JD Vance: The Devil in a Blue Dress Suit

The Convert Who Corrected the Pope

Take a moment — just one — to sit with the sheer, uncut audacity of it.

JD Vance, a man who discovered Catholicism roughly when he discovered that Catholicism polled well, who has apparently catalogued his conversion somewhere between “talking points” and “forthcoming memoir,” stood before a Turning Point USA crowd in Athens, Georgia and informed the Holy Father that his theology needed work. The Pope. The actual Pope. Corrected. By JD Vance. Out loud. Into a microphone. Before an audience. I am nearly too stunned to be scathing. Nearly.

The timing is what elevates this from ordinary political stupidity to something more terrifying. Donald Trump had just spent a weekend calling Pope Leo XIV, the first American-born pontiff in the two-thousand-year history of the Catholic Church, “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.” The global blowback was not merely bad. It was the kind of catastrophic, wall-to-wall, cross-partisan condemnation that makes presidential advisors drink at the…