President Donald Trump and his entourage met with Pope Francis at the Vatican this morning, and the photo they posed for during the meeting basically sums up how it went:
Look at their faces. pic.twitter.com/0t84cBX8bZ
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) May 24, 2017
It almost looks like a farce: Trump cheerily oblivious, Pope Francis looking for all the world like he’d rather be literally anywhere else but in that room with that man, and Melania and Ivanka standing stiff and oddly morose, as if they’re part of a historical reenactment of a Victorian-era funeral.
(The conservative black dresses and veils are Vatican protocol for women, but are not mandatory — leading some to question why the two women chose to cover their hair in the presence of the Pope, but declined to do so in Saudi Arabia.)
The photo is awkward and hilarious — but it also perfectly captures the tension inherent in a meeting between two of the world’s most powerful men whose visions of the world couldn’t be more different.
“The opening exchanges between the pope and the president,” wrote the Guardian, “began on an unusually sombre note, with the pope not exuding his usual warmth and cheerfulness.”
Trump and Pope Francis have made no effort to hide their shared enmity over the past few years. During the presidential campaign, the Pope — who is revered for his deep humility and sincere affinity for the poor and downtrodden — was cutting about Trump’s plan to build a border wall with Mexico. “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel,” Francis said in February 2016.
Trump fired back via Facebook:
If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS, which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the Pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been President because this would not have happened. ISIS would have been eradicated unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.
Trump added, huffily, “No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith.”
The pope is also a passionate and vocal advocate for the plight of refugees, and he believes that man-made climate change is a critical problem that must be addressed by world leaders. Trump, on the other hand, has tried to temporarily ban all refugees from the United States, called climate change a hoax created by the Chinese, and wants to back out of the Paris climate accords.
Europeans seem to fall more in the pope’s school of opinion. Indeed, when Trump arrived in Rome on Tuesday night, he was greeted with an illuminated message blazoned across the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica by environmental activists that read “Planet Earth First.”
At St. Peter's Basilica tonight, a message awaits @realDonaldTrump from environmentalists: Planet Earth First. pic.twitter.com/BPTD3ud408
— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) May 23, 2017
We don’t know exactly what the two men discussed during their 30-minute, one-on-one meeting behind closed doors. But afterward, Pope Francis was none too subtle about what he’d like the takeaway to be: "At the end of the audience, the pope gave Trump copies of his writings," Sylvia Poggioli said on NPR, from Rome, "including his encyclical on climate change — a topic on which Trump has a very different opinion."
The two men also exchanged gifts. Trump apparently gave the pope a copy of the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. The pope gave Trump a medallion of an olive tree rendered by an Italian artist, as a symbol of the need for global peace. “It is with all hope that you may become an olive tree to make peace,” the pope told the president.
“We can use peace,” the president responded.
A few of the photos taken before and after the meeting do show the pope smiling, but they are few and far between. Most of them show a decidedly dour-faced Pope Francis — rather surprising for someone who is often photographed mid-chuckle or with a huge, beaming smile on his face.
Even People magazine, not known as a particularly political publication, had a distinctly political take on the two leaders’ interaction: “Onlookers described the meeting as ‘stiff’ and the pope as ‘stone-faced’ during the meeting. In the first minutes of the meeting, the pope did not say anything to Trump and did not smile.”
Following the meeting, Trump told the press “He is really something!” of the Pope. Judging by the pope’s face in that photo, the pontiff certainly seems to think Trump is really quite something, too.