U.S. News

Poll: More Americans Approve of Pope Leo Than Trump

By Mike Harper · April 24, 2026

Pope Leo XIV has been in office for weeks. His approval rating is already higher than the President of the United States.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows more Americans view Pope Leo favorably than view President Trump favorably — a finding that lands with particular weight given that Trump has spent much of the new pope’s early tenure publicly criticizing him and picking fights with the Vatican.

The poll did not release a full breakdown of the specific numbers, but the gap between the two figures was described as meaningful rather than within the margin of error. For a president who has made dominance of any room he enters a defining feature of his political identity, being outpolled by a recently elected religious leader he has been attacking is a notable data point.

Trump’s relationship with Pope Leo has been openly adversarial since the conclave. Trump publicly said before the election of a new pope that he hoped the College of Cardinals would choose an American — a statement widely seen as an attempt to influence a process the Catholic Church considers sovereign and sacred. When the cardinals elected the Chicago-born Cardinal Robert Prevost — now Pope Leo XIV — Trump initially congratulated him, calling it “a great honor” for the United States.

That goodwill did not last. As Pope Leo began speaking on immigration, the poor, and global conflict in terms that diverged sharply from the Trump administration’s positions, the relationship deteriorated. Trump has since made pointed public remarks about the new pope that Vatican officials have described as inappropriate interference in Church affairs.

The approval gap the Reuters/Ipsos poll documents reflects a dynamic that has been building throughout Trump’s second term: his job approval ratings have been declining as the Iran war drags on, gas prices remain above $4 a gallon, and economic anxiety rises. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll on the Iran war found more than half of Americans saying their household finances had taken a hit from soaring gasoline prices — a figure that tracks closely with the president’s slipping numbers.

Pope Leo, by contrast, has entered the papacy with both the goodwill that typically greets a new religious leader and the specific appeal of being the first American-born pope in the Church’s history — a fact that generates pride across the political spectrum in ways that are largely independent of the administration’s foreign policy or domestic controversies.

The White House has not responded to the poll’s findings.