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A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of Donald Trump flying to the Vatican this weekend and publicly feuding with international leaders in front of St Peter’s Basilica in the midst of the sombre rituals and rites that will mark the funeral of Pope Francis.
The US leader’s first international trip of his second term comes at one of the most politically fractious and fraught moments in recent memory, as his “America first” project sets fire to US alliances and trade relationships around the world. Between international tariffs, the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, the Trump team’s open antipathy toward Europe and its hard line on immigration from Central and South America, the papal funeral could prove to be a minefield of international diplomacy.
Trump’s international engagements in the past have set the stage for some of his most explosive confrontations, and he has bristled at world leaders who have criticised him publicly and castigated those he views as insufficiently deferential.
Compounding tensions are the Trump administration’s difficult relationship with the Vatican itself, including Pope Francis’s criticism of Trump’s deportation policies as a “major crisis” and declaration that “builders of walls sow fear”.
Adding to the diplomatic minefield, it was announced on Friday that the former president Joe Biden, whom Trump has repeatedly and continually criticised, would also attend the funeral. Trump’s predecessor is a lifelong Catholic who had met Pope Francis several times and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in January before leaving the White House.
There is little doubt that Trump’s trip to the Vatican – which Italy has encased in a “ring of steel” with Nato jets, snipers and thousands of police at the ready – will provide plenty of white-knuckle moments as the volatile US president navigates controversy amid the pomp and circumstance of a papal funeral.
Assuming Volodymyr Zelenskyy attends – on Friday he said “military meetings” might preclude him from making the trip – the funeral will be the first time the Ukrainian leader has been in the same place as Trump since the US president and the vice-president, JD Vance, berated him in the White House in February. Trump cut short that meeting, saying Zelenskyy was “gambling with world war three” and being “very disrespectful”. He has now floated the prospect of the US recognising Russian control of Crimea and accused Zelenskyy of delaying a peace deal, testing the Ukrainian president’s patience and raising the danger of a new meltdown in bilateral relations.
