CBS News' Norah O'Donnell Confronts Donald Trump About His Attacks on 'Weak' Pope

CBS News senior correspondent Norah O'Donnell questioned President Donald Trump regarding his attacks on the Pope and a controversial AI-generated image he posted to Truth Social that appeared to depict him as Jesus Christ.

The image showed a figure resembling Trump portrayed as Jesus healing the sick and being worshipped.

The widely condemned incident occurred during a period of high tension between the Trump administration and the Vatican, starting with O'Donnell's 60 Minutes report titled "Pope Leo’s Church," which highlighted the unprecedented rift between Trump and Pope Leo XIV, who has criticized Trump's policies on mass deportations and military actions in Iran.

Trump responded by calling the Pope "WEAK on Crime" and "terrible for Foreign Policy," even implying he was responsible for the Pope's election.

During a phone interview with O'Donnell on Monday, April 13, Trump claimed he did not intend to portray himself as Jesus. Instead, he insisted the image showed him as a "doctor" or a "divine healer" making people better.

“I viewed that as a picture of me being a doctor in fixing — you had the Red Cross right there, you had, you know, medical people surrounding me,” said Trump. “And I was like the doctor, you know, as a little fun playing the doctor and making people better. So that’s what it was viewed as. That’s what most people thought.”

Trump admitted to O'Donnell that he was surprised by the intense backlash from his own conservative base and Catholic leaders, who found the imagery "disturbing" or "disrespectful.” Still, he also managed to take one more dig at the Pontiff.

“He’s wrong on the issues,” the petulant POTUS told O’Donnell. “I don’t think he should be getting into politics. I think he probably learned that from this.”

Following the controversy and the interview, the post was deleted from his social media account, but only because, Trump told O’Donnell, he said people were “confused” by it.

“Normally I don’t like doing that, but I didn’t want to have anybody be confused,” he said. “People were confused.”

The president went on to claim that he has “done more for the Catholic Church than any president in the last hundred years.”

“During COVID, I gave them billions of dollars,” Trump claimed. “They were gonna go under. I gave them billions of dollars for education and that’s not the right way to treat somebody that’s been so good.”

The U.S. presidents cited for doing the “most” for the Catholic Church are Ronald Reagan, JFK, George W. Bush, and the OG, George Washington.

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church used a special and unprecedented exemption from federal rules to amass at least $1.4 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus aid, with many millions going to dioceses that have paid huge settlements or sought bankruptcy protection because of clergy sexual abuse cover-ups.