Pope Leo keeps lecturing Donald Trump about borders and bombs, and the President keeps firing right back.

The Vatican insists its man in white floats above American party politics.

And Leo just did something no pope in 2,000 years has ever dared to try.

A Foreign Monarch Mailed In a Midterm Ballot From Rome

Pope Leo XIV voted in the November 3 midterm elections, and he did it by mail from Vatican City while reigning as the sovereign of a foreign state.

No pope in the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year history has ever cast a ballot in any election while holding the office. Leo, the Chicago native the cardinals elected in May 2025, decided he would be the first.

The Will County Clerk’s Office in Illinois confirmed the pontiff, still on the rolls under his birth name, asked for a mail-in ballot on October 3. “Robert Francis Prevost is on the list of individuals who requested a vote by mail ballot for the upcoming election,” Kim Fladhammer, the office’s chief of staff, told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Then the Holy See Press Office confirmed the envelope went out. “Pope Leo XIV has exercised his right to vote as a United States citizen, whenever he was eligible to do so,” the Vatican told CBS’ Margaret Brennan.

Leo still lists an address in New Lenox, the Chicago suburb where his brother John Prevost lives. His ballot carries the race to replace retiring Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s bid for another term, and a handful of local contests.

And one of those names ought to make every pro-life Catholic sit up straight.

Leo Already Went to Bat for the Senator Whose Seat Sits on His Ballot

In September 2025, Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich planned to hand Durbin a lifetime achievement award for his work on behalf of immigrants. Durbin has backed abortion-on-demand for decades, and Springfield Bishop Thomas Paprocki has barred him from Communion since 2004.

Reporters asked the brand-new pope about it outside his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo. Leo didn’t stand with the bishop. “It is very important to look at the overall work that the senator has done,” he said.

Then he swung the bat at Republicans. “Someone who says I am against abortion but I am in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life,” the pontiff told journalists.

Durbin turned down the award soon after. But the message landed loud and clear. When a pro-abortion Democrat needed cover, Leo asked everyone to look at the big picture. When Trump enforced immigration law, Leo reached for the word “inhuman.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt didn’t let it slide. “I would reject that there is inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants in the United States under this administration,” she told reporters.

Now the same pope gets a say in who inherits Durbin’s seat. Nobody knows how he marked his ballot. Illinois keeps that private, and it should.

But Leo’s thumb has rested on the American scale for a long while now.

Donald Trump Fired Back, and JD Vance Drew a Line in the Sand

Before the conclave, then-Cardinal Robert Prevost used his X account to share posts slamming Trump and Vance on immigration, including a column arguing that Vance had Christian love all wrong.

As pope, Leo backed the US bishops’ November 2025 statement against the administration’s deportation push. Reuters later reported that he urged American bishops to speak out more forcefully against Trump’s immigration agenda. And in his annual speech to diplomats in January 2026, he condemned “a diplomacy based on force” and a “zeal for war.”

Trump finally had his fill in April. After Leo’s sermons on the Iran conflict, the President blasted him as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

Trump didn’t stop there. “Will someone please tell Pope Leo that Iran has killed at least 42,000 innocent, completely unarmed, protesters in the last two months,” he posted. He also put it plainly to reporters: “I’m not a big fan of Pope Leo.”

Leo shot back. “I’m not afraid of the Trump administration or of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel, which is what the church works for,” he told reporters.

Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic convert, offered the pontiff some advice of his own, warning that Leo should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology.”

Leo apparently filed that one under junk mail.

A Sovereign Is Still a Sovereign, Even in White Robes

Vatican City isn’t some parish on the South Side. It’s an independent country. Ronald Reagan established full diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1984, and Washington sends an ambassador there like it does to London or Tokyo.

Under the Vatican’s own Fundamental Law, the pope holds full legislative, executive, and judicial power. That makes Leo one of the last absolute monarchs on earth.

Picture the reaction if the King of Spain or the President of France mailed in a vote in a hot American Senate race. Cable news would melt down by lunchtime.

Leo’s defenders have an answer ready. He’s a US citizen by birth. Illinois election officials say an overseas voter can keep casting mail ballots as long as he keeps an Illinois voting address, and federal law protects Americans living abroad. Leo also holds Peruvian citizenship from his years as a missionary bishop.

All true. But legal and proper don’t always ride in the same car.

Federal law even lists serving in a foreign government as one of the acts that can cost an American his citizenship, though only when the person intends to give it up. Leo plainly doesn’t. Still, Congress wrote that statute because it understood the trouble with one man answering to two countries.

Boris Johnson understood it too. The New York-born politician gave up his American citizenship in 2016, the year he took over as Britain’s Foreign Secretary.

Then there’s the envelope itself. The bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission warned in 2005 that “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Nobody suggests anything crooked happened with the pope’s ballot. But a vote that crosses an ocean from behind the walls of a foreign city-state makes an odd poster child for mail-in voting at the exact moment Trump is pushing to rein it in.

And the timing raises its own eyebrows. The Vatican says Leo votes “whenever he was eligible,” yet county records reported after his election show no ballot in the 2020 presidential race or the 2022 midterms, and Christopher Hale notes he hasn’t voted in a primary since Trump’s first win. Maybe the paperwork from Peru and Rome got tangled during the pandemic. Plenty of overseas voters know that headache.

But this year, still recovering from October surgery to remove part of his right lung after a cancer diagnosis, Leo made certain his ballot reached Illinois.

A precedent like this never stays in one envelope. Every foreign official with a spare American passport just got a permission slip, and the Vatican’s American bishops already know which way their boss leans on immigration.

Back in April, JD Vance offered the Vatican one simple suggestion: “let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy.”

Sources: Mediaite; Chicago Sun-Times; CBS News; NBC News; NPR; The Hill; Axios; Reuters; Religion News Service; Daily Signal; Spectrum News; People; Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform (2005)