Trump Lures Pope Francis into 2016 Race

So now The Donald is running against the pope.

After waging a presidential campaign that appears to have been all but directed by Triumph the Insult Dog, billionaire developer Donald Trump has outdone his earlier displays of bold audacity. This time he's taking on Pope Francis.

That's right. A man whose name is associated with wealth, power and self-promotion is taking on a man who chose to be named after the patron saint of the poor, Francis of Assisi.

Yet, as much as Trump risks losing voters in heavily Catholic states, he may have helped to energize other elements of his base, particularly social conservatives who think Francis' policies have been too liberal.

Either way, it is almost amusing to watch Trump play the victim card like a champ, all because his little feelings were somehow injured by the Pope's opposition to Trump's signature issue: his desire to wall off the Mexican border and somehow persuade Mexico to pick up the bill.

Pope Francis' response to that questionable idea was clear and direct: "A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian," Francis said in response to a question from reporters on the papal plane back from Mexico. "This is not in the Gospel."

As criticisms of Trump go, this one falls on the mild side. Yet it was too painfully precise for the notoriously thin-skinned Trump to shrug off.

Instead, the billionaire fell back into his usual civility-challenged defensiveness. He asserted during a South Carolina campaign stop, that if the Islamic State attacks the Vatican, "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."

Thank you, General Trump.

But what really caught my ear was the theological rebuke in Trump's prepared response to the Pope: "For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful," he said. "No leader," Trump declared, "especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man's religion or faith."

Oh really? For a "religious leader," it seems to me, questioning other people's religious faith is part of the job description.

More important, if anyone has quite publically judged other people's religious faith with willful abandon, it is Donald Trump, especially when talking about President Barack Obama.

Remember how Trump became a leading "birther" in 2011, claiming that Obama might secretly be a Muslim -- a claim from which Trump more recently has backed away.

"He doesn't have a birth certificate," Trump told Fox News. "He may have one, but there's something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want that."

Maybe, maybe, maybe. That's a great word to throw around when you want to raise suspicions about somebody without a shred of hard evidence.

Those are the classic questions raised by demagogues when they want to smear someone without evidence.

Sometimes all you have to do is nod your head when somebody else spouts lunacy, as when Trump let a questioner in his audience at a Rochester, N.H., town hall rattle on: "We have a problem in this country. It's called Muslims. You know our current president is one. You know he's not even an American."

Trump's failure to correct the man was conspicuous. "We need this question," he said.

But when "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert asked Trump a week later whether he believed Obama was born in the United States, which he was, Trump said only, "I don't talk about it anymore."

Yet as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz began to rise ahead of Trump with evangelical Christians in Iowa polls in December, Trump suddenly wanted to talk about Cruz' religious faith.

"Just remember this," Trump hinted to a rally crowd, "you gotta remember, in all fairness, to the best of my knowledge, not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba, OK?"

And just a week before the pope's remarks, Trump tweeted, "How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?"

Yes, Trump is a great respecter of other people's religious faiths -- as long as they stay behind him in the polls.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)