s hell.
