Jake Tapper blasted what he called the Trump team’s “spring of sacrilege” on Thursday, tearing into President Donald Trump’s feud with Pope Leo XIV and a burst of religiously loaded remarks that have ricocheted through Washington this week. On ’s The Lead, the anchor singled out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attack on the press and Trump’s own string of Bible-bending posts as the week closed with no sign of the row easing.
The sharpest fire came after Hegseth likened journalists to the Pharisees, the New Testament opponents of Jesus Christ, in a rant that cast the press as blinded by animus toward Trump. Tapper mocked that view as “what a warped view of what the news media is supposed to do and what a view he seems to have of this war,” before adding, “And frankly, what better way to cap off a spring of sacrilege by the Trump team.”
Hegseth had already stirred backlash late last month when he recited a prayer during a religious service at the Pentagon and said it came from a military chaplain. The prayer asked for “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” a line that drew a public rebuke from Pope Leo a few days later when the pontiff said, “God ignores the prayers of leaders who wage war and have hands full of blood.”
Trump then added fuel on Easter Sunday with a profane post that read, “Open the fucking straits, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell. Just watch, unquote,” and followed it with “Praise be to Allah.” He began the week with a now-deleted image depicting himself as Jesus, then said he thought the post carried medical rather than messianic meaning. Many of his MAGA supporters were not buying that explanation, and a few days later he turned on Pope Leo in a long Truth Social rant that attacked the pontiff for not being tough enough on crime among other criticisms.
The sequence leaves Trump in a one-sided feud with the pope while his team keeps cycling through religious imagery that has unsettled even some allies. Vice President J.D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, weighed in yesterday, but the larger story is the same one Tapper was pointing to on Thursday: a White House orbit that keeps mixing politics, war and faith in ways that are hard to separate and even harder to defend.